Kwing's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Sliding Puzzle]

I can't help but wonder if this is shovelware. The game itself is coded well enough, but feels like a cheap excuse to show off some artwork, most of which doesn't look finished as the scanned/photographed pencil art just doesn't show up that well on a digital screen.

While functional, it's really simple and not very engaging. It's also rather silly that the different images have their own leaderboards when all of the 3x3 and 4x4 puzzles are identical to each other in terms of difficulty.

JG0328 responds:

Thanks for playing. It isn't shovelware, I just like to share what I do and try to learn with each different game.

[Karla's Quest: Spotter Demo]

At first I thought this was going to be an escape room and was a bit disappointed to find it was just an Eye Spy.

The art is solid and does give off the vibe of early 00s Flash games, but what this game is really lacking is content. There are only four items to find, and the only reason they're difficult is to find is that them being blacked out makes it unclear what the objects even are (specifically the phone and wallet.) A greater area to explore (perhaps you can go into different rooms) and maybe some more puzzle elements (or at least more items to find) would make this more interesting.

Vile523 responds:

Understood, thank you for your suggestion. I'll take it into account for the full game.

[Yu Dragoon 2: A flash Game]

The smoothness of the 3D here really can't be understated, it really is completely seamless. While normally a pretty simple thing, the diagonal running animations also are a really important touch that contributes to the fully 3D feel of the game. This seriously looks awesome. If your engine can handle it, I would like to see some kind of platforming or verticality so that the third dimension can actually do something other than be a cool graphical illusion.

Gameplay-wise, there's a lot missing. As others have said, the camera is too zoomed in to have much spatial awareness, and it's also really hard to make out if you can hit an enemy from front or behind (it just makes more sense to run around and attack from the side.) The single attack, lack of dodging, blocking, combos, etc. make this feel almost like Sword of Vermilion in terms of blandness, and as an unfinished game there's obviously nothing in the way of upgrades or progression yet.

Honestly the only thing this game needed in order to succeed was a teammate to take care of some of the boilerplate code needed for a combat and inventory system.

TeamTamago responds:

Thanks, all this feedback is really helpful! I'm already working on a version with these things implemented. Also verticality is going to need some clever tricks and the like but it's totally possible.

[Backstage Fighers]

The art is solid, but that's about all that you've got. Even in terms of visuals, the game looks a bit shaky (literally) due to the health bar moving with the player, probably an issue with the dynamic camera that would make it more straightforward to dock a smaller health bar just above the player character, rather than trying to put it in the top left of the screen (alternatively, shove the level, player, and enemies into a Movie Clip and manipulate that for your dynamic camera so the UI in your _root never moves.

Enemies can attack from so far off screen you can take damage without realizing it. Similarly, you can kill enemies from so far away you barely see their death animations.The bullets change direction when the player does (I don't know how you could even get that to happen without intentionally coding that it.)

Past the first like 3 enemies is an infinite loop of a town with nothing in it. You couldn't even tell the player they reached the end of the game?

Ultimately feels like an unfinished Alien Hominid clone.

MoneroBTW responds:

yo man, thanks for the ideas, we are goin got fix everything!

[Portal Defenders: Fast Break!]

Really good looking (and feeling) game. The sound design and animation in particular really make this pop and give it a really exciting energy.

Gameplay-wise, it's fun if you play the way you're intended to, but it's easy to cheese the game. Once you're in the lead, you can essentially stand still and run the timer out. I saw an NPC run up to me and use an attack to steal the ball ONCE, but even if this happens you can generally just run and never shoot. The extra obstacles in each level sometimes mitigate this, but not to the point that this wasn't a dominant strategy toward the end when the AI became really oppressive. If anything, the level gimmicks feel like a desperate attempt to fix underlying balance issues with either the mechanics or bad AI.

The controls felt a bit annoying, it was never clear what it took to block a shot (sometimes my jumps could knock a ball away from the hoop, sometimes they couldn't, despite me jumping with almost identical timing and in the same place.) Having attack be a button combo instead of a fourth button also seemed strange and unnecessary.

