Kwing's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[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.

[Powerfox V.3]

For the time this was made, it's nothing short of incredible. Virtually no Flash games from this era had graphics this clean looking, or such flashy animation (the amount of explosions, effects, and weapons is completely insane.)

The biggest issue with this game in my opinion is that behind all the smoke and mirrors there actually isn't a whole lot of content. The weapons are pretty similar to each other and the bosses don't have many different attacks. Moreover, boss attacks aren't telegraphed very well, making it difficult to tell when you're taking damage against Hitler or how to dodge the bonsai's attacks. The game is brutally difficult even on normal, yet doesn't feel fair because it's never entirely clear what mistake you made which led to you taking damage.

[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.)