Kwing's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Tough Growth]

There's very little here in terms of actual content. The aesthetics aren't bad (though they are a bit on the flashy side, with lots of effects and graphics that aren't much more complex than squares,) but I think the biggest issue is the concept to begin with.

At its core, this game is a mix of bullet hell and a mouse maze, with neither being terribly new or groundbreaking concepts. Too often is it possible to cheat by moving the mouse off-screen. More annoyingly, the stages in which the large player box makes it hard to dodge feels more gimmicky than difficult. Similarly, the last area of the game (where you're sent back a level for failing) feels more gimmicky than anything, as the levels are generally easy than the ones previous.

I would have liked to see some more unique obstacles, some deeper level of strategy, or at least some other way for the player to interact other than dodging things.

Jaswir responds:

I wonder, what game would you consider groundbreaking?
Also this game was designed to be a mix of bullet hell and feed and grow.
I do not know any other games that combine bullet hell with feed and grow.

[Rock Bottom]

I'm not sure I see the appeal here. The music and graphics are pretty bland, with the only really attractive element being the color scheme which sets the tone quite nicely.

There are a handful of issues with the rest of it. The dialogue has numerous translation errors, making it come across as awkward more often than not. More than that, the game aspect of this feels inorganic and distracting. The way the brother slaloms up and down is weird. If you get too far behind, both of you fall off the screen. The arrows on the road give you some reason to move up and down, but just feel out of place in a submission like this. The grabbing mechanic also feels kind of weird, especially since you only ever really do it once, and the whole concept of chasing a guy down in the middle of an endless road just doesn't feel realistic. Forward movement feels useless because you never need to go any other direction. The repeating houses get old fast. Need I say more?

Ultimately this comes across as a rather uninspired proof of concept. I see the need for these types of games to exist, but the execution here just felt weird. In your defense, content like this is hard to make right. Some folks at MIT tried (and failed) at exactly this task when they made Elude, so it honestly would have been more surprising to see a game do this correctly. Either way, this game just didn't wow me.

bioszard responds:

Thanks for your feedback, my friend. I'll really think about this issues you brought here.

My goal in this game in this game was just to show that many times we tell things to depressed people that just not help the situation. In my humble opinion, we must just welcome depressed people, making them feel confortable, not encouraging, not judging nor creating expectations based on their own will.

Besides that, I was forced to think about and implement (almos alone) 2 different game genres within 72h, for LD41 (I'm not justifying my fauls, just telling the develop context). You are completly right, my translations skills are not that good, I'll try to improve that. Thanks for your time.

[Eggys Big Adventure]

I played this back on mobile and was impressed with the overall smoothness and playability of the game. There are some minor flaws of course - reused graphics, and some weird physics when standing on moving platforms - but for the most part the game feels comfortable. While it's good that the game is simple (as the controls on mobile really don't lend themselves to complexity) I would have liked to see a bit more environmental variety - perhaps different kinds of enemies, or platforms that offered more than the basic Unity physics prefabs.

Most of the issues dealing with actual enjoyability stem from level design. A lot of the difficulty is concentrated in the earlier levels, and while you can usually skip particularly hard levels and farm eggs elsewhere, it's still weird that the second half of the game (and bosses) are comparatively easy, especially when the bubble level is downright brutal (and frustrating, since it's so easy to slip off of them.) It would have made sense to make all of the levels somewhat easy, but for the eggs to be put in especially difficult places. On that note, it would have also been nice for collecting all eggs in a level to provide something, even if it were only cosmetic such as player skins.

Overall my biggest disappointment here is that the game feels like a very generic platformer, even though I've known you to come up with some really outstanding original concepts such as Nodes, Draw Play, and Battle Fish. Battle Fish in particular strikes me as a game that could be outstanding on mobile, given its simple control scheme as well as how much more enjoyable it would be in a less laggy platform such as Unity.

EggysGames responds:

Thank you Kwing. You are correct I didn't space out the difficulty on the levels as well as I should have unfortunately. I didn't feel it was that generic, since I havn't made anything with physics like this before.

Thanks for the review.

[Suppressed Demo]

I'm actually making a game with a VERY similar story (three people escaping a fascist country also based on North Korea, lol) and really wanted to play this to see how it compared, but as others have said it's buggy beyond belief. The poor animation, slow walking speed, use of text to speech, and random freezes make this look unpolished in addition to being unplayable.

zephyo responds:

yeah... this was my first game so I kinda sucked at like everything lmao. thanks for your review on my other game btw. Lots of detail and helpful points.

[Simplicity]

It's amazing how faithfully this recreates the old ~2003 Flash game era. The graphics look authentic in a way that's imitated but almost never done right.

