Kwing's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Drop Cannon]

Damn, Utah's artwork never ceases to amaze. This is easily the most polished looking game in the jam and it's clear he's the reason.

The first couple minutes of this game I thought it was going to be too simple to be enjoyable, but the mechanics are added in nice and slow and ramp up into a pretty fleshed out experience. The added mechanics were a mixed bag. I never once fell for the decoy vehicles until the last level, and the drone sequences felt a little tacked on, but I also really liked that the vehicle stopped for the drone sequence - it gives the player a bit of time to catch their breath in a game that otherwise doesn't stop moving for a second.

The random all-ATV level, surprise boss at the end, or crushing the robots with heavy cannons were neat ideas, I would have liked to see more stuff like that. Perhaps having a mismatch between the vehicles and the cannons and forcing the player to equip vehicles with weapons below their weight class would have been interesting, but as-is I mostly found myself only doing this toward the end of levels if I made some pretty serious mistakes earlier on.

For the fights themselves, the Cassandra-bot (I'm calling it that because that's totally what it is) is a bit simplistic; shoot out its eyes and you're done. Having it regenerate mid-battle would keep the player more focused. Also, having the drones fly in multiple directions would allow the player to purposefully let some of them explode behind enemy lines. Or, drones could explode upon death, making it so that you could shoot them down only while they're over enemy lines? There are a lot of ideas that could have been explored here that weren't.

All in all, there's a lot going on here and even more that could have been added. It's unfortunate that the bulk of the difficulty increase comes from increased speed, as it seems like the most bland way to increase the challenge. It can also make this game a bit overstimulating, as you're watching very bright colors moving across the screen quickly while not taking your eyes away for even a fraction of a second.

I'm curious why you didn't make this a rhythm game. You've been doing this for 20+ years so I KNOW the thought crossed your mind.

My last note would be that it's interesting to see how this performs with Ruffle. Some of the later fights can take a pretty serious toll on the framerate, but as the battlefield clears up it's usually not much of an issue at all. I can't help wonder if this game is the byproduct of a stress test that you decided to flesh out into a full game, considering how easy it is to arbitrarily add in objects.

Btw, you forgot to tag this with "flash-forward-jam"

[Torture the Blammer]

There's not a ton to write home about here. The graphics are pretty basic, and there's only a few things to click on. Clicking on the victim himself only advances a set of predetermined frames with no animation, and the ending doesn't have much more than a few basic tweens.

I get that AS2 is hard to get into if you're trying to make something quickly, but it would have been easy enough to have different body parts take damage independently from one another, and also to have animations advancing them from one state of injury to the next.

Little-Rena responds:

umadbro

[Knoss]

This is a super cool concept and makes me wonder how the heck you got this working with Flash. I'd be super interested in seeing how this engine works!

That aside, there are some definite weaknesses in the design. Being able to strafe would be nice; why not have two extra buttons to move left and right without rotating the camera? It's also too hard to navigate the map. I get that being lost is part of the experience, but it's so difficult to navigate that it really just feels like a blind rush until the static gets quieter, then another blind rush when it gets loud again. There's really no way to strategize, and the walls appearing/disappearing doesn't happen in a meaningful way.

A game like Slender feels like the natural evolution of this game. You have the added task of collecting notes, and can gauge your performance based on how many you collected. Even something as simple as a timer would be enough for a player to want to replay this game, but when you realize there's nothing more to the game than the maze and the red screen, it's hard to want to play again, or even to stay alive.

[FRIDAY NIGHT FUNKIN']

There's a lot of small things I want to talk about here so I'll break it down the best I can.

Positive:
- The attention to detail is phenomenal. I love how the girl's hair blows in the wind when a train rolls by, or how she points in the corresponding direction when saying up, down, left, and right. The animation really is top-notch.
- The music is fantastic, and while the call/response style of the songs is a little weird at first, it ends up working really well. Overall presentation with the Vocaloid-ish style is really slick. Blammed was by far my favorite track.
- Step patterns are intuitive and realistic. I can't stand the Stepmania patterns that are impossible with your feet, whereas everything here could easily be done on an actual pad. UPDATE: As of Week 7, some of the harder charts would be nearly impossible to do with your feet. The arrows also get annoyingly fast when it would just make more sense for them to be slower but closer together.

Negative:
- Performance suffers pretty badly. My framerate dipped into the high 20s at some points and usually seemed to hover in the 40s. This also seemed to be highly dependent on the song (which I assume means it has something to do with the background animations.) I get that the player character has to respond to player input, but could the rest of the animations be baked instead?
- The player doesn't get enough feedback! The score is really unintuitive, as you never really know if you're doing well or not based on a number unless you've played that specific song several times before. The original AAA-E ratings, combo system, and feedback (Marvelous-Boo) of DDR keep the player better informed of their performance. Personally I breezed through all five weeks on hard on my first attempt, but a lot of my button presses would have counted as "almosts" if the game gave feedback on how precise your timing was. Obviously I can see that my scores are lower than other peoples' on the leaderboard, but I'd prefer to have some feedback in-game that isn't just relative to how other players have done.
- I get why the arrows are colored the way they are; someone that isn't used to the left/down/up/right sequence will recognize the directions because they match the PlayStation's face buttons. That said, the original DDR arrows have animations matching the beat, making it easier to step perfectly in time, and the lack of color-coding makes this a bit more difficult than necessary. Having options to change arrow style would be greatly appreciated. Also, the freeze arrows need to be clearer - the transparent tails made me miss a good chunk of them.

