Kwing's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Tough Growth]

There's very little here in terms of actual content. The aesthetics aren't bad (though they are a bit on the flashy side, with lots of effects and graphics that aren't much more complex than squares,) but I think the biggest issue is the concept to begin with.

At its core, this game is a mix of bullet hell and a mouse maze, with neither being terribly new or groundbreaking concepts. Too often is it possible to cheat by moving the mouse off-screen. More annoyingly, the stages in which the large player box makes it hard to dodge feels more gimmicky than difficult. Similarly, the last area of the game (where you're sent back a level for failing) feels more gimmicky than anything, as the levels are generally easy than the ones previous.

I would have liked to see some more unique obstacles, some deeper level of strategy, or at least some other way for the player to interact other than dodging things.

Jaswir responds:

I wonder, what game would you consider groundbreaking?
Also this game was designed to be a mix of bullet hell and feed and grow.
I do not know any other games that combine bullet hell with feed and grow.

[Rock Bottom]

I'm not sure I see the appeal here. The music and graphics are pretty bland, with the only really attractive element being the color scheme which sets the tone quite nicely.

There are a handful of issues with the rest of it. The dialogue has numerous translation errors, making it come across as awkward more often than not. More than that, the game aspect of this feels inorganic and distracting. The way the brother slaloms up and down is weird. If you get too far behind, both of you fall off the screen. The arrows on the road give you some reason to move up and down, but just feel out of place in a submission like this. The grabbing mechanic also feels kind of weird, especially since you only ever really do it once, and the whole concept of chasing a guy down in the middle of an endless road just doesn't feel realistic. Forward movement feels useless because you never need to go any other direction. The repeating houses get old fast. Need I say more?

Ultimately this comes across as a rather uninspired proof of concept. I see the need for these types of games to exist, but the execution here just felt weird. In your defense, content like this is hard to make right. Some folks at MIT tried (and failed) at exactly this task when they made Elude, so it honestly would have been more surprising to see a game do this correctly. Either way, this game just didn't wow me.

bioszard responds:

Thanks for your feedback, my friend. I'll really think about this issues you brought here.

My goal in this game in this game was just to show that many times we tell things to depressed people that just not help the situation. In my humble opinion, we must just welcome depressed people, making them feel confortable, not encouraging, not judging nor creating expectations based on their own will.

Besides that, I was forced to think about and implement (almos alone) 2 different game genres within 72h, for LD41 (I'm not justifying my fauls, just telling the develop context). You are completly right, my translations skills are not that good, I'll try to improve that. Thanks for your time.

[Eggys Big Adventure]

I played this back on mobile and was impressed with the overall smoothness and playability of the game. There are some minor flaws of course - reused graphics, and some weird physics when standing on moving platforms - but for the most part the game feels comfortable. While it's good that the game is simple (as the controls on mobile really don't lend themselves to complexity) I would have liked to see a bit more environmental variety - perhaps different kinds of enemies, or platforms that offered more than the basic Unity physics prefabs.

Most of the issues dealing with actual enjoyability stem from level design. A lot of the difficulty is concentrated in the earlier levels, and while you can usually skip particularly hard levels and farm eggs elsewhere, it's still weird that the second half of the game (and bosses) are comparatively easy, especially when the bubble level is downright brutal (and frustrating, since it's so easy to slip off of them.) It would have made sense to make all of the levels somewhat easy, but for the eggs to be put in especially difficult places. On that note, it would have also been nice for collecting all eggs in a level to provide something, even if it were only cosmetic such as player skins.

Overall my biggest disappointment here is that the game feels like a very generic platformer, even though I've known you to come up with some really outstanding original concepts such as Nodes, Draw Play, and Battle Fish. Battle Fish in particular strikes me as a game that could be outstanding on mobile, given its simple control scheme as well as how much more enjoyable it would be in a less laggy platform such as Unity.

EggysGames responds:

Thank you Kwing. You are correct I didn't space out the difficulty on the levels as well as I should have unfortunately. I didn't feel it was that generic, since I havn't made anything with physics like this before.

Thanks for the review.

