Kwing's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[ONE BTN BOSSES]

I've actually been looking for games kind of like this.

This seemed impossible (I kept dying at the boss attack where the entire screen fills up with the attack) until I realized that not pressing the button would cause the ship's attack speed to increase, at which point the game became a lot easier and better designed. I like the idea of trying to have minimalistic input, both as a game and as a player - doing nothing in order to attack reminds me a lot of Archero.

The biggest issue with this game is that the boss' attacks aren't telegraphed well enough. Sure, you get a warning, but the rotating beams begin rotating at full speed, rather than accelerating (I have no idea why this is, since the beams slowly decelerate.) Normally this wouldn't be an issue, except that the player has no idea whether or not the rods are going to move clockwise or counter-clockwise, which means they sometimes have basically no time to change directions.

Similarly, the big red attacks that are transparent don't give you a good idea of how much time you have until they activate. This is usually not a big deal since you simply get out of the damage zone as quickly as possible, but it can be a bit annoying. More importantly, some of the largest area attacks still seem to give you the same latency before the attack as attacks with a smaller area of effect. In some cases it feels like I simply didn't have time to get out of the way.

If the design of the game is to force the player to play as aggressively as possible so as to finish off the boss before it becomes unbeatable, I think this game is fairly well-balanced. However, I still think that the late-game attacks should be easier to dodge.

As far as suggestions, it would be cool if there were obstacles or pickups that could appear along the player's path. For instance, you could have some kind of obstacle that stays in one place and damages the player, but can be disarmed by approaching from one side. Alternatively, you could have powerups that may appear on the circle. Either way, incentivizing the player to do things that aren't only related to avoiding attacks could give the game some more risk and reward mechanics, as well as allowing the player to express some autonomy beyond just dodging.

Regarding the alternate control scheme, I'm not a fan of the boosting ability. The attacks require you to boost so frequently that you run out of fuel and are forced to take damage. Not being able to change directions takes way too much control away from the player.

If you're just playing around with different kinds of ideas, I have a game called Chernobyl which has a 1-button control scheme that you might find interesting - the player has the ability to navigate the entire 2D space, rather than simply changing direction as is the case here.

Some good potential here, but I think you were right to get a second opinion before going ahead with a full game.

[The Facility]

It plays decent, but it is quite boring. The dialogue reminds me a lot of World's Hardest Game, although the add-an-obstacle level design feels more reminiscent of This is the Only Level. All in all the design feels kind of derivative, which isn't in and of itself bad except that the difficulty only really increases once, and it's when the turret is added.

My suggestion for this game would be to have fewer levels, but make the difficulty increase significantly with each one. More obstacles would probably be good too, especially if you had moving blocks and turrets in multiple directions.

Still giving a decent score because for all its flaws and simplicity it actually is quite fun tot play.

[Newgrounds Snowboarding]

For as cute as this looks (and as nostalgic as it is to see Kerrigan after LegendaryFrog has been MIA for so long,) it's just not that fun to play. The different tricks are identical gameplay-wise, as they take the same amount of time to execute, and most importantly you don't bail if you're doing a trick when you land. This makes the game extremely low stakes, as you pretty much can't lose unless you attempt flips.

Some suggestions:

- Basic game balancing would dictate that each of the tricks has a start and end lag, with the slower tricks having the greatest point payout, such that you execute (and finish) a trick BEFORE landing, otherwise you bail. The size of the jump would then determine when to use each of these tricks.
- Make linked tricks multiplicative rather than additive to incentivize players to take the risk of chaining tricks back to back. Show a timer for how long the player has until their combo runs out, and don't let the player do two of the same trick consecutively (otherwise the player will use the fastest trick repeatedly to get an infinite combo.)
- A bounty system where the game asks the player to perform a combo with several specific tricks in it would also help add a sense of tension to the game.
- Make the camera zoom out, especially when the player becomes airborne, so that the player can more accurately assess how much hangtime they're going to get.
- Make the slope only have a finite distance, so that the player is incentivized to take more risks in order to achieve a high score. If the slope is infinite, the best way to get a high score is to take no risks at all.

As for things not related to the game balance, I noticed a glitch where the game didn't recognize that I had already purchased some characters, asking me to buy ALL of the characters with money I didn't have and thus making the game impossible to play. The characters, while well-drawn, all play identically to one another. The game itself has a pretty low framerate and the slow animations only exacerbate a feeling of slowness to a game that should be anything but. Last, the controls are a bit too responsive and make this feel more like a platformer than a snowboarding game. The jump specifically weirds me out, I think holding and releasing to jump higher might make more sense.

MSGhero responds:

Thanks for the feedback. We would probably need about 5x the time we had to implement these things, but it's still valid. Though, the framerate is 60 fps, so you're probably experiencing something you think is the framerate.

