Kwing's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Mini Musou]

The most obvious thing to mention here is the art, which looks absolutely fantastic. The theme is consistent and reminds me a lot of Okami.

The gameplay shows a lot of promise but it feels like it's missing something. The movement and attacking are logical and make sense, and the combo attack feels good to use, but something about the base capture feels off to me. The fact that the main character hits a large area when they attack makes the quantity of enemies irrelevant, so the difficulty doesn't scale the way you might have intended. This is exemplified by the fact that enemies don't really attack - they just kind of bumble around and deal damage when they're close enough.

I found a very dominant strategy was to do a quick sweep of each base from top to bottom, then heal at the home base until 2-3 bases were recaptured before doing another run. This allowed me to pretty quickly unlock all of the character skins, but it felt cheap, and waiting to heal at the home base was kind of boring. What if while you were in the home base, your other bases were converted 3x as fast, but the player also healed 3x as fast? This would keep the game balance the same but also allow the player to spend less time waiting around (this is a 30 second fix - you should definitely have time to handle it before the due date tomorrow!)

One strange thing that happened was that while I was doing a sweep, enemies swarmed the home base and gave me a game over, even though they hadn't captured all of the bases. Your instructions imply that you have to lose all of the bases before they attack the home base. Even if this isn't the case, I do think some kind of warning or indicator should pop up showing that your home base is under attack, or even just show a health bar for your home base on the UI at all times, because it was very frustrating to lose without even realizing it was happening until after the fact.

cheesycoke responds:

Wow thank you so much for all of the detailed feedback and suggestions!!! I can't stress enough how much I appreciate it, I wasn't planning on making any changes before the end of the jam but I pushed an update with some stuff based on your suggestions

For the part about the quantity of enemies not mattering too much, I will say that's sort of a fact of the gameplay style I'm trying to implement here. The number of enemies is more about spectacle while the difficulty stems from having to jump around to make sure they don't invade your shit. I did try to remedy this a bit, though, so now enemies in keeps spawn in a slightly wider area to hopefully make it more difficult to hit all at once.

The healing thing, I implemented your changes almost entirely and I think it's a great idea to help keep things a bit faster! I did, however, make it so capturing is tripled while healing is only doubled, just because I want healing to be a very risky move (especially when the enemies are, frankly, pretty stupid already so I'd rather players avoid damage in the first place)

Also ohh this last part is the result of an oversight with the enemy ai! So they do only choose to target home base if all the keeps are stolen, but there's nothing to tell them to stop targeting it if the player takes a keep back (unless they get bored), if that makes sense. I do, however, like the way this encourages heading back home instead of sticking to defending keeps all the time, so I did what you suggested and made the home health bar part of the UI.

Thank you again for the kind words and the fantastic ideas!!

[Lose Your Money!]

The character design looks nice, but that's honestly about it. The gameplay is frustrating and slow, especially because of how little the player is really aware of. It took a while to figure out that winning and losing ALWAYS happened in increments of $50.

The games themselves are too simple. RPS and the slot machine at least make sense because those games are as simple as they appear, but a bit of an animation showing the results of the game would be nice. Blackjack makes very little sense because you can't actually see what your cards are before selecting "hit me" or "stand." I also dislike that you default back to "rock paper scissors" when you're finished with a game.

The biggest issue is that there's no real strategy to speak of, or if there is, it's a single best strategy that is originally obscured from the player. I see that RPS is fast but has a 50/50 chance of winning, I see that the slots are slower but seem to make you lose money a bit more consistently, but among all three games one of them is going to have a highest chance to lose and once the player figures that out all they have to do is play that every time.

[Tinder Mobile NG]

It's a solid concept and the art is generally high quality, but something falls flat in execution. The UI is in pretty rough shape, and showing the finger and phone is unnecessary when the concept of the Game Jam is that this is already going to be on a phone. The formatting around the score just looks ugly. The experience also would have been much better if the art had all been a single style.

[Pico "OC" Creator]

Eh, it's okay. I dislike that the toggle buttons only appear when the mouse is over them, and that they have a different style from the rest of the game's art style. Too many of the different loadouts stray so far from Pico's original character that it makes more sense to call this a generic character creator that happens to have Pico as one of the characters. The amount of different options for a character creator feels about average but the UI just feels unpleasant to use.

[Hungry Knight!]

For a Game Jam game, this isn't bad. The instant death mechanic is punishing, but it makes sense in the context of the entire game being beatable within only a couple minutes; if you could take a couple hits before dying, it would be way too easy.

The graphics are cute and the game controls decently, but I do feel like the physics could afford to be a bit snappier, especially when compared to Hollow Knight. The dash feels more like running than dashing, and it would have been interesting if it consumed the hunger gauge rather than being free. It would also be nice if attacks had a bit of knockback, to give the game a sense of impact.

I have two main complaints for this game. First, the camera is too zoomed in. Nearly all of my deaths came from my dashing into an enemy because I needed to move quickly. The fact that this happened far more often than me actually dying to an enemy attack was very annoying.

Second, I dislike how much of the game is blind searching. The mask bosses are scattered randomly around the map and this can make the core gameplay feel very much like you're just wandering. You're not in any real danger if you can keep killing the respawning enemies, but it does drag on a bit when you have no clue where to go. Obviously the game would be too short if you knew exactly where you were going, but I wish there were something to make the moment to moment wandering a bit more interesting.

Gameplay is solid, graphics are great, music is pretty bland. Overall above average as far as Game Jams go.

[Mastermind: World Conqueror]

In all honesty, I wasn't wowed by this. It's ultimately a very easy clicker game. Plot, meeting, execute, repeat. I beat the game pretty easily without ever going on any missions other than steal cash and steal science. I was waiting for certain circumstances to necessitate the kidnapping, killing, propaganda, or brainwashing missions, or for there to be some utility to the world map and the bars for each region. The fact that steal science will bring you up the science tree and simply executing the final mission grants you victory makes so many of the other features completely superfluous.

The presentation (both visual and auditory) are fantastic of course.

[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!