Overall:
Fantastic presentation - both the animations and music are significantly better than anything I've seen from Bemani. Unfortunately, user experience suffers because of how little information the player has about their own performance.

[Week Demo]

The animation and color scheme are beautiful, and surprisingly enough works really well with the mostly silent nature of the game. What's unfortunate is that you really don't get a feel for the lore or story, and that's really what you want to get people excited about the full game. You can admit up front that this is short, but it really is TOO short. Even just introducing the main character would be a big step in the right direction here.

[Squicide]

Pretty simple, but also fun if you just want to collect a bunch of medals. Pretty impressive that there are over three dozen medals to collect from the concept of just clicking a square.

It may be a bit much to ask when the concept itself didn't really try to be anything more complicated, but it would be nice if the game itself logged which endings you'd gotten, especially because clicking around wildly and rewatching the same animations can feel tedious. I also dislike that there are no textures, as it means there's really no landmark to figure out where to click for certain endings (I got the camera ending and haven't been able to replicate it since.)

Some additional logic also could have made this a bit less of a "try random shit" game and more of an actual puzzle game. Having certain things in the background or foreground would have allowed the player to reason out certain things that could be done.

[InvasionLab]

It's a fun concept, but there are a lot of small nitpicks that could have made this way better.

The elephant in the room is the graphics, which look pretty rough. The handwritten style is cool, but putting more detail or even just neatness into the hand-written (mouse-written?) text would have been really nice. The gun looks unnecessarily primitive (even the enemies have more detail) and it just looks weird how it's floating in one place and how enemies teleport onto the screen (adjusting opacity to make enemies fade in, or having them come in from off-screen like the bugs that crawl down from the top would look a little cleaner.)

The upgrades are nice, but the early game ones are pretty obvious - upgrade the gun because you'll be using it for every enemy type except the tank, which is best taken care of with the rock but can be significantly damaged by the mud and shotgun as well.

Gameplay-wise, the worst issue is that the special weapons aren't clear with when the cooldown has expired. Often I pressed a button when the graphic for the powerup showed it was usable, only for nothing to happen. Wait a few seconds, and the weapon eventually triggers upon a button press. Surely you could fix this? A secondary issue is how weird it is that an enemy just being present causes the invasion percentage to rise. It makes more sense to specifically defend something rather than killing whatever you see in any order.

Last note is that it wouldn't be hard to make this phone-compatible. Just have the weapons triggered by bigger buttons at the top of the screen; the mud and rock could be one tap to select and one tap to aim. Let the gun auto-fire and boom, there's no reason why you would need to play this on desktop.

If you're concerned about judging/placement there's more than enough time for you to fix all of these little problems by the time the deadline rolls around.

[Type Help]

I really wanted to like this, but it's just too obscure. The first room with the towel and chamber pot are nice and feel like a text adventure should, but the demon riddle is annoying, as it's unclear that it's even a riddle in the first place - I spent a lot of time searching other rooms for some kind of solution and found nothing. I understand the logic, but it just doesn't feel like good design.

The apple is where things completely fall apart. The fact that the player can turn spoilers on, ignore a warning and break the game seems to imply a "right" way to beat the game, without tampering too much with the commands given to you. Yet the way the apple is obtained still requires you to manually edit the game itself. The line between solving puzzles and breaking the game gets too fuzzy here, and while the logic of this is kind of explained, it's never demonstrated in a way that would make it user-friendly, nor does it really feel fun to actually accomplish.

Then after you finally get past these two awful sections of the game, barely anything happens before the game itself ends. Just like that? No real story, and no puzzles between the super obvious bits of the start and finish and the two horribly impossible puzzles in between? The game requires a lot of investment to understand and is so wholly unrewarding that it just doesn't feel like it's worth it.

If anything, this game (particularly the apple puzzle) feels like a weird tutorial for understanding how the story builder feature works, but doesn't provide enough substance for me to have faith that user-generated games would be any better.

Would also be nice if pressing up allowed you to look at past commands similar to a real terminal.

BoMToons responds:

Yes, it's mostly a tutorial for learning the editor. That's the point, but I do understand how obscure it is, so I'm not disagreeing with your comments, mostly agreeing.

The first version of the game hid the things now marked as "spoilers" completely, but a reviewer complained about that fact and said it contradicted the "open-ness" of the game's concept. So, I compromised and put in the spoiler stuff... I do see how it's a bit contradictory now though :-/

The demon name puzzle is very obscure, I know, but I liked it too much and felt too clever to exclude it... but a lot hinges on it, so... I left it :-)

I agree about the up command... how could that be implemented and keep the page scrolling/paging feature though? (I don't want to code a scroll bar, and Ruffle doesn't support Flash's native components)

[3D Join the Dots]

One of the few early submissions I've seen that actually models 3D correctly. I'm not sure what kind of use cases there are for this in terms of a full-fledged game since these wireframes don't have textures, collisions, etc. but this looks nice and is quite impressive for its time.

Would be nice if the dots you click on were a bit bigger.

[The Big Red Button]

Wow, I had no idea this was originally on Newgrounds, though I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. What to say... There's really not much of a game here, but that's also kind of the point, as is the simplicity, the humor being decent but not fantastic, and basically just all of this.

Given the simple ingredients, I don't know what more you could really do here. The colored buttons, multiple buttons, and even the moving one all make this a bit more interesting, but making something genuinely difficult almost doesn't feel like it would fit with the theme of the narrator actually being quite bad at getting you to stop clicking.

Giving this an 8/10 but it really is a classic.