Rating Curve

QuazeryIceCube's structuring never fails to impress. I absolutely love repetition in small gameplay structures or motifs synced with corresponding repeating elements of the song, and that is everywhere in Spacious Senses. There's so many little sections that repeat 3-5 times in time with the song's echoing synths or drum loops, I really appreciate the consistency and attention to detail in this regard - it's damn impressive that every single noise in this song comes through in one way or another.

I also love the use of default blocks to create art designs, like the flowers and stars near the beginning. In a period dominated by more realistic art that leans towards breaking the bounds of what GD is, these little additions are small, and don't really impact the level's theming or vibes much, but are something I personally appreciate. This applies in a much more impactful manner to the massive geometric shapes created by the blocks and orbs from around 1:40 onwards, with the gameplay forming circles, pillars, tunnels and other shapes. The open gameplay, geometric designs and repeating gameplay all combine to create one of the most visually striking parts I've seen this year.

On top of all this, I found Spacious Senses to be quite a fun experience; heavily reliant on memory, but without any notable choke points and very consistent. I can't recommend enough that you should play this level if you enjoyed any of Quazery's earlier works; it is not only one of my favourites from them, but one that is very characteristically an evolution of their style. Great work!

Sparks Cry of Mercy does a really nice job carrying its song's energy, and has a more raw, unrefined edge that I think works very well with the very messy song that's used. A lot of the block designs are semi-transparent, which historically tends to mean muddy details and a lack of "solidness" to the structures, but two choices were made that I think help the designs out drastically; the consistent use of black "outline" sections, and the general bright colours and subtle details used in the semi-transparent sections. The darker outline portions contrast very nicely with the rest of the level and helps the structures stand out, and the usage of glow and the line-based designs help both break up the large chunks of flat black as well as to add more texture and detail to the designs. The interior semi-transparent portions themselves all have some sort of subtle detailing, similar to reflections bouncing off of glass, and are coloured brightly enough that they aren't muddied too much by the rest of the level and serve to accent it instead.

I also think the less polished nature of the level works in its favour in regards to the gameplay. The structures are all very simple, and there tends to be a lot of negative space between them (most noticeable around 0:49) that relies on the background as filler, but Sparks Cry of Mercy has such fast-paced gameplay and bright colours that I think attempting to remedy these issues would have drastically lowered the gameplay clarity. The simple shapes and excess of negative space combined with the aforementioned contrasting block designs all help the player easily intuit exactly where the gameplay is and what will and will not kill them, which in my opinion is a necessity for fast, high-CPS gameplay and contributes to an overall excellent playing experience for this level. The lack of heavy shaders or camera controls further solidifies the level's already good readability, which is a nice bonus.

Some individual parts do make an effort to stand out - there's a fake 3-way "dual" at 0:51, a dash orb that breaks through one of the structures at 1:13, and some other nice novelties that are very cool additions in their own right - but overall I think the level does get monotonous. The colour scheme stays the same aside from the red in the first part, the structuring and design styles are the same, even the background structures are reused fairly consistently. While cohesive, I'd love to have seen some more usage of slopes, or another spin on the outline sections of the structures, or even a different mechanical/electronic style altogether for some of the more intense parts. However, I'd consider this a relatively minor issue, and overall really enjoy Sparks Cry of Mercy. I will be keeping an eye on ISGAgaru's levels going forward and look forward to more from them.

I'm a big sucker for the mechanical theming of Powercut. I really like the general mechanical-electrical meld of aesthetics on display here; in particular, I think the lightning present in the middle of many of the structures is very nice and adds a new layer of movement and vibrance to the otherwise static mechanical designs. This is at its best around 0:22, with the brighter lightning serving to accent the interior lines and designs rather than stand alone, which helps make the designs feel more "alive" due to the added movement and colour.

While I like the overall consistency with the gameplay and colour scheme, each part tends to have a mind of its own with the effects used, which is especially rough with the camera controls. Quite a few parts in the midsection of the level have either really strong camera bounces, or frequent sections that slow or disconnect the camera from the player, which feels jarring as there's not much consistency as to what these sections synchronize to in the song. This is most obvious with the very intense camera and shader usage in the part around 0:14 contrasting heavily with the mainly background and pulse-focused effects in the following part, with no change in the song to compensate. There's also a giant fantastical skull design at 0:19, which really sticks out against the mechanical block deco and feels very out of place.

Most of my complaints are relatively common in large megacollabs - generally, it takes a lot to perfectly align a group of individual creators on a specific vision. Powercut does a decent job at this in a lot of aspects, and is a pretty enjoyable play thanks to the high energy and solid designs, but suffers from lacking consistency in effect work, among a few more minor things. Regardless, I think this level is cool, and I would like to see it rated.

