Kwing's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[InvasionLab]

It's a fun concept, but there are a lot of small nitpicks that could have made this way better.

The elephant in the room is the graphics, which look pretty rough. The handwritten style is cool, but putting more detail or even just neatness into the hand-written (mouse-written?) text would have been really nice. The gun looks unnecessarily primitive (even the enemies have more detail) and it just looks weird how it's floating in one place and how enemies teleport onto the screen (adjusting opacity to make enemies fade in, or having them come in from off-screen like the bugs that crawl down from the top would look a little cleaner.)

The upgrades are nice, but the early game ones are pretty obvious - upgrade the gun because you'll be using it for every enemy type except the tank, which is best taken care of with the rock but can be significantly damaged by the mud and shotgun as well.

Gameplay-wise, the worst issue is that the special weapons aren't clear with when the cooldown has expired. Often I pressed a button when the graphic for the powerup showed it was usable, only for nothing to happen. Wait a few seconds, and the weapon eventually triggers upon a button press. Surely you could fix this? A secondary issue is how weird it is that an enemy just being present causes the invasion percentage to rise. It makes more sense to specifically defend something rather than killing whatever you see in any order.

Last note is that it wouldn't be hard to make this phone-compatible. Just have the weapons triggered by bigger buttons at the top of the screen; the mud and rock could be one tap to select and one tap to aim. Let the gun auto-fire and boom, there's no reason why you would need to play this on desktop.

If you're concerned about judging/placement there's more than enough time for you to fix all of these little problems by the time the deadline rolls around.

[Type Help]

I really wanted to like this, but it's just too obscure. The first room with the towel and chamber pot are nice and feel like a text adventure should, but the demon riddle is annoying, as it's unclear that it's even a riddle in the first place - I spent a lot of time searching other rooms for some kind of solution and found nothing. I understand the logic, but it just doesn't feel like good design.

The apple is where things completely fall apart. The fact that the player can turn spoilers on, ignore a warning and break the game seems to imply a "right" way to beat the game, without tampering too much with the commands given to you. Yet the way the apple is obtained still requires you to manually edit the game itself. The line between solving puzzles and breaking the game gets too fuzzy here, and while the logic of this is kind of explained, it's never demonstrated in a way that would make it user-friendly, nor does it really feel fun to actually accomplish.

Then after you finally get past these two awful sections of the game, barely anything happens before the game itself ends. Just like that? No real story, and no puzzles between the super obvious bits of the start and finish and the two horribly impossible puzzles in between? The game requires a lot of investment to understand and is so wholly unrewarding that it just doesn't feel like it's worth it.

If anything, this game (particularly the apple puzzle) feels like a weird tutorial for understanding how the story builder feature works, but doesn't provide enough substance for me to have faith that user-generated games would be any better.

Would also be nice if pressing up allowed you to look at past commands similar to a real terminal.

BoMToons responds:

Yes, it's mostly a tutorial for learning the editor. That's the point, but I do understand how obscure it is, so I'm not disagreeing with your comments, mostly agreeing.

The first version of the game hid the things now marked as "spoilers" completely, but a reviewer complained about that fact and said it contradicted the "open-ness" of the game's concept. So, I compromised and put in the spoiler stuff... I do see how it's a bit contradictory now though :-/

The demon name puzzle is very obscure, I know, but I liked it too much and felt too clever to exclude it... but a lot hinges on it, so... I left it :-)

I agree about the up command... how could that be implemented and keep the page scrolling/paging feature though? (I don't want to code a scroll bar, and Ruffle doesn't support Flash's native components)

[3D Join the Dots]

One of the few early submissions I've seen that actually models 3D correctly. I'm not sure what kind of use cases there are for this in terms of a full-fledged game since these wireframes don't have textures, collisions, etc. but this looks nice and is quite impressive for its time.

Would be nice if the dots you click on were a bit bigger.

[The Big Red Button]

Wow, I had no idea this was originally on Newgrounds, though I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. What to say... There's really not much of a game here, but that's also kind of the point, as is the simplicity, the humor being decent but not fantastic, and basically just all of this.

Given the simple ingredients, I don't know what more you could really do here. The colored buttons, multiple buttons, and even the moving one all make this a bit more interesting, but making something genuinely difficult almost doesn't feel like it would fit with the theme of the narrator actually being quite bad at getting you to stop clicking.

Giving this an 8/10 but it really is a classic.

[Pandemic II]

For as iconic as this game was when it came out, when it comes down to the mechanics, it honestly feels like a bit of a gambling game - one that obscures a lot of critical information from the player.

While playing on "realistic" difficulty, a vaccine was developed and fully deployed within 54 days for a virus with a mortality rate of 0% Hindsight is 2020 (pun not intended) but it shouldn't be hard to figure out that the basic mechanics don't allow players to use their real-world intuition.

There are certain real-world things that are probably too complicated to expect from a game (it doesn't seem as though at-risk populations die off more frequently, as you would expect,) but between the input players receive and the actions they take, the game ends up feeling too obscure. You can read breaking news, but what does it really mean? Knowing how to take advantage of riots, hurricanes, or earthquakes would actually make it so the player could respond to what was happening. However, there's very little the player can actually do. I beat this once using the common technique of laying low as a parasite, but given that this is practically the only way to win it makes other strategies feel basically useless, as well as making the game really slow.

All in all the idea is cool but it's really hard to stay actively engaged. Cool UI and concept make this appealing for a newcomer, but the gameplay isn't deep enough to retain interest.

[Epic Battle Fantasy]

I remembered playing this back in the day but never beat it. After seeing EBF5 in the portal, I decided I didn't have time for a 30 hour game and decided I'd give this another go instead.