The fact that the turbo only replenishes under certain conditions led to some frustrating situations where you literally can't do anything except block, especially with late-game AI players that would jump in and grab the ball at lightning speed, making it nearly impossible to grab the ball without directly attacking. On the other hand, the "on fire" bonus felt really overpowered and like a cheap way to give a struggling player a free win if they just kept playing long enough to get lucky. I think the solution to this would be to make it so that turbo slowly replenishes on its own, and have On Fire only last for a certain amount of time, not until the opponent scores again.

In terms of content, this game feels bloated. Too many levels and too many characters, with the gameplay changing too little across these variables to make it tempting to replay. It feels exceptionally demotivating when you consider that the most reliable way to beat the game is to run back and forth without actually shooting.

Overall this game feels like an overly ambitious project with some fundamental flaws in enemy AI and balance that were hastily covered up with lots of characters and level gimmicks, rather than addressing the underlying issues. The result is something that looks and plays like a great game from the right angle, but has a few gaping holes in it that become obvious upon closer inspection.

BoMToons responds:

Great review, this is why I love NG :-)

[Alister - Monster tamer]

Going into this, the polish and production quality of this game (especially the buttery smooth animation and vibrant particle effects) made me think it was going to be a serious contender to win the whole Jam. Unfortunately this game is either incomplete or just buggy beyond belief.

Defense Cut is the only attack that seems to do a reasonable amount of damage, and even then you can only barely kill the two turtles at the beginning before they kill you. Unless you reload from a save, those turtles are actually still there after you defeat them, making it impossible to progress, and if you DO make it past them, dying puts you back at the start with the turtles respawned, forcing you to load again. Sometimes even winning a fight will do this, which is quite annoying. I was able to trigger the cutscene inside the castle, but that was as far as I got.

Keep going, there's a game here but it's clearly not finished.

Alex303 responds:

thank you for the feedback! I increased the starting level and removed the turtles after you beat them or lose and it saves it. yea sadly didnt have any time to add anymore thanks for playing.

I forgot to mention the reason some attacks do less damage is because of the typechart. there is a working typechat but did not elaborate on it here

[SPERT BALLS]

Have you played Brainsplatters 2? This reminds me a LOT of that game and it's hard not to directly compare the two (which is kind of crazy considering that game is nearly twice your age.) Anyway...

Virtually everything about the aesthetics of this game are pretty flawed. The drawings, voice acting, writing, and gameplay could all stand to get some major improvements. That said, I have a lot of appreciation for the level of detail put into giving this game every little bell and whistle, even if those bells and whistles are themselves flawed.

For instance, the animated intro, animated menu, and voice acting are all inclusions that aren't strictly necessary for a "click stick figures to shoot them" game, but contribute to a really cinematic experience. In a way, this feels more like a concept sketch or animatic of an actual game, given how lacking the assets are but how complete the structure is.

Aside from the rather generic advice of "put more effort into the graphics" something really critical in making this a better game would be ramping up the difficulty. Forcing the player to click the stick figures faster, making the stick figures move, or more complex methods of killing bad guys (similar to having to find the hiding sticks in the last level) would make this more engaging instead of allowing the player to cruise through the entirety of the game in a single attempt.

Ibs571 responds:

I did actually played Brainsplatters 2 about when I was 6 yrs old (8 yrs ago) on stickpage but the main inspiration I took was from a game called Sift Heads I remember playing that game with my brother years ago

Note: Originally I was going to add puzzles and different mechanics but the 2023 flash forward deadline was near and then I rushed it

[Ucogi GO]

There's not much here other than a walking simulator. The graphics and overall production quality are nice, but there's not enough here to really call it a game.

The biggest issue with what you have (and this issue really does stand front and center) is that rolling over the circles to move to them just feels really bizarre and unnecessarily tedious due to how small the circles are. Using arrow keys (even if the arrows have a button overlay on the screen, as many mobile games do) would make this feel so much more accessible. As it is, the awkwardness makes it feel like I'm playing a port even on its intended platform.

Veinom responds:

I wanted this to be a game that you can play with your mouse only, but you are right. I was considering making the blue circles bigger, and I will try adding keyboard controls as an alternative. Thank you.

[A Dress Up Game]

Well, it's a dress-up game, taken a bit more literally than anyone expected. The music and graphics are solid, but the clicking and dragging mechanic is a bit frustrating because the depth of the objects being manipulated can make it so the mouse gets stuck dragging objects around.

