Kwing's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[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.

[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.