[Roguebot Rumble]

I can tell this is an ambitious project, but there are a lot of shortcomings here. I'll start with the bad news first.

For as cool as the idea is, the gameplay just doesn't feel very focused. The fact that you're ONLY playing user-created levels makes the game feel directionless, and often just creates a bad experience since there's no quality control (on that note, most of the levels feel the same.) Unlocking combos may incentivize the player to continue playing, but these typically don't influence the gameplay much and mostly just look cool. I also don't understand why you have to start a new game to change the difficulty level - does this mean the combos you've unlocked are reset each time? This could have felt a lot nicer if you just had a short, linear campaign before being kicked into the custom levels.

Since enemies aren't really aggressive, much of the gameplay feels like spawn camping or pushing enemies back, so the combo system doesn't really make much of a difference. It's just kind of a hectic shuffle between the points you're defending, with the enemies themselves almost taking a backseat to the game. The underpowered jump that the player gets can also make it very annoying to traverse the map vertically.

On the plus side, the graphics look incredibly clean and the animation specifically is wonderful (I'm always a sucker for smooth frame by frame animation.) I also felt like I was listening to the same song repeatedly on loop, but when I closed the game and listened to the songs individually I was really able to appreciate the length and quality of the soundtrack.

[AshBelt]

The art style here is really breathtaking. The color scheme and animation specifically are incredibly cinematic and captivating, and there's a lot of juice in the transitions and menus to add to that cinematic feel. Combine that with some really intense music and fast-paced gameplay and the overall experience is just really engaging.

The mechanic of having limited attacks by type is a crude way to force people to use both kinds of attacks, but it's effective. Instant death is punishing, but not so bad when the enemies you fight also go down in one hit. However, instant death can also make certain things such as slippery controls or recovery animations frustrating, and this was particularly an issue when I tried to use a melee attack on the bouncing enemy type, only for it to land on my head and kill me without my hit connecting. Similarly, turning and hitting an enemy behind you can be very problematic, especially when you're surrounded on both sides and basically have no choice but to attack in two directions in quick succession (otherwise a bit of foresight could probably save you.)

[Cat Burglar & The Magic Museum]

I remember you posting about this on the forums and playing it before it was officially released. While some work could definitely be done to improve performance (the money particle effects are particularly bad - they should just have an animation where they fade out instead of programatically moving toward the player) the tradeoff is that the graphics also look pretty great.

Similar to my thoughts on the beta version, there's not a ton of strategy here. It's more of a touchy-feely thing where you try and guess how long you've been making noise and err on the side of caution. Security never increases fast enough to be especially punishing if you decide to be overly cautious. What is nice is that you can actually escape security this time! As many people said, in the earlier version you were basically dead once the guard was coming. I'm glad that both gloves and boots have a purpose now.

All in all the simplicity of the gameplay makes this pretty casual and sets a certain ceiling for how engaging it can be, but that doesn't mean it's not enjoyable.

Starblinky responds:

Thanks for the thought out review.

And yes I find some people are put off by the hyper casual nature of the game but that’s understandable.

The game has definitely come a long way.

There is not much optimization for the game so it could lag on older devices unfortunately. Once the jam judging is finished I’ll upload a new version with a bunch of improvements.

Thanks again 🙏

[The Flash Flood 2021]

The voice acting for this is hilarious. Pretty simple in every other respect - the sprites aren't especially detailed and there's very little gameplay to speak of.

I did find saving the people to be a bit annoying due to how small the clicking area was. I assume that's the point, but lack of checkpoints made it quite frustrating, especially since you still have to wait for the water to fill up the whole screen after saving everything.

Cyberdevil responds:

You're a tough critic Kwing. :) Simple sprites yes, suppose most of the drawing time actually went into the text here, and details you barely notice like the hundreds of minuscule bubbles as the water floods or the stars on the last level. But would definitely have been more detailed if I'd started this earlier/had more levels/probably have opted for checkpoints then.

Regarding the limited level count, maybe you'd be intrigued to know each item you click is actually a button within a unique MC with a runtime that syncs to the rising water level, and either directs to the game over screen on root after a certain frame count or to the last frame in the MC with a stop statement if you click it. The whole game's made with very basic goto/play/stop functionality. Would've probably had time for a few more if my coding skills were a bit more suited for this type of stuff, but in a way I do like figuring out workarounds like this with the most basic prerequisite programming knowledge that allow for games that probably seem at least a bit more advanced than they really are; paradoxically enough are maybe really unexpectedly complex because of said workarounds. And that's the nature of Flash I feel; why it's always been so awesome! :) Anyone can really do anything. No heavy skills required as long as you get creative with it. The optimal blend between game and animation-based functionality, where you can find shortcuts via the latter to make things seem more like the former, or whatever it is you strive to do.

