OK, first off, I hope the dev / devs do not consider this to be full release quality software, I would consider it to be late alpha stage or early beta stage at best. There are some significant polish issues that I've come across so far. The first thing is that there seems to be no exit or quit button on the escape menu in-game and ALT-F4 does not work for this game, even though the manual indicates that it should. I did, after managing to press random keys come across the F-12, which backed me out to the start screen, and after that, I was able to quit. Suffice to say, the game does require more polish in order for it to be a professional quality release, in my opinion, try it out, maybe you will feel differently. Also, I would not consider it to be $30 software, at this time, I wouldn't even pay $5 for it.
Moving along to gameplay, there are some major issues I have come across there as well. Navigation in this game seems to be a bit off, for example the tones you hear when walking about really are quite ambiguous and after learning them in the learn sounds menu really don't give you a good indication of where you are in relation to other rooms around you. Ok, this part is hard for me to say because I have to find the right words to express this so let me think. This game seems to be based off of games like 7th Saga and Lagoona or whatever that game is called for the SNES. The problem is, that without having this knowledge, it is hard to understand why you seam to be able only to walk forward and back and not to turn, but only to sidestep or strafe about. In these type of games, the map will remain constant and the character will turn, he will be looking in whatever direction you press the D-pad. This does not come across during gameplay, but is confusing.Now, if it weren't for the vision I do have, I wouldn't have ever played games like Chrono trigger and the like so how would someone without this experience know how to navigate. This seams to be a big deal as it took some time for me to put the pieces together in this matter. So some explanation in the documentation is in order I think. Now onto combat and let me explain my frustrations. The tutorial is good but the dragon strike scrolls are quite frankly ridiculous. The reaction time in order to complete them are superhuman at best. I mean really, the time has to be under 200ms and the beeps get faster, who can react like that, not me. My average reaction time when tested falls between 170 and 205 milliseconds and it took me a bunch of tries to do it in the practice and I couldn't even pull it off during that part of the battle in the tutorial, I only got one part of it. Now, I get the philosophy, there needs to be some challenge to pull off some powerful spells like the dragon strike scrolls but this area of the game needs work. No one can react that fast.
Now, I don't claim to be an expert on gaming, I'm not even that good at most games, and I know some people will react badly to this post especially because it is my first post, it is a very long post, and I'm basically ripping on this game but I have an explanation later on for that.
When playing an audio game, it is important for whatever voices that are used to convey information in the game to be up to the task. This is not the case for the default SAPI 5 voice on my computer which is running windows 8.1, and Anna was worse on windows 7. That being said, for a dev to expect customers to pay for an audiogame,that product needs to have as many supported speech methods as possible to be viable for its customer base. This game needs to support screenreaders, not just SAPI 5, that's all I can say about that.
Now, why have I been so harsh in this post about this game? Because i see the potential in it, I see what a great game lies underneath all the technical stuff, UI, navigation, gameplay and the like. Instead of this being a negative post, hopefully the dev can turn it into a positive force and use that to polish up the game and to re-envigorate him or herself or themselves and make this game the best it can possibly be. My hope is that one day, there will be audiogames that have the same quality, detail, complexity and overall awesomness as todays triple A games on the Xbox 1, the PS4 and PC. Since I am too stupid to code, this is the only way I know how to respond. If the dev or devs take offense at this post, I apologize, but, the faults of this game need to be addressed, and for that to happen, the dev / devs need to know them.
To sum up, Paladin of the sky is a great game trying to break free and shine, there are some problems which I feel need to be worked out, but when they are, this will be a top notch product and will be worth its price tag. Thank you for reading this huge, insanely long post and goodbye for now.
-- Brandon Cross
