Just leaving this here, don't mind me. The beat 'em up equivalent of "euroshmups". Also includes some general red flags/issues even if they're not euro.
Basics & Feel
- No hitsparks. Hard to see hit impact in general.
- Hitboxes get spawned on the wrong frame - either before or after the impact frame. Making hits feel weird & disjointed.
- Weak key poses, player/enemy feel like they're stuck in a "neutral" stance. An especially big problem for hitstun sprites.
- No air hitstun sprites, enemies get juggled like sacks o' shit.
- Enemy hitstun sprites have too many startup frames, so the initial impact of a hit doesn't feel like it has much of an effect on the enemy until a few frames after.
- Player's sprite is drawn under the enemies even if they're on roughly the same Z axis plane. No draw depth bias in the player's favor, basically.
- Sloppy frame advantage, enemies recover before your move finishes. Even if they don't have enough frame advantage to attack back, it tends to feel poorly thought out/tested.
- Player hitboxes on the tip of their attacks, no coverage of the player's body, so if you're standing on top of an enemy, you'll whiff.
- Player moves forward when attacking but the above issue + low enemy pushback leads to it feeling janky & needlessly punishing.
- Bizarre hand drawn/duct taped together enemy gravity. When you launch an enemy into the air, they'll move up & fall down at very strange rates, possibly because juggle movement is a bunch of hand-drawn sprites. Inconsistency in enemy fall speeds too.
- Diagonal knockdowns in a 2D belt scroller.
- Interpolation/procedural animation for state transitions. An especially big problem if games have cancels.
- Enemy Z axis being "unstable" resulting in them moving around just because they changed sprites.
Player moveset
- Can't turn around mid autocombo.
- Can do full autocombo without hitting anyone.
- Guard cancels/similar defensive mechanics allowing you to set up infinites by resetting your autocombo.
- No throw iframes.
- No desperation attack iframes.
- Few minor helpful iframes in general, for example no iframes when picking up items.
- Poor movement/neutral game in general, only interesting stuff exists when you're attacking or defending.
- Poorly balanced desperation attack cost, too OP or useless.
- Too much movement accel/inertia, can't react to minute changes in enemy movement or play around with them too effectively (a little bit/conditional accel/inertia is OK).
- Iframe dashes, especially ones that cancel moves you're doing. Prepare for a lot of super armor and other crap if you see this.
- Meters, especially for basic things that are freely accessible in older beat 'em ups.
Enemy design & combat
- Massive play area, slow player/enemies.
- Low enemy attack range, letting players stand around and mash while enemies are helpless.
- Over-reliance on enemy jump-attacks and ranged attacks to compensate for their low jab range + their bad movement design.
- Homogenous, slow enemy wakeup times between different enemy types.
- Homogenous, slow enemy movement.
- Enemies don't circle you, just walk towards you in the most braindead manner.
- Enemies don't try to bait you or play with you in general, zombie-like behavior.
- Super armor/lack of hitstun.
- Free, excessive juggles with no anti-infinite system.
- Bloated enemy health to justify the existence of combos/juggles & to cover up how easy it is to get hits in.
- Purely randomized enemy attacks, not proximity/location based.
- Excessive enemy wakeup attacks that slow down the pace of combat.
- Thrown enemies don't hit other enemies.
- Enemies get iframes during attacks which makes them invincible to throws.
Misc red flags
- No stage timer.
- Slowmo being used to accentuate hits, instead of hit pause.
- Cinematic finishers.
- Color coded attacks with prebaked responses (parry red, dodge when enemy glows yellow, etc)
- Suck To Target mechanics when attacking.
- Stats/player character progression that persists between runs/restarts, instead of just being limited to that single run itself.
- Ragdoll physics.
- Can always walk backwards, no screen lock. By extension can scroll left/right a bit too much even when the screen's locked.