It's decent, but the gameplay is a bit drawn out and monotonous. Not knowing the type of an enemy except based on the damage you deal is a bit annoying, and I found many of the items to be significantly more important than others while in the shop (potions, ethers, and revives are by far the most important, and ethers get used the most.)

I liked the idea of balancing healing and damage with Goku at the end (the fact that Judgment heals you makes this interesting, as your mage might heal the swordsman, but is better off using Judgment to heal herself.) However, aside from that, the game doesn't have a ton of strategy to it, and not knowing how long until you reach the shop or how long each wave lasts makes the game feel longer than it otherwise would.

matt-likes-swords responds:

Yeah, if you only play the oldest game, you're gonna get an outdated experience.

[Light Puzzles]

For as obvious as the first few puzzles were (the pause after you solve a problem seems just a tiny bit longer than it should and makes the first handful of levels a bit annoying,) the level design here ended up being a very pleasant surprise. Right around level 18 I started having fun, and when levels started having 3+ light sources I actually had to start thinking.

There's a lot of fairly obvious puzzle elements here, with the typical systems of solving them; mutual exclusion, backtracking, etc. but a few of them (typically ones that involved multiple light sources sharing a mirror) were really clever. I also really liked that the light beams were nice and generous, making it so that it almost never felt like you were finessing a pixel-perfect solution even after figuring out what you were supposed to do (Nodes had this issue and it could be a real pain.) The beam-splitting levels at the end drifted into this territory a little bit.

It was a bit annoying to have to go back to easy levels once you started exploring the "one source hits multiple targets" mechanics. In fact, it might have been good if you'd formally divided these levels into sets (1 source 1 target, 2 sources 2 targets, 1 source 2 targets, split the beam, etc.) so that the ordering of the levels actually made sense.

A lot of the puzzles that had an obvious partial solution also ended up being annoyingly easy. It's pretty common for puzzle games to throw in "bait" to make players try wrong solutions, but your bait is too obvious.

The later levels (40ish) can end up being a bit overwhelming due to the raw search space of the problem, though the all-45-degree mirror puzzles struck me as more tedious than anything. It felt like I was solving a maze, which was a pretty sharp contrast compared to the earlier ones. Toward the very end (50-55) the puzzles got so complex that I really didn't understand what I did even after I solved them. Being able to pause and look over my own work would have been kind of nice (especially since I finished several while still having mirrors left over.)

It does strike me as a bit odd is that the mirrors are stuck in their orientation. For the sake of the puzzles it makes sense, but I wish there was some in-game explanation for why you're not allowed to rotate them yourself.

I also wasn't a fan of how the same graphical elements are reused for every level. It wouldn't be asking for much to add just a little bit of variety. Similarly, the targets you hit look kind of lame. Plus, Unity affords you so many cool tools when it comes to shaders and textures, why didn't you just use some easy presets to make something look a bit fancier?

Some definite design flaws but overall a really good game. I usually don't stick with puzzle games long enough to finish them but this one was worth it.

[Viewpoint - A Game of Perspective]

Very strong Echochrome vibes here as far as the "2D player in 3D space" shtick goes. I struggled a lot earlier on until I realized you could click and drag to adjust the angle - that helped a lot with respect to having spatial awareness of the level layout. After that it ends up being surprisingly similar to a sliding puzzle in that the player can move an arbitrary number of tiles along any axis provided that said axis is facing the camera.

Aside from the blue blocks it can sometimes feel weird when this happens; for instance, it seems like the player will snap to the surface closest to the camera, but it just feels so weird to see it happen, even if the logic is internally consistent. It means the game tends to follow its own logic (which is better than no logic at all, but still a bit more frustrating than being able to use your own intuition.) Actually, I'm not sure this IS how snapping works; on 16 I tried to move the player onto the green tile, only for the player to stay on its own axis even though the green tile was closer to the camera. Maybe the player only snaps if the tile it's moving to would be invalid along its current axis? I really wish the snapping were a bit more intuitive.

It would be nice if there were a compass and "this side up" indicator on the side of the screen. There were times when I wondered why I couldn't move a certain way until I realized I was telling the player either to walk off a ledge or climb a vertical surface.

[Demonic Defence 2]

I remember looking for this game back when I was in middle school after seeing the hit success of Demonic Defense 3, but it wasn't on most of the big game sites at the time. When I finally found it then (and now) I quickly realized why.

The clicking mechanic really doesn't work here. The hitboxes of the things you're fighting is too small, and your inability to fling enemies backward makes the game unnecessarily hard. Mashing the mouse over and over just doesn't feel that fun. Graphics are alright for what they are but it just doesn't feel like something you would want to play long enough to unlock endgame things like Nuke.

[Magirune]

Honestly this is pretty boring. Aside from the achievements, there's really no reason to avoid dying, and the fact that all enemies give 1 XP regardless of difficulty really breaks the game. Perfect example is that you can spam up and down between floors 20 and 21 and if you can kill that enemy without taking damage, you can farm levels infinitely (there are likely other places where you can do the same thing,) making the whole system kind of broken and also defeating the purpose of potions. Also, even if you're trying to beat the game without dying, you can just use a potion whenever you drop below 50% health. There's no strategy whatsoever as to when you should use one.

Once you get past the weird combat mechanics, the game is puzzle and exploration. Navigating 15 floor mazes is a bit confusing and often tedious, but the puzzle elements are decent, even if it's frequently interrupted by level grinding. Once I got the pickaxe (but couldn't figure out where to use it despite seeing "need a pickaxe" messages earlier) I figured it was time to hang it up and be satisfied with the fake ending.

Between the lack of music, balance, and overall sparseness of anything interesting, this game just feels really unfinished.

FluffyLotus responds:

You should try hardcore mode. It removes the 1xp when the enemies are to easy. That's how the game was originally built.