(This is part of a series of party game reviews for party games that I messed around with alongside a good friend in a weekend. I'm writing them with time inbetween each review to avoid flooding so I can still have friends after this.)
This was the last game that my friend and I tackled before he had to head back to the airport, and it was... certainly a fair and balanced Smash clone, to say the least.
I think the biggest problem is the lack of impact with your attacks. Smash games and good Smash clones like Slap City and Rivals of Aether have very satisfying sound effects and vibrations when you land successful hits upon your opponents, and that is sorely missing in CNPTE. Hitboxes feel a bit strange too, and I can't quite put my finger on why. There's also the strange design choice of not having invincibility while rolling (this was testing by my friend and it blew his mind), and movement feels kind of sluggish unfortunately; in my opinion, you don't have to make your characters have fast dashes, but if not, then there needs to be a more advanced movement tech that lets you traverse the ground more effectively. Aerial drift feels pretty stagnant, so it's really really easy to just shark opponents for an eternity and a half and this slows down gameplay a ton. Because finally, the magnifying glass works very strangely and seems somewhat inconsistent; sometimes I'd get KOed at fairly reasonable percentages, but most of the time, my friend and I would live up to absurd percentages because we'd fly into the magnifying glass but just not die due to the blinking skull not activating. Imagine a match where characters routinely lived to beyond 200% because an up air refused to kill opponents off the top. That's CNPTE in a nutshell.
Having said that, there is a part of me that found a lot of ironic fun in this game, spamming every character option to find out what was the most broken technique in the game (and there are a lot of busted characters). I would have done more research, but needless to say, my CNPTE career was ended prematurely by my friend wobbling me with Samurai Jack's side special. Perhaps we'll come back to it in a few months during vacation, so I can get the salty runback and destroy him with Grim's scythe spam.
This was the last game that my friend and I tackled before he had to head back to the airport, and it was... certainly a fair and balanced Smash clone, to say the least.
I think the biggest problem is the lack of impact with your attacks. Smash games and good Smash clones like Slap City and Rivals of Aether have very satisfying sound effects and vibrations when you land successful hits upon your opponents, and that is sorely missing in CNPTE. Hitboxes feel a bit strange too, and I can't quite put my finger on why. There's also the strange design choice of not having invincibility while rolling (this was testing by my friend and it blew his mind), and movement feels kind of sluggish unfortunately; in my opinion, you don't have to make your characters have fast dashes, but if not, then there needs to be a more advanced movement tech that lets you traverse the ground more effectively. Aerial drift feels pretty stagnant, so it's really really easy to just shark opponents for an eternity and a half and this slows down gameplay a ton. Because finally, the magnifying glass works very strangely and seems somewhat inconsistent; sometimes I'd get KOed at fairly reasonable percentages, but most of the time, my friend and I would live up to absurd percentages because we'd fly into the magnifying glass but just not die due to the blinking skull not activating. Imagine a match where characters routinely lived to beyond 200% because an up air refused to kill opponents off the top. That's CNPTE in a nutshell.
Having said that, there is a part of me that found a lot of ironic fun in this game, spamming every character option to find out what was the most broken technique in the game (and there are a lot of busted characters). I would have done more research, but needless to say, my CNPTE career was ended prematurely by my friend wobbling me with Samurai Jack's side special. Perhaps we'll come back to it in a few months during vacation, so I can get the salty runback and destroy him with Grim's scythe spam.