Kwing's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[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.

[Winter Golf]

It's really hard to believe it's been six years since your last game. I've been a fan ever since Reverb came out (when I was 11!) and it's cool to see you're still doing your thing.

This was fun and well-made. The graphics, sound, and physics are really spot-on, and while the concept is simple, the growing snowball is a bit different from other games I've played of this type.

My main criticism is that most of the difficulty comes from getting the power correct. This is especially true when going for all of the hole in one shots, because it's fairly straightforward to figure out what the proper angle is, so the difficulty really just boils down to the amount of power you put into the shot, which feels kind of gimmicky. Another slight annoyance is that your angle is reset when you reset a level. I get that this may be a way to prevent a player from resetting multiple times and rigging the game in their favor, but honestly that would be a completely viable way to beat the game in my opinion.

For a short game, I think everything works pretty well. However, if you wanted to give this a bit more depth, I think making it so that some of the levels can't be completed in one shot would make things much more interesting, as it would force players to figure out more complicated solutions for winning in 2-3 shots.

[Eggbot vs Zombies]

I like the concept - the way the one level expands and you collect more weapons is really neat and has an interesting way of pressuring you. Certain choke points become advantageous to hold, but because of the missions and doors opening, things stay dynamic and you run around the level quite a lot, especially once you start buying health, ammo, and extra lives.

Negatives? There should be at least another enemy type (flying would be good as it would require the player to aim in more directions.) It's also too easy to get big chunks of money at a time and skip to the best weapon of each type, or just rely on the mystery boxes, whose weapons are powerful even before you buy any of them. The missions are few and far between, so much of the game feels very repetitive. With the amount of guns you can buy quickly superseding the amount of content, there's not much reason to unlock them.

The one level gets kind of old after a while, too. You did a great job designing it and it feels pretty balanced, but there's only so long you can play it before it starts to get stale. It would be cool if there were some areas that cost a ridiculous amount of money to unlock (like $1000.) That way the one level could retain some variety even late into the game. Time bonuses on the missions would also give the player a sense of urgency.

I've noticed a few bugs. You can stand on the leftmost obelisk when the mission comes up and enemies are unable to reach you. Sometimes when teleporting to the top of the level, enemies get stuck inside the floor, and when you restart a game, sometimes your Beretta will start with the amount of ammo as the last gun you equipped in your previous game (one time I actually spawned in an inaccessible area - no idea how that happened.)

EggysGames responds:

Thank you Kwing for your detailed reviews they are always really in depth and informative.

[Little Knight]

This is a game that screams Ludum Dare all over it. From the quirky control scheme to the 8-bit aesthetic and music to the short (10 level) design. And yet, regardless of whether or not this was made in two days, it really feels like it was. The jumping mechanic is unreliable, and the controls are overall not that great.

Plenty of one button games already exist, and none of them have ever needed an attacking mechanic. In this game it doesn't feel like it enhances the game, rather it's a kind of gimmick. In some cases I noticed the sword actually extended the vulnerability hitbox and so attacking an enemy was causing me to die. The run/jump button was also weird. In some cases you could wait a second or two before starting the level to throw enemies out of sync, but other than that, having a button to run was pretty pointless. The jumping and bouncing was something I've seen in games before (Pix n Love Rush, for instance) and the "collect two, get to finish" goal for this game was not a particularly new or clever implementation of that idea.

Overall this game is beyond forgettable. Controls are meh and level design is meh.

[Hydrogenic]

This was surprisingly fun. Simple concept, but well-executed and original, if somewhat short. My main criticism here is that the existing concept doesn't require that much thought to it - the stage shrinks at a constant rate, meaning it's always getting harder and thus there's no element of timing to it - just play as fast as you can, all the time. On top of that, the way that the game is as simple as collecting one thing and avoiding another lends itself only one important mechanic - figure out where you'll land if you press the spacebar, then construct a back and forth path to gather all of the electrons. This concept gets old quite fast and as a result, wouldn't make this game very fun if you developed further on this concept.

[Arcalona]

This is several orders of magnitude larger than any other game you've worked on and it shows. Most everything looks and sounds great, though the music gets old somewhat quick. Gameplay wise I felt like this was pretty good, though as others have said strength and critical aren't terribly useful. I liked the mix of resource management/RPG elements, though at the end things seemed to take longer than necessary and I ended up using my computer's clock to skip forward and max out my stuff. (Respecing stats would be nice by the way, some abilities are unlocked at weird points that make it hard to have a consistent build from start to finish.)

I ended up stopping at World 5 due to a persistent freezing issue, but up until then I found myself making good use of many of the abilities and generally finding the game to be well done.

[Broken House]

This game was really bizarre - seemed like a throwback to the old '06 era escape games. And it's even made in Flash! I thought the puzzles were mostly the right difficulty, though some of the hints were a little vague and the 4th hint was really hard to find. I also got really confused as to why everything was so scrambled. Things being broken is one thing. Things being on the wall is another. Graphics and sound were above reproach, and overall everything was pretty average and unassuming. Still fun for the few minutes it lasted.