Kwing's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Bird On Bird]

This is the first puzzle platformer I've played in a LONG time that felt like a good organic mix of ACTUAL puzzles, ACTUAL platforming, and a concept that wasn't overly contrived.

The concept of "you can jump an extra time for every chicken you have" is intuitive and immediately understandable, and the way that each stacked chicken increases the size of your hitbox makes the game difficult in a way that feels logical and fair. The extra mechanics (such as the buttons or spiky chickens) add a bit of depth to the gameplay, but from a development standpoint what I like is that you don't use them to bloat the game with logic puzzles; virtually all of the logic required to beat the game deals with the same stacking logic that the core mechanics are built on.

The graphics and music are cute (and I don't want to take anything away from your collaborators) but the concept and execution really stand front and center.

I do have a few criticisms:

One, the main "level select" area is nice, but toward the end of the game it can be frustrating running around trying to locate the last few levels you need feathers from. Having a map (just for this area) would have been helpful for someone looking to get those last couple ones.

Two, the game can glitch a bit. If you fall a long distance while pressed against a wall, you fall through the floor. I noticed a chicken do this once or twice as well.

Three, the game's performance can get a bit shaky. Lowering the quality helps a lot with this.

Starblinky responds:

Thanks so much for the review!
Really appreciate the great feedback (and compliments)

And yeaa.. there's an issue with being able to fall through the ground. I discovered it like a few weeks before launch and with the amount of spaghetti I coded this game with I really don't think that will ever get fixed. At least it's not too bad.

A map would be a cool idea, I agree it might be a bit frustrating to have to find all the feathers you missed..

Thanks :)

[Portal Defenders: Tower Defense]

Okay, so last year's games were solid but this is the real deal. This game is fantastic.

I was a big fan of the creative liberties taken as far as tower defenses go. Only a couple places to put towers, only three types of towers, and one of them requires the player to micromanage where its troops move. These creative choices are weird and unusual but ultimately make the game a lot more interesting.

I found pairing the cannon with tankmen worked well at the beginning; tankmen forced enemies to stop, so the splash damage from the cannon could be maximized. Toward the end, as vehicles and flying enemies became more prevalent, I found myself using the turrets more. I do wish the turrets and cannon had more distinct differences, as by the end of the game, once the tankmen became less useful, they seemed very similar.

I find a lot of what makes the game remain interesting toward the end isn't so much that it becomes harder so much as the change in strategy relies on the expectations built through previous levels. For instance, I beat the third to last level using only turrets, which from an outside perspective is a stupidly simple strategy, but becomes unintuitive within the context of previous levels requiring you to use the tankmen a lot. This hampers replayability a lot. Another balance-related issue is that the last few levels actually aren't that difficult; most of the excitement comes from the power creep on both sides as your fully upgraded towers bash away at huge damage sponges (oddly enough I was able to kill Bizarro Tom really, really fast.)

Everything outside of the mechanics is basically flawless. The graphics, animation, voices, music, etc. all look great. The voices sometimes repeat just a bit too often, but in terms of style and presentation this game looks incredibly polished and the fact that this exact game could hypothetically have been made in 2005 (during XGen Studios' golden age if that puts things into perspective) is mind-blowing.

9/10 for overall quality, enjoyability, and execution, -1 for some balance issues and lack of replayability.

BoMToons responds:

Great review, and I agree with every point. Thank you for diving in to that depth! I agree that we do a 180 on the player with expectations (basically a lot of the development was nerfing how powerful the Tankmen are and introducing enemies that nullify their advantage).

Re: replay-ability, it's kind of our team's style to give you an intense, one-time, story arc in our games and we sacrifice some of that replay-ability to drive home those twists and turns/surprises on the first play through (speaking of which I'm glad you got the idea loud and clear of the "escalating power war"). It's a trade-off, but we don't pretend this is more than a web-game made for a game jam... if we were ever to expand this concept for a bigger game, I think we'd massage the mechanics you mentioned quite a bit (in addition, making upgrades more unique and having upgrades branch your tower specialties).

I'm glad you realize and appreciate that this was built with pre-2009 era tech (AS2) It even runs super smooth on most mobile devices...

[Beat Drill Galaxy]

This is pretty solid, and when you compare this to stuff like Ice or Burn the Earth it's clear this is several giant leaps ahead of the kind of stuff you've done before.

The menu, UI, and general vector graphic style all look immaculate. The physics are weird but it's interesting that each level has its own gimmick to keep things interesting. No one would ever know pixel art was your strong suit from looking at this.

The music isn't bad, but it really doesn't fit for a rhythm game. Your looping synths are working against you here; they work great when the game isn't centered around the music itself, but when the dynamics of the song determine the action in-game, more progression and complexity are going to be what give the game its complexity as well.