Pandemonium strongly reminds me of Funnygame and Serponge's genre-defining effect work from the 1.9 era in many ways, which is really interesting to see in a level from relatively early in 1.9. The technical skill on display is very impressive - the conveyor belts in the mechanical part close to the end in particular are very clean and the pulse looping is quite smooth and well made for only using 3 frames of animation. It's a subtle touch but brings a lot of life to the part and helps create a stronger mechanical theme in the eyes of the player, as the conveyors are a much more literal representation of technology than the vague grey blocky designs. The cybernetic grid part near the beginning is another good example of this, as the blocks are placed such that each group fades in and out on the same timing compared to where the player is, which makes it appear like each group has its own fade, and there's no clipping or visible looping either. This not only helps massively with the readability for this part, as all of the structures are visible for roughly the same amount of time, but makes the whole effect feel very cohesive and visually tied into the surrounding grids.

My only major complaint is the lack of overall theming in the level. It's a common issue in older levels, as fully themed levels weren't very popular at the time, but it does leave each part feeling like its own thing rather than a part of a whole. I think a lot of the individual parts have themes worthy of expanding into full levels - the green cybernetic part and grey mechanical part especially have a lot that could've been explored, even with the heavy limitations of 1.9. Additionally, the gameplay does feel like it takes a backseat to the effects more often than not, and both the readability and balancing of the level suffer (the aforementioned cybernetic part is very easy compared to the rest of the level, and the ending as a whole is quite a hard choke point with many unreadable dual clicks). Overall, though, Pandemonium is quite a cool level that I agree on the Featured rating for.

With UPlust being as old as it is, it's no surprise to see messy, high-blending grid block designs as is common with most levels from the time period. I don't have much to say about the designs - they're okay, but nothing special for the time and haven't aged very well - and the gameplay is also quite unremarkable, lacking much in the way of flow or sync and just sort of existing to provide the player obstacles.

One thing I do want to hone in on, though, is the city part around halfway through. There's a pretty notable lack of contrast between the foreground and background, which happens for three reasons. Firstly, the background doesn't parallax properly, so the three layers of buildings either don't move at all and coalesce into one blob, or the back layers move too quickly compared to the front layers, which hurts the sense of depth that the parallax is meant to create. Second, the block designs use the same (or very similar) base black colour as the front layer of buildings, and since the block designs aren't outlined this causes them to frequently fade into the background; lightening the base colours of the background buildings would have fixed this. Thirdly, the yellow highlight colours used for the windows in all three layers of the background are exactly the same. If the base colour lightens due to depth, it's logical that the highlight colour would start fading into the background, in this case becoming more of a pinkish tone rather than the strong yellow used.

Despite much of this level not being very noteworthy, I wanted to visualize how a couple simple fixes could serve to elevate one part to a much cleaner and more professional-looking status, regardless of the actual asset quality, with just some colour tricks and understanding of depth perception. I'd recommend this level for Star Rate, and I hope the feedback helps anyone looking to create depth effects in GD.

This is a really funny level to me because of how inconsistent it is. There's a few neat high points to it - I really like the way the ship corridors are used to sync to the high vocals in the first 30 seconds, for example - but overall the contrast between the dark, metallic 1.9 design style popular in levels like Tartarus and the light, upbeat J-rock song used is a bit absurd for my taste. In terms of the percussion I do think it works fine, as the gameplay is fast and high-CPS enough to well represent the percussion, but otherwise the two elements of the level don't coexist well at all. I think Tengaku being less dark would have helped a lot, making it feel a bit less foreboding and menacing to more closely match the song's upbeat nature, and also I'd have loved more consistent use of movement sync in the gameplay beyond the aforementioned ship corridors; there's tons of potential for things like matching icon height to vocal pitch, reusing specific gameplay sections on certain words/patterns in the melodies that would've helped drastically to make this into a more cohesive product. As is, I wouldn't recommend Tengaku for rate, but at the bare minimum it's a pretty interesting level.

Jetstreams is quite a welcome callback to 2.0 efforts from creators like Superopi and Codex, in particular through its structuring. The blocky 2.0 lego brick ground spikes do quite well at filling space, and the subtle detail blocks used to texture them add some needed part-to-part variation. I also like the grass and flower blocks used to add further variation to the outside of the spikes throughout the level. The actual structures fading into the ground spikes when placed in them is quite nice, and helps the spikes feel more "solid" and imposing enough to justify them creating what is effectively a tunnel across the whole level, which is quite a cool way of doing that and mostly works due to how consistent this choice is across the level.

