Kwing's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Color Collision!]

Unfortunately this is just too simple to be worthwhile. From the name "Color Collision" I was expecting there to be some kind of system that centered around combining colors, or scoring bonus points by building up streaks of the same color, so just running around hitting every block indiscriminately was a bit of a disappointment. Despite there being multiple blocks and random spawning, in practice the game plays almost exactly like Pong.

First of all, I disliked that the blocks have to hit the registry point of the player, rather than touching any part of the sprite. This made it feel just a little bit harder as you have to wait just a bit longer for a block to fall into the registry point, or move just a bit further to the side to catch a block before changing direction and speeding off toward the next block.

That aside, I disliked that the random position and speed of the blocks made it impossible to avoid losing lives. In addition, the whole game is pretty slow, making the process of scoring 100 points more tedious than difficult.

[CypherGrid]

The high-effort graphics (excepting the big boobs which are very annoying,) animation, and juice really made me want to rate this highly, but after reading the whole thing about row priority 3-4 times, I just don't get it and I honestly don't want to. The logic is too obscure and its level of complexity outpaces the actual degree of fun a puzzle like this might have. Ultimately I brute-forced all of the puzzles past the tutorial.

I can understand that the quantity of digits by a row or column indicates how many tiles in that line need to be marked off, but the priority system feels incredibly arbitrary, and trying to figure out whether a 5 is the product of 1+4 or 2+3 just feels obscure and annoying. The fact that there are really only 4 puzzles after the tutorial, and two of them essentially have a timer going on during them, makes it prohibitively difficult to actually spend the time learning the mechanics, despite all of the time you've spent constructing a tutorial.

My biggest issue with this game is the ruleset itself; explaining the rules better, or having some kind of random mode that gives the player a set number of easy puzzles before gradually ramping it up, would make things more enjoyable, but I don't think any amount of QoL improvements would make the underlying game fun to play. Games like Sudoku have a certain intuitive simplicity to them, and the rules around priority in this game are the antithesis of this principle.

Veinom responds:

If you feel that the puzzles get hard early, that's because I wanted to showcase what my puzzle concept is capable of (like the Hack-time and the Quick Time Events in the final boss). If I had more time, I would add more puzzles in between, which is something I plan to do in future updates.

I will try to improve the tutorial regarding Priorities. Thank you for your long and detailed review.

[The Whicher]

I haven't played (or watched) The Witcher so I'm sure a lot of references flew over my head, but this was still pretty entertaining! The brevity of each encounter, followed by Geralt's :| face (especially if the player chooses the "idgaf" options) really sells this, and for as simple as it is the animation is solid as well.

The "always need 1 more alchemy than you have" was infuriating and took me way longer to realize than it should have. The biggest frustration for me was having to have preexisting knowledge of what was going to happen in order to see all of the content, and not being able to skip or save scum. As a result, some of the content requires you to replay the game from the beginning, which is a bit obnoxious.

Not too much else to say here. Being trolled by the game is funny, but not so funny that I'm willing to sit through the game (and its animations) several times to see all of it.

[Ruffle Adventures!]

I really wanted to like this. The concept of killing different sites and services associated with Flash is funny and different, but there are so many things in the way of this feeling like a fully fleshed out experience.

In terms of the story, the typos, font, and low contrast background (just increase the alpha a bit) make it hard to read the intro.

Regarding gameplay, the hitboxes for the actual fighting feel really imprecise. It's hard to tell if there are separate hitboxes for the player character and their weapon, as it kept feeling like I was taking damage while attacking. The characters are also big relative to their movement speed, making them feel slow and making dodging feel really hard. It felt less like I was managing attacks and more like I was managing how many frames two big, clumsy hitboxes were intersecting with each other. Having snappier controls is really the biggest thing you could do to make this feel better. As someone whose old (2008-ish) games felt like this, I know all too well how these kinds of controls can feel natural to you as the developer but frustrating for the player.

The eyes and mouths on the graphics are cute and decently well-drawn, most of the other graphics look a little sloppy but that's okay.

[Pizza Tower Defense]

Tower defenses are a pretty basic formula, and while this doesn't add much to the formula, there are plenty of shortcomings with the basic implementation.

