Kwing's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Shadow Gauntlet]

I really wanted to like this. The concept is really cool, balancing the recoil for movement as well as attacking targets or grappling.

That said, the physics are really an acquired taste. The recoil is too weak and the player's momentum decays too slowly, making everything feel really floaty. I couldn't get past level 6 because of how unequipped the recoil strength is to counteract gravitational force.

Having a bit snappier controls, specifically stronger recoil and weaker gravity, would make this much more accessible.

EDIT: Finally figured out that where you grab the bird in level 6 affects its tilt and therefore the direction it flies (it flies straight, relative to where it's facing.) Still totally lost on how to unlock the portal in level 8.

VicBiss responds:

Thanks for the feedback! I've had to do all of the level design and testing over the past week or so to get it out for the Flash Forward Jam. So it's quite rushed. I actually just weakened the gravity a bit and think it is feeling better.

[Newgrounds: GLADIATORS]

The 3D models are cool but it's hard to imagine how much more broken this game could possibly be. Holding down an attack button causes the opponent to lose health instantly, regardless of whether you're facing the right direction or if the opponent is within range of the attack. Holding J + K + L will triple your damage output and destroy the enemy within 2 seconds. The one opponent you face just seems to hop around and deal damage on contact with no behavior that actually responds to the player.

I don't know if the different playable characters are supposed to feel different, but considering attacks don't have different amounts of damage, speed, or reach, it seems like they're all the same.

The Dad medal is broken, as playing as Dad causes you to spawn in as Alloy.

Sketonna responds:

Thanks for the review man
I'll do my best to fix these issues as soon as I get home from school ,I think I know why Alloy appears instead of dad , as for the boss and attacks I have an idea that could fix it so I think it's gonna be better soon

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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

[Dead Fish Clicker]

The most impressive thing about this is the fact that Cookie Clicker was itself meant to be satire, and you somehow managed to take it a step further. The narration feels like the drunk cousin of Getting Over It. Your hesitation and stumbles really add to how hackneyed and thrown together everything is.

Despite looking like stupid spam, there are some interesting choices of juice going on here, specifically the chimes varying in pitch when you accumulate maggots. The images are also surprisingly high-resolution, and you picked great music.

Obviously I can't give a high score to something that's basically spam but this was surprisingly amusing.

LeviRamirez responds:

thank you :-)

[Vizzy & The Lost Cat]

You know I was mad when I got 5:01 on my 3rd run.

This game looks awesome in terms of development, but in terms of design it doesn't seem to know what it wants. The mechanics make it out to be a collect-a-thon, based on the counter going up instead of down, and enemies dropping a lot of loot. However, getting the hardest medal for collecting money is still absurdly easy and after that there's really no point to continue hunting down pickups.

On the other hand, the ridiculously fast pace of the game, including movement and jumping speed as well as no cap on your firing rate, make this feel like it would be much more at home if speed were the primary goal of the game. And the game is much, MUCH more fun to play this way! Unfortunately, the one time-based achievement is based on the completion time of the entire game and feels tacked on.

What this game really needs is a more robust scoring system, and a level selection screen so players can practice individual levels. You could probably mix the collect-a-thon and speedrun playstyles by having some kind of ranking system that requires a certain score AND completion under a certain time, but whatever your preference is, I really do think this game could have played to its strengths better.

The graphics are decent but it's the smoothness of how everything feels that really steals the show. The music REALLY gets your adrenaline going and feeds more into that speedrun mindset.

Simple concept with perhaps a somewhat misguided execution, but even that one speedrun achievement is enough to bring out the potential this game has.

Just-a-ng-dummy responds:

Under 15 days I didn't really think much about this kind of stuff. You listed a lot of great ideas, mostly the speedrunning potential and I want to implement them after voting ends. I think misguided execution happens a lot of Game Jam Games. Hopefully I'll improve on this game in later updates

Thank you for the review Kwing!

[Pengu's Bubble Gun]

I got to 2412 before I got bored and called it quits.

It's a pretty faithful recreation of a bubble shooter. Everything more or less feels the way it should and the Pong minigame was unexpected but worked surprisingly well. As others have mentioned there is the bug with rows spawning incorrectly, though this isn't game-breaking.

The biggest thing this game is missing is some kind of difficulty curve. The rows moving down should happen more often as the game progresses, or perhaps the number of colors should increase.

STANNco responds:

my plan was to have each level introduce more elements/make it more difficult, but i was crunched for time. i will add these things later tho! ( :

[Danger Creek]

While I'm not a huge fan of pixel art, I will admit the execution on this is very well done, and the music is a real jam also.

Gameplay-wise, I'm not sure I really "get" this game. Sure, I can aim and shoot, and I got all the achievements on my first playthrough, but a lot of important detail feels obscured from the player. Does selecting the same powerup twice do anything? What exactly is my rate of fire?

Very small QoL improvements such as showing bullets at the top instead of a text number to indicate how many shots you have left, giving some indication of what your current weapons are as your arsenal grows, or having some visual indicator to show when you can fire again, would make the player feel a lot more in control of the experience. Without any indication of reload speed it can feel very clumsy to click on the screen too soon and see absolutely nothing happen.

Last, I really wanted the difficulty to feel a bit more interesting than just having a greater quantity of beefier and faster enemies. Enemies that zigzag back and forth and are hard to hit, or other kinds of patterns would really help make this feel like there was more technique instead of simply mashing your finger wherever you see enemies.

Frosty responds:

Ty for the review, ill keep all that in mind!!