This would have been a hell of a game 15 years ago. It's still a decent game now. The puzzles are pretty varied in their difficulty which is good, but the time limit seems unnecessary. Combined with the music, you don't really help the player relax and think and instead you seem to be hurrying them up. Not a good model for a puzzle game.

Other than that there's a lot of things you could have done to make the graphics more impressive. Think about lighting, beveling, texture, etc. Rather than just having text as buttons, put them inside of boxes and give them some level of uniformity. Pick ONE font and stick with it, and unite all of your graphics under one color scheme. The chaotic main menu should have some transparent fill over it to bring the menu items into focus, and what you have makes the green and blue level selection and play screens clash too. The time gauge, mute button, clock, etc. all seem slightly off-center and there's a lot of blank space that seems awkwardly placed.

As far as the game is concerned I think what you have is good. The level design is strong, but some levels really are frustrating. I suppose that's what you want for a puzzle game. Some of the puzzles seem to be out of order in terms of how difficult it is, so perhaps you should have other people tell you how difficult each puzzle is and re-order them so that there's a smoother curve.

garylu1999 responds:

Thanks for your review. Your review is the most helpful one so far and I would definitely use some of these tips for future flash games. Thank you.
By the way, about the difficulty order, I actually did have other people try it, but different people did not agree on which puzzles are harder and the way some of them ordered it seemed odd to me as well.

[Blue Lights #6]

Taking into account the entire series, I feel this episode was not terribly different from the rest, and overall it was underwhelming. The flashbacks were corny and everything that happened was beyond predictable. I did stick it out through every episode, but this was mainly due to the brevity of each episode rather than the quality of the VN. Was I expecting this to be Steins;Gate? No, but I WAS hoping for some element of choice or some plot element with a more serious commitment, either to its dramatic or comedic elements.

Some other minor gripes include the QTEs becoming longer and more tedious, as well as aliens literally stopping if they got close enough to you. Seriously? It also doesn't help that there are several points at which the characters even make note of the intentional vagueness of the plot, which works for an immediate comedic effect but fails to repair a broken story.

Points for decent artwork and a nice UI, but the substance just isn't here.

JackAstral responds:

That's fair enough, it was mainly intended as just a dumb, hyper little thing. I tried to add a little more to it through Rey's character arc - going from someone who runs away, to someone who tries. There's some little tiny bits of depth I think dotted around the narrative, though that defs wasn't the focus.

Thanks for the constructive criticism - I'll look into improving in those aspects going forward :-)

[Unknown]

The game is gorgeous, I'll give it that much. The mechanics are simple but interesting, it's definitely different playing as a human, jumping creature, or blob. The level design is solid and overall this is well-made. I know how game jams are, but it would have been nice to at least have a timer or death counter so there's some reason to replay it if someone were so inclined.

GrimMutilator responds:

Thanks Kwing! Note taken about the death counter. Im very glad you enjoyed it :)

[Manhattan Project]

I have no idea how I beat this before, this game is ridiculously hard. I'm not sure I understand how you can destroy everything and get a x2 multiplier or a x1 multiplier - seems like you're supposed to cause a big ruckus all at once but then keep minor explosions going on afterward? Weird mechanic.

The game is pretty and the sound is well-done but it lags pretty badly as the game progresses, making me think you might be keeping data allocated for things that have spawned.

FrozenFire responds:

Yeah this game was poorly optimize sry

[Fleeing the Complex]

Kind of an interesting choice for the #1 game in the portal right now, though I suppose the lack of difficulty is probably what's responsible for the lack of 0-bombers. The art, animation, and sound design are all pretty good, although there are a few animators out there (Stone, Oxob, Terkoiz, Hyun, etc.) that could have done it better. Most of all I liked that the voice acting was fairly realistic and didn't sound cartoony as tends to be par for the course with this type of game (especially with female characters.) I think the amount of content that remains available after viewing all of the animation is quite impressive, too. And of course the references are bound to draw some attention.

Anyway this is a pretty solid game. I think I would have enjoyed something a little more involved but there's little to complain about.

PuffballsUnited responds:

I agree with everything you said!

[Deterministic Dungeon]

Aside from being able to manipulate the game by timing your clicks, there's really nothing different about this game. I don't feel like this singular idea merits an entire game. It looks cute but ultimately the rolling just becomes a slightly controllable gimmick that slows down the pace of the game considerably. It's also weird how you don't roll for all of the attacks made against you. Anyway, the idea is cute but it just doesn't feel that interesting to me. I was expecting a game with the protagonist being an NPC and the player, being the RNG, decided whether or not to help them. Oh well.

PestoForce responds:

I like your idea for what you were expecting, you should make that game!