With that said, I'm not a big fan of most of the glowy foreground effects used. I think they clash pretty hard with the designs that consist of mainly sharp corners and flat colours with very little blending, particularly the full screen moving glow bars in the first couple parts or the screen edge accent flashes across the level. Each part of the level being mostly monochrome means the bright glow tends to muddy a lot of the details, which I think could be fixed by introducing more secondary colours as highlights into the block design, particularly the block outlines as these are important for gameplay readability. I do, however, like these effects when they come out of the structures vertically, as this is a neat way of showing the player the intended path ahead while also accenting specific structures that are important in one way or another. This helps my overall enjoyment of Jetstreams, and I'd recommend it for Feature personally, but it's great seeing modern creators still put out faithful callbacks to the legends of 2.0 sometimes.

I love me a good sky themed level. Soleil has some really solid, consistent designs across its runtime, and the pillar structures work pretty well here by creating more verticality in the foregrounds, which sells the lack of "bounds" and makes the level overall feel a lot bigger. The same goes for the multiple layers of wind and rainbows - the foreground ones are more visible, brighter and are used as accent pieces in areas with less block design to fill space and add a bit of colour, while the background ones are much larger and dimmer. A lot of elements of this level use this sort of simple parallax to create extra depth, and the consistency with its incorporation is a big part of what makes it work.

One of my criticisms of Soleil is the effects. In concept, I love the idea of the blocks flying apart and disintegrating in the intense sections, but the effect is quite blocky and the movement is too regular to feel natural. It definitely needs some more variation in the particle size, speed and rotation, and I do wish it was incorporated based on some specific song element like the loud synths near the end of the drop, rather than just whenever the part felt intense enough. I also don't like how the gameplay is balanced, as the wave parts feel significantly harder than anything else in the level, creating many frustrating choke points that hamper the playing experience quite a lot. If anything, I would err on the side of making the waves easier, as the gamemode in general is extremely mechanically intensive and (in my experience) usually works better when a bit easier compared to the rest of the level.

The transitions are also pretty lacklustre, particularly the one out of the first drop - the fade to black really hurts the attempt to fade from one part to another and feels quite jarring. I get that it's likely to match the sun setting during the transition, but having the clouds disappear slowly and the new block designs materialize in with some sort of effect would have been much better for the flow between the two parts since it would create a more logical implicit reason for the style shift between parts (the sun setting to darken the background, the new block designs and the removal of the clouds all accounted for). Overall, though, Soleil is very solid and I did enjoy it. I would recommend this for Feature and look forward to more from luhlamar going forward!

The Michael gauntlet contest as produced some of the coolest song-focused levels I've ever seen, due to the chaotic, glitchy IDM songs Flash puts out. destination 0 is my personal favourite MGC entry due to how unafraid it is to use repetition to its advantage. The solid bassline comes through in the heart-stamped pillars underneath the player, and both stay constant through the entire level aside from some flashing and wavering, which itself is a great piece of song representation for a prominent element of the song. The energy provided by the glitching, jumpy clicks and synths that make up the lead melodies comes through in a multitude of effects; flashing slopes and outlines for the muted ones, full screen rotating cascading lines for the huge synth pulses, big tapestry-like designs for the building background noise, etc, etc. There's a lot of minute details to both the song and the level that can only really be experienced while playing the level, but my favourite of them all is how the backgrounds colours shift around 2:55 onwards, with the reds and pinks used for more distorted, crunchy synths and blues, purples and teals used for the smoother noises. It's a genuinely fantastic visual representation of a very chaotic melody with a lot of different moving parts, and its simplicity in choosing the colours for each sound is really quite commendable.

Admittedly, destination 0's 4 minute runtime is a bit of a drag, and the slope-focused gameplay can be quite inconsistent due to some fairly difficult timings and general slope jank. However, these are relatively minor issues for me overall, and I'd recommend this level for Epic or Legendary due to just how good it is at representing its song. I hope to see this place highly in the Michael gauntlet contest, and if it doesn't then I'm even more excited to see what's in store for the results. Well done!

Titanic Thunderstorm is a pretty neat Black Blizzard spinoff, although I'd appreciate if this was credited somewhere within the level considering how strong the inspiration is in some parts. I like the choice to include a lot more energy in the form of strong pulses, shakes, bright lightning flashes and more dynamic block designs, because it brings about a similar effect-centric identity and theme expression that KrmaL originally helped popularise back in 2.0. The consistent usage of lightning, rain and the brooding dark purple-grey colour scheme helps set the tone and keeps the theme very consistent despite the varying intensity created by the effects, which is much appreciated.

My biggest complaint lies in the block designs. Interestingly, the designs themselves are decent, using 2.1 animated lightning as an outline is a cool choice that adds some nice texture to the otherwise unremarkable designs. However, the structuring really falls flat, and nearly every part uses the same default boxy structures. KrmaL excels at using unique structures either as thematic pieces or to highlight specific aspects of block designs - think the Rearmed memory maze or the Falling Up dual. Titanic Thunderstorm neglects this, and suffers from very forgettable feeling block designs as a result. Thankfully the other elements of the level hold their own, and it's a solid Black Blizzard spinoff all around. I'd recommend this for Feature.