Kwing's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[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.

[Niner]

This is really good as hypercasual games go. Won't say much about the graphics or sound since they're so plain, but the gameplay is nice. It took me a while to understand that the best strategy is to delay merging numbers and to keep a large pile of them somewhere so that you can add new numbers to a pile, or synthesize a new one if the next number you have to play is one that you don't already have on the board.

Having the game recognize when you reach 9 or attempt to reach 10 would be nice. Right now it feels more like an objective to reach 9, except that the only real effect it has on the gameplay is making it harder (a savvy player would postpone reaching higher numbers for as long as possible.)

I would also like if you could see maybe 2-3 numbers into the future rather than only the one you're about to place. I got a few game overs having to make 50/50 decisions, only to find out that I could have kept going if I had placed a number in the other vacant square.

Last, you could tweak the difficulty of this game by adjusting both the maximum number as well as the size of the board. The difficulty seems appropriate at 4x4 with a max of 9, but you could increase the difficulty by increasing the max number or decreasing the board size, or decrease the difficulty by doing the inverse.

Surprisingly fun game.

[Defend Your Castle !]

Not a ton to say here. This game is old and simple. The graphics are clean but not flashy, and there's really not much to do once you have an archery range other than keep a tab on your upkeep and slowly max out your defenses. Very repetitive, though it's definitely good that you added more content later.

[Just Slide!]

Decent game. The concept is simple and relaxing, but most levels are too easy. Only five or so actually require you to figure out a partial ordering. What might be interesting would be a system that allowed the player to draw over the map and "mark off" areas that need to happen in order. In this way the game could be harder but the player would be given the tools to keep up with the difficulty increase.

Logging the number of moves used to complete a level (and rewarding players for doing it in fewer moves) would also be super nice.

[The Fancy Pants Adventures: World 4 part 2]

I'll be honest, I had no idea these games were still coming out. That said, it's a real treat to see Fancy Pants alive and well - especially with all of the improvements you've made over the past 14 years. The animation is smoother, the juice is juicier, and the level design flows super well.

Legit the only thing that seems lazy here is that some of the floating platforms are reused and can make the game look slightly redundant, but there's so much else going on it's really hard to care about that.

[Interview Simulator]

Gosh, I really have no idea where to start with this. The fact that this was frontpaged really makes the memeability of this game a non-sequitur, but credit where credit is due, it's an amusing submission.

I am gouging you for points, but not for the reason you might expect. The poor quality visuals, inconsistent UI, etc. play into an unintentional aesthetic that developed in early 00s Flash games, and I don't mind it being used again. What ends up bringing this down is a general lack of content. It's too short, and as such there's not enough buildup for the jokes, so they don't hit as hard as they could have. FilmCow's skit "The Interview" does a great job of this, as it actually starts off serious and quickly devolves into madness. Don't Make Mommy Cry is another good example of this while utilizing the same quiz game genre.

The concept is solid, but there is a lot more that could have been done here. Sound could have made this funnier, and having a better spread of graphics (maybe have some of it look professionally done) would have made it more jarring/funny.

[the classroom 3]

I was a big fan of The Classroom 1 and 2. Looking back, it's clear you really perfected polishing up the game for the final installment. The graphics look super smooth, especially compared to other games from '06.

Gameplay-wise not much has changed, but not much needed to. The formula works, although I think the last game is a bit short in terms of how many actual levels there are, and the plot is also less interesting. I think the biggest change that should have been made was maybe make it so your character copies automatically when in range, rather than using the mouse button (which is a super weird system.) It might also have been cool to have an actual copying system, like QTEs to copy answers when in range.

[NICO]

Man, what the heck happened here? The screen is too small to see much of anything - not that the graphics are great anyway. The sounds are really basic, repetitive, and can't even play concurrently with one another. The gameplay mechanics are stiff, with double jumping sometimes not working, and not being able to see your surroundings ends up being annoying and slows down gameplay a lot. Not much good I can say about this.

[Amorphous+]

It took some elbow grease to make it through the single small nest, but after beating it, I don't feel especially inclined to continue playing. Even if there are more enemy types I haven't encountered yet, pushing through the early game (as I'll explain later) doesn't feel like a fun enough task to justify being a completionist here.

I see why this is one of the classics. The gameplay is simple, the slow-but-powerful swing attack is easy to grasp, satisfying, and requires strategy, and despite enemies having almost no AI, a lot of strategy emerges from deciding if and when to engage different enemies.

The biggest weakness in my opinion is that you spend too much time in early game, and for a game as punishing/difficult as this, it can dampen the game experience quite a bit. You spend a LOT of time pushing through the first 50 or so enemies repeatedly, especially because being killed by charging enemies with almost no warning (due to them being off-screen) happens easily and often. I get that area denial and controlling the center of the map is a central part of the gameplay, but you don't need instant death to hammer this point into the player's head, and doing that ultimately produces a frustrating experience where players suffer a cheap death, which makes them want to speed through the easy part of the game to reach the end, only to recklessly die again. If you could restart smaller sections of the game in which you could begin with the spawn rates of late game, it would have made this game much more satisfying as the player would be confronted with challenging content all the time, rather than constantly dying and having to repeat boring sections.

The bells and whistles on this game (different modes, powerups, bestiary, etc.) are all nice additions and add a sense of professionalism to the final product, but I don't think these change a whole lot. For the most part, the good parts of the gameplay (strategic depth) are present in every mode, and that's the important part. The issue is that the weaknesses (redundant early game) also affect the entire experience.

[Pretentious Game]

Hmm, how do you rate a game that's so accurate in its critique that it becomes hard to play? You pretty much nailed everything on the head about, well, pretentious games! There's everything to dislike about this - the graphics are trash, the text is trash, the gameplay is trash, etc. but every single one of these is a caricature of issues with other games. And for a four hour project, your physics work pretty well.

I'll rate this a 4/5 because I don't think a game intentionally meant to be bad can expect to be much better than that. I might have scored it higher if there had been some kind of punchline at the end.