Obviously there are going to be sacrifices made with the deadline of a Game Jam breathing down your neck but there are a couple things I think would have been easy enough to implement without being too difficult.

The objects on screen should have different colors. This would be the easiest way to tell them apart while playing and really doesn't take more than about 30 seconds of work to change. Sound effects could also be a nice touch (with the option to toggle on and off.) The songs are a bit too long, and especially for easier songs it can be kind of boring to sit through them. Not having a fail state and not being able to see the score during a song takes any sense of tension away. Last, this is a simple enough game that you totally could have added a joystick or some other way to control the game on mobile.

Last note about the general design is that shorter, harder songs (and a fail state) would provide greater encouragement for the player to redo levels and try to perform better.

ShinsukeIto responds:

Thanks for the review Kwing!

Really appreciate the game design feedback. I agree with all the things you've noted here - especially shortening the tracks. I underestimated the impact of level design when making the tracks and building the levels out, and is one of the glaring issues I have with the game.

I did learn a lot from making this though. And if I were to update this (or make an improved version) I might look at getting you to play test it!

[-TRAPPED-]

I can't believe I never reviewed this.

The biggest pull of this is the voice acting, honestly. The art and puzzles are solid but nothing special for their time and this is pretty short, but a point and click with an actual story does stand out a bit.

The shortness really can't be overlooked though. This, and the content of Pursuit really belong in the same game.

[AN Escape Series #5]

I really liked this one. The only thing I got stuck on was not looking closely enough to find the third jumper, and having to look up the Fahrenheit conversion. I think putting the conversion table somewhere in-game would have been a nice way to keep the experience self-contained within the game.

Really cool concept and good puzzles too.

[Escape from Crystal Lake]

Solid game. I like the way the map is implemented and the logic puzzles are simple enough and make sense, but I dislike that the buttons you click on are so small. It also doesn't help that you can't make the game full-screen to make the buttons larger.

As far as positives, the game is drawn a lot better than your previous games and the way Jason moves is hilarious (it looks like he's dancing!)

[AN Escape Series #2]

This was a lot easier than the first game. I was able to finish this in about 6.5 minutes the first time, 1.5 minutes the second time. The graphics are basic and the game is short, but it's really incredible how well this holds up 15 years after the fact.

I dislike that the cursor is hidden, and it would be nice if the areas you click on to face a different direction were not invisible, but other than that this is a really tightly knit (if short) experience.

[The Last Piece of Cake DX]

I remember playing this before the redesign and finding it hilarious. I always liked how smooth the gameplay was as well as the voice acting.

Unfortunately the gameplay could really use work. You can never really predict when the dad is going to swing at you, and even the gun attack can be tanked if you just keep attacking. The scrolling background is cool but you never actually need to avoid any attacks in order to win.

A stamina gauge, heavy attack, telegraphed punches, and the gun attack dealing more damage could all have made this feel like a fully fleshed out experience.

Still funny and especially impressive for the time it was made.

[Rogue and Defiance [beta 5]]

It's not bad, but I found the pacing of this game to be off. The game reminds me a lot of Pixel Dungeon, but one big difference in that game is that each individual action (attacking and moving) pushes the clock forward one tick, and enemies respond automatically. Giving a player a full turn allowing for several tiles of movement plus an action sounds fine at first, but when you have to wait for enemies to take their turns, the gameplay feels like it slows down to a crawl. Final Fantasy Tactics can kind of get away with this because you have multiple player characters to control, but in this, you spend most of the time waiting for enemies to move, since you have one character and there are many of them.

There's other stuff to talk about, for sure. I never quite got the knack of which upgrades were the best to pick, and the varied enemy attacks made it pretty challenging to figure out how to minimize your incoming sources of damage while taking down enemies, but something about these felt off, too. I think introducing enemy types and upgrades gradually would help the player get familiar with the mechanics a lot better.

With a lot of roguelikes I get the impression that I'm building incremental mastery for a game that's fairly complex, but here I get the sense that I'm really struggling to grasp something that's actually not that hard, nd I think guidance (or lack thereof) is a big reason for that. At the end of the day, it feels like so much of your success depends on you figuring out the attack range of the enemies, remembering exactly how many hits it takes to kill them, and maybe knowing when to use a potion, but a lot of the deeper strategies also feel like they might be missing. Anything that isn't a health or mana potion looks to be pretty rare, so it's really hard to learn how to use them or to pay them much mind.

My suggestion is to make the core mechanics a bit friendlier, and the less common items in the game more accessible, so that the player spends less time floundering around on the basics and can actually get to the deeper parts of the game.

[Math Push]

The difficulty on this ramps up WAY faster than I was expecting. The concept feels kind of dumb at first but once it gets harder it suddenly feels like a puzzle game is supposed to.

I'd like to see a move counter, and maybe some more open-ended levels with multiple solutions. Seeing if you could find a better solution when you already have one would give this a lot of replay value.