The biggest issue here is that there's no way to see the actual speed and damage of a tower, or how those stats change as upgrades are applied. My first time trying the game I didn't upgrade the towers and was frustrated by not being able to kill anything. Then, after buying one tower and dumping 2-3 upgrades in it, I saw that I started killing enemies in one hit. I still don't really understand the functional difference between the three tower types, as pepperoni is strong enough to kill enemies on its own, negating the need to buy other towers except for getting the relevant medals (which are currently broken.)

Aside from essential information not being available to the player, my next biggest complaint is that the game freezes a little bit when an enemy spawns in, probably because it's running a pathfinding algorithm. There's no reason to do this for every enemy; run the algorithm once at the start of the wave and reuse it for all of the enemies that spawn in. Alternatively, bake the paths into the game instead of making the towers and enemies occupy the same game space. The way it's done now is really boring because you can just use the towers to create a winding path - and if you don't, enemies just go straight to the right and then down.

Graphics and music are unremarkable.

clarkiagames responds:

I understand it's hard to balance the game on my own taking account of all the possibilities, for now i just tested it a couple of times, I will make some adjustments. You got a point for the lagguish part I basically wanted to have the ability to add tower mid game but found out it would be too difficult and removed that. I might actually calculate the path once as you suggest. Basically the slow tower is useful for speed wave and splash tower for tanking waves. But the upgrade are too powerful for now i'll also adjust that. I don't know if you know the basic War3 TD in which you basically have to create a winding path. I find this kind of fun knowing there are multiple path you can use to optimize tower usefulness so i implemented it like that. I obviously said I done it in less than a week so yeah this is not some ultimate art. I appreciate the feedback though.

[Newgrounds Maze]

It's simple, but it's also functional.

Moving obstacles or even just some different colors for different levels would make this a bit more interesting or at least easy on the eyes. Having to restart the entire game whenever you hit a wall is pretty frustrating and make it tempting to cheat (especially easy to do considering there are no anti-cheating mechanisms.)

If you could restart individual levels you could also make levels much harder without it being as punishing to the player to have to redo all of them.

[Paper-Draw]

Considering the Flash Forward Game Jam was announced on January 2nd, this isn't bad for two weeks worth of work. However, the physics are pretty badly broken, mainly regarding the hitboxes. It's always a good idea to have an invisible hitbox inside of the player character that's a bit smaller than their sprite to give them a small amount of leeway when squeezing between tight obstacles.

On top of that, it seems like the platform physics only register ground; the player can jump up through ground and emerge on top, which is a really effective way to cheat through many of these levels.

The UI is kind of ugly, too. Normally this isn't a huge deal but in a few instances it becomes actively difficult to read the instructions that are being given.

The inspiration from Draw Play is clear and as one of my favorite games growing up it's cool to see it still being remembered fondly.

[XOXO Puzzle]

This is a big step up from the earlier version. Most of the levels are easy, but a few you do have to work for.

My biggest frustration was that it didn't seem clear where the letters would go in the levels where the position they ended up in changed (like alternating adding on the right and left.) Having a clearer indicator than just "R2" would be more visually appealing.

The timer seems like a dumb addition, I would rather have the game track my best completion in terms of moves (maybe two tiers of completion, one for par, and one for the fewest moves possible.)

[True Idle Game]

This is a really good parody. The typos, bad font, bad UI, etc. all bring the whole thing together. The only thing wrong with it IMO is that the sound/music/more games buttons don't explain what they are. It's funnier if the player sees some text to suggest what a button should do, so the message that pops up is a response to the player's choice to click it, rather than the player just clicking everything.

I also think the actual idle part of the game might be more compelling without a timer.

[Pixel Puzzle]

It's a not a bad concept (though simple) but is there no way to register when the player has solved a puzzle? The pieces don't snap into place. I also dislike that you have to click on the area where the pieces spawned from to rotate them.

Graphics and music are simple, gameplay could be decent but putting the pieces together and then just going back to the parent menu to do another feels really underwhelming.

Veinom responds:

I wish I could fix the 3 problems you mention (and I tried multiple times) but they are beyond my programing skills. So this is the best I could do. I understand why someone would expect the pieces to snap, but the game works fine as it is and the concept is clearly presented. And that's a win in my book.