[It's Just TIC TAC TOE]

A weird pick for the front page, to be sure. I liked this, but it's still rather simple. Adapting to the moving or beating the boss still isn't terribly difficult and the game just isn't long enough. The sound design and graphical quirks are excellent and this looks polished, but I don't think this was ambitious enough.

[Suppressed Demo]

I'm actually making a game with a VERY similar story (three people escaping a fascist country also based on North Korea, lol) and really wanted to play this to see how it compared, but as others have said it's buggy beyond belief. The poor animation, slow walking speed, use of text to speech, and random freezes make this look unpolished in addition to being unplayable.

zephyo responds:

yeah... this was my first game so I kinda sucked at like everything lmao. thanks for your review on my other game btw. Lots of detail and helpful points.

[I woke up next to you again.]

I got three of the four endings before throwing up my hands.

This is such a gorgeous game. I've always been a sucker for black and white - MadWorld and Limbo are two of the best in my opinion - and this is no different. The film noir, high contrast and bloom make this visually stunning, and the girl is absurdly attractive. If I can nitpick a little, the only thing I didn't like was the weird branches that sat behind the text bubbles. These just looked awkward to me when compared to the meticulous detail of everything else.

The music is nice but not outstanding. Suitable for the style of game, I think.

The real problem with this game is its brevity. Playing through multiple times gives you enough information to recognize that the girl is a fatal attraction, but rather than the message being subtle it comes across as incomplete. Thematically, or as a narrative, this feels like part of a larger story. It's frustrating having so many choices, too, because it gives the illusion of a larger story existing when the amount of content is deceptively small.

[Simplicity]

It's amazing how faithfully this recreates the old ~2003 Flash game era. The graphics look authentic in a way that's imitated but almost never done right.

This would have been a hell of a game 15 years ago. It's still a decent game now. The puzzles are pretty varied in their difficulty which is good, but the time limit seems unnecessary. Combined with the music, you don't really help the player relax and think and instead you seem to be hurrying them up. Not a good model for a puzzle game.

Other than that there's a lot of things you could have done to make the graphics more impressive. Think about lighting, beveling, texture, etc. Rather than just having text as buttons, put them inside of boxes and give them some level of uniformity. Pick ONE font and stick with it, and unite all of your graphics under one color scheme. The chaotic main menu should have some transparent fill over it to bring the menu items into focus, and what you have makes the green and blue level selection and play screens clash too. The time gauge, mute button, clock, etc. all seem slightly off-center and there's a lot of blank space that seems awkwardly placed.

As far as the game is concerned I think what you have is good. The level design is strong, but some levels really are frustrating. I suppose that's what you want for a puzzle game. Some of the puzzles seem to be out of order in terms of how difficult it is, so perhaps you should have other people tell you how difficult each puzzle is and re-order them so that there's a smoother curve.

garylu1999 responds:

Thanks for your review. Your review is the most helpful one so far and I would definitely use some of these tips for future flash games. Thank you.
By the way, about the difficulty order, I actually did have other people try it, but different people did not agree on which puzzles are harder and the way some of them ordered it seemed odd to me as well.

[Yellow]

Pretty good game. Shows just how much you can do without giving the player any instructions. This reminds me quite a bit of a game called Help Helen, though more puzzle and less humor. The music got a little annoying and overall the lack of instructions felt kind of limiting, but this was a fun play.

[Insane Orb]

Can't believe this is the most played game on the site and I didn't know about it until now. This is a surprisingly fresh game. The graphics and sound are clearly in need of a revamp but the gameplay is enjoyable, if someone annoying due to the framerate feeling kind of choppy. The gravity fields keep things interesting as do most of the gimmicks that you find on the playing field.

Ultimately two things brought this game down. One was that the controls felt spastic and much of the time I didn't really feel like I was in control. The other is that there's no break while playing. Something that breaks up the levels and perhaps allows them to be replayed individually would be nice, because as-is it's a mad rush to a huge point value of 75 without any real structure.

[Escape the Can]

The commentary on this game was pretty funny, but the graphics were underwhelming and items were hard to use. The one-screen system made everything look small and the inventory was also unclear - I was never sure as to what I had because the soap just looked like a tiny pink rectangle. Everything in this game needs to be drawn bigger, and the music should probably be changed because as it is it's really annoying.