Kwing's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[XOXO]

Maybe there's something I'm not getting here but I thoroughly loathed this. The music is cute and the animation is nice and smooth, but I have no idea how you're supposed to control what's going on. I seemed to have the best luck just mashing buttons as fast as I could and hoping I got lucky. The fact that you can't control which symbol you select makes it impossible to strategize, I'm not even sure there's a puzzle here.

[Badass Beatrice]

Taken in isolation this is nothing special, there were plenty of early 00s games (a few on Stickpage and the Whack Your Boss series) that had a choose-your-own-animation theme to them. That said, the level of fidelity here in recreating that vibe is really impressive. The B-voice acting, the art style that makes generous use of the line tool, the fonts, and everything else create something that genuinely feels like it could have been made in the era that this harkens back to.

There are a lot of ways you could upscale this for a better final product, such as more content (Pico's School is a fully-fledged game after all,) more animations, etc. or perhaps having something more to say other than being a period piece that mirrors a very specific era, but what you have now is fine.

[Doula-Ball]

If any game screams old school Newgrounds, it's something like this. A pinball machine themed around labor? The theme, art, and voices are cheesy and hilarious.

I like the rules a lot; the player is asked to hit a variety of things such as holes, ramps, and bumpers. I also like multiball a lot, it allows the player to be more active since normally the ball spends a lot of time away from the flippers. Unfortunately the physics are pretty broken, with the flippers being too short to accurately aim and the ball glitching through obstacles causing most of the drains. It seems you compensated for this by making the center drain nice and lenient, but I would rather the difficulty not come from unfair, glitchy drains in the first place.

[King of Buttons]

I played this a long time ago and was finally able to find it again.

The concept is simple but never tries to be more than what it is. I think the biggest issue has to do with replayability and content. Some medals (even ones not reflected on the Newgrounds API since medals didn't exist yet) would be nice, otherwise the only way you can compare your performance is through the (now dead) leaderboards.

After playing all four modes, Reflex is really the only one that feels enjoyable. Time Attack and Endurance are kind of boring, and Challenge can be memorized and it feels a bit contrived to hunt around for the one right button.

[Hexiom Connect]

I really, really enjoyed this game. In a sense, it's not much different from a jigsaw puzzle, but the fact that any of the pieces can be adjacent to any other pieces and that it isn't immediately apparent if certain pieces are incompatible adds something unique to the problem space. Starting with a huge mess and gradually determining which pieces have to be in certain locations is amazingly satisfying.

The biggest issues as far as I can tell have to do with player guidance:

The path sections that can't be moved are nearly the same color as the moveable pieces, making it hard to visually track, sometimes making me try to pick up a section that I couldn't, or making me second-guess pieces that had to have been right because I didn't realize which ones were glued in place.

The fact that the pieces have to be manipulated in-place causes a lot of visual noise. Being able to drag around pieces on the side of the main area would allow the player to store them out of the way, or to experiment with their placements without limitations.

Finally, it was at times hard to keep track of which pieces I KNEW were correct, sometimes picking them up by accident even though I would have known not to had I double checked. Some way to lock pieces in place (as well as color-code locked pieces) would have made the process a lot more pleasant.

[Aquacubes]

This game definitely shows its age, and the mobile games that would follow this in the next decade have made this quite redundant. That said, there really isn't much to this game. You hunt around for ways to get groups of four, and that's mostly it. The time limit is too aggressive for the player to really want to think about their moves when the short-term gains outweigh it.

Simple and enjoyable but no reason to play for more than a few minutes.

[Binding of Isaac DEMO]

Can't believe I haven't reviewed this yet. Even the demo is damn good but the full game really is fantastic. Randomized enemies and countless permutations of different powerups create an experience that has a ton of variety.

The only real issue with the main game is that the player doesn't have enough agency over the items they acquire, with the Devil Room and Shop being the only times the player can actually make meaningful choices; the rest of the time they're just kind of stuck with what they get.

[Hollow Knight Demake]

I wanted to give this a higher score based on the high quality pixel art but the game itself is a pretty miserable experience.

The sword attack has barely any range and the delay between when you wind up and when you attack is extremely frustrating. The UI dialogue goes too slowly and there's no way to make it go by faster. The cutscenes are unskippable, which is a bigger deal when you consider that the delay in your attack leads to you eating hits, and you only have 3 masks of health whereas you start with 5 in the original game - the deaths send you back to the cutscenes over and over. I also found myself hitting my head on platforms while trying to jump at an angle. All of this put together makes an experience that's slow and clunky.

If you're trying to remake the full game, the stuff I've mentioned should be some of the first things you address before you continue adding content.

Elv13s responds:

yeah the engine i used to make this at the time is really limiting, it might be better now but I plan to start from scratch with all the things I learned from this little experiment, thank you

[Extreme Mini Golf]

At first this felt like an upgrade to PsychoGoldfish's "Mini Putt" but then the flaws started showing, mostly in the game balance. The last few holes, especially the ones with ice, are just too hard. It feels like you're just praying to get lucky and nail a hole in one because the water hazards are so oppressive.

I like the physics and the framerate is nice and high, giving everything a smooth feel. It's just that the game design feels really unbalanced.

[Wonderputt]

The visual design here is striking, and I like how convincing the 3D is, but if we want to talk about user experience, the fixed 3D angle can be really frustrating. I found myself either getting eagles and holes in one, or being 5-7 strokes over par, and I feel like this either speaks to the controls being unfriendly, or the par just being wildly inaccurate such that some holes are clearly harder than others, even taking the par into account.

The animations between the holes are really cool, and there are a few creative ideas here in terms of elevators, chutes, etc. but unfortunately the base mechanics are hard to ignore, even with all of the attractive design aspects.