Some simple QoL improvements would be to have a toggler for things that are obviously meant to go in one place (such as clothes and accessories) and allowing the player to dynamically spawn and delete decorations like arrows, circles, and spirals, rather than just having a bunch of them shoved into the corner. Also, manipulating the background with something other than the spacebar would be nice, it seems like a total non-sequitur to include keyboard controls.

Cyberdevil responds:

Indeed it is, though hopefully that unexpected literal twist was an appreciable entertainment factor too; redeeming point of an otherwise functionally I agree somewhat limited game. ;) Mmm, I've wondered why the mouse sometimes gets stuck like that, it doesn't seem to happen often (for me at least) but I do agree, not ideal. An extra click seems to let go of the item that's being dragged when this happens.

Such things go beyond my coding capabilities, but all good ideas for sure. In regard to the background you can toggle it via one of the on-screen arrow buttons as well. Personally I feel like keyboard shortcuts are always a benefit; the quickest way to perform an action. If however you're on mobile/touchscreen everything but music can be toggled within the game also, thinking of it now I really should've added a button for music too if you actually do not have a keyboard, essential feature...

Appreciate the feedback Kwing! Maybe I'll up my coding capabilities a bit till next year.

[Tidying Up]

The aesthetic for this game isn't my style, but there's no denying it works really well. The UI and music just look really polished, and you even have some filters (film grain and the scan lines over the character avatars) to make the game visually pop.

That said, there are a couple UI things that I found a bit annoying which should be easy fixes. The dialogue and music buttons take up a lot of the screen, and I'd rather just have a settings button for music and a popup for dialogue that went away completely after the cutscene finished, as they take up a lot of real estate and make the game screen look cluttered. The controls on the right also seem cluttered until you realize they're there for mobile players. This could potentially be something a desktop user could hide to free up more space, but it's less important. Finally (and this is really a 5 minute fix) I was confused by the fact that the only way to tell who the player is controlling is the "ACTIVE: 1" indicator at the top of the screen (and the sparkles, which only pop up for a fraction of a second and then are gone completely.) Why not have some kind of effect or even just a color change over the active player character?

One more small nitpick regarding presentation is that the amount of juice in the transitions and the quantity of dialogue (which is kind of cliche) make it feel like too small a percent of the time the player spends with the game open is actually gameplay, which only becomes more annoying with the puzzles themselves being so easy. I finished this game feeling unsatisfied, and while the level creation system hypothetically allows players to enjoy more content and more difficult levels, it feels a bit like outsourcing an important part of the game onto the player when the content included in story mode is so lean.

On a more fundamental level, there's an interesting concept here, but I REALLY didn't like the level design. Most of the levels are braindead easy, and the ones that are even slightly hard hinge entirely on keeping one of the characters trapped until the end of the level. Sliding puzzles where a character can only stop when they hit an obstacle are common, and the idea of being able to manipulate an obstacle (the capybara) so as to put the sliding character in optimal positions is a novel twist, but if all of the difficulty comes from keeping Capy locked away in a little area where she can't help, your level design has undone the exact mechanic which differentiates this game from every other slider puzzle.

I get why you made an easy game. Harder games score significantly lower on the site and it's clear whoever designed the game knew their audience. At the same time, there are ways to reward more skilled play, even if basic completion of the game is easy. The most obvious idea is to keep count of how many moves the player has made, and recognize if a player is able to complete the same level in fewer moves.

4.5/5 for a really solid concept, but I'd like to see a player pack flesh out the content with a bit more difficulty and replayability.

Bleak-Creep responds:

Thanks for the in-depth review! The character portrait labels are a bit buggy yet and could definitely use some work, I agree there. We're planning on having the characters flash briefly when switching between them in a future build too, we just ran out of time and used the sparkles as a simple replacement for the time being.

As for the levels themselves, I know we did struggle a bit at first at trying to determine exactly what levels mechanics would be kind of make sense in the house setting as well as how to keep Capy from feeling too "OP" once he's able to move around freely.

There's a good chance we might go back in and add some bonus levels that add more challenge later too, but we aimed toward making the storyline a more accessible experience so players could get the whole story within a a single sitting without getting too frustrated.