Anyway you do provide fair critique. Waiting for the water to reach the top gets a bit slow when you're playing just to get back to the final level, could've maybe added a counter that each item adds to, and then sped up the water thing when it reached a certain amount hmm... will try that next time. Thanks for feedback; play!

['Brain-Toasting Dungeon']

It took all of about 2 seconds for me to recognize you as one of the guys that got really far into the animation deathmatch several years back. You really do have a trademark style.

Given that you're an animator by trade, it's no surprise that's the high point of this game. Everything is visually stunning. The game itself is pretty simple and the bad endings are extremely short, but if you enjoy it as an animation rather than a game, there's really not much to complain about.

Cute, fun, simple, short. Not a ton of replay value but it doesn't overstay its welcome.

Butzbo responds:

Wooow that's right!!, the classic NATA tournaments!!
Yeah part of me wanted to make some more elaborated endings, and even more branching routes, but ended up lowering the scope to finish well in time hahah.
thanks Kwing!!

[FAST FOOD FUNKIN']

Damn, if I'd known you were making this I would have been happy to throw down a verse for the soundtrack! The instrumental is fantastic. The rapping is a mixed bag but it's not bad. There's not much art but what I do see is quite nice.

The concept is simple but not bad. The swiping makes it pretty clear this was designed with mobile in mind. The fact that the arrows go down instead of up makes me think it would have been better to have ASDF as the desktop controls. Having played DDR for years my eyes are trained to recognize arrows when they're going up, but I think anyone would be able to handle the patterns if the linear pattern represented four keys that were also laid down in a linear order. The other obvious change would be for some button that takes the next order if you're on desktop that doesn't involve swiping such as the spacebar (I lost several arrows reaching for my mouse when I saw "swipe" on the screen.)

Unfortunately the issue that I really can't get past is that the arrows are straight up broken. The timing seems to be off, but even experimenting with hitting them early or late, I found the process of hitting them to be extremely inconsistent. I'm not sure what went wrong here but a fix is definitely necessary before this is really playable.

BrandyBuizel responds:

The game is designed for mobile but fully playable on the keyboard alone. I added your suggestion about using the ASDF keys, but in order to keep WASD for some players I instead made the use of the 1234 number keys work in the place of ASDF. Additionally you've always been able to use the right arrow key to swipe instead of reaching for the mouse, but that was unclear so I modified the UI to reflect that as an option! Lastly, the key presses/hit registration is much more generous to the player now so I hope you'll come back and try experiencing the full song :)

I regrettably had to rush publishing the game to make it in as part of the Flash Forward Jam, but I've spent the last few days cleaning up the game to be in a more fun/complete form so please enjoy!

[Diaphanous 0]

I nearly beat level 5, but when I got the jewel on the far left and couldn't get back to the chest I had to quit. This game is just too damn hard.

The mechanics feel a lot like a vertical Meat Boy. Jumping and stomping are extremely fast, as opposed to MB's super fast horizontal movement. This gets really interesting with the relatively slow falling speed, as a LOT can happen while you're airborne and this makes sticking landings especially difficult. I sometimes noticed I landed on people but still hit the spikes anyway. Very annoying.

I would highly recommend putting in some moderately difficult levels between 2 and 3, even on difficult games you never see difficulty ramp up this quickly.

Some other suggestions: Don't restart the music when the player dies. It happens too much and players will never hear more than the first 10 seconds of any given song. Give the spikes a bit more glow/contrast with the rest of the level. You can play these levels by instinct but everyone else has to use peripheral vision, so do what you can to make that part easier for us. I also think jumps where you have to wait for certain obstacles to go in and out of phase should be changed so that the window of opportunity happens with each cycle of animation. Waiting for two obstacles to go into phase and missing the jump anyway is probably one of the most frustrating things you can experience in this game.

The graphics are interesting (especially the psychedelic effects) but ultimately pretty basic. Though for something this challenging where you stare at the same things for a long time, it might be nice to have something even simpler, or at least just more high contrast (getting back into what I said about the spikes.)

All in all the game is fun and brutally difficult, but eels more difficult than rewarding, especially as there's no real downtime where you can take some time to breathe between the hardest parts.

EDIT: So I decided to give this another go and got to level VI. I've collected as many gems as I could see (one on far left, two in the small jumps on the right, two in the big jumps on the right) and it's still saying I need one more gem. I restarted the game and my save file was deleted so I got sent back to level 1. Some kind of bug?

HapPie responds:

Thanks a lot for the review, music restarting was a bug and now is fixed, thanks for pointing that out. I´ll look into making levels less frustrating in general as well.