I watched a letsplay of this game from start to finish, and I'll do my best to try and stay constructive. One positive thing I can say is that you guys are definitely trying to improve. The quality of your sounds, stories, and voice acting has gone up since the first few releases. Unfortunately, th positivity ends here.
Here's the problem. Mechanics wise, the association's games are stuck in a rut. Their mechanics never seem able to move away from bop it style combat, puzzles with way too much hand holding, and simplistic racing.
The fighting in particular could have been improved a long time ago. Ever since games like blind gladiator, people have been giving you suggestions on how to do *interesting* combat. I can't even count the times people have made perfectly constructive posts on the forum explaining how to move away from this bop it style hit up/left/right arrow thing. They also gave you plenty of examples of games with good combat mechanics that keep players engaged and make things challenging, without being unbeatable. After this much time, you guys are sort of running out of excuses. You have the feedback, which you constantly ask for and say you will follow it. You have the suggestions, which build off of great combat and racing mechanics. Now you should really add them. I personally have had it up to my neck with hear and react combat. If you're not a complete and total newbie with audio games, you can finish the game without having to heal one single time and without losing a single race. That's now how a game should work. A game should challenge you. If it doesn't, you might as well leave the game part out and just record all the story parts as an audio book.
Speaking of racing, there's just no challenge there either. The guy tells you where to go, and you go there. There's no unforseen hazerds, no unexpected changes in the track, nothing to throw you off your game for even a second. Example: One of the racers you race against is said to cheat on every race he drives in. So why doesn't he with yours? That was such a wasted opportunity to make one of the races feel different. You could have introduced a mechanic where your car engine or steering was rigged by the enemy, so it didn't behave in the way you thought it would. If the story allows for it, you have to use opportunities like these.
It's literally a game of "hold the arrows I tell you to hold." For some of the racing sections, you appear to be racing in different vehicles. But it doesn't feel, or even sound! that way. It's always the same car even though the story says it isn't.
I just have to ask, what happened to the racing system from Audio Speed? I want to be challenged. I want to have to try a track a few times to figure out how to beat it. Then, I want some way like a high score or a best completion time to keep me coming back and trying for higher scores or speeds.
I... honestly don't know how to properly end this review. This game is just... more of the same. And at this point, games like these are just holding us back. They're putting a stone in the way of gamers, of devs, and of game accessibility as a whole. We're blind. We're not stupid. We can figure out challenging game mechanics. We can try different ways to solve problems. We have the cognitive ability to do more than hit an arrow key when we're told to hit it. If I didn't know any better, I'd start feeling insulted at being given games with mechanics like these even after so mant people have given you so much feedback on how to do it better.
I used to be a knee like you, then I took an adventurer in the arrow.
