Kwing's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Depict1]

It's okay, I suppose. The gameplay is pretty tight and I especially liked the spike throwing mechanic added in - it really gave the game a nice puzzle twist to it. That aside, this is basically a rage game that's been tuned down for it to actually be enjoyable, with a thinly veiled story cloned from Portal. While the game had potential, the graphics and level design don't bring enough to the table and ultimately it ends up being another Pretentious Game, only this one takes itself seriously.

[Level Up!]

WOW. After seeing all of the awards this got I finally sat down and played it, and holy shit, this is really awesome stuff.

It's gotten to the point where pixel games are a little too common, and now it seems there are more pixel games that are made to have a retro feel than there are actually retro games. It definitely is grating dealing with samey, generic graphics and 8-bit chiptunes. The gameplay, however...

I originally thought that resetting stats upon each day was going to drive me batty, but it didn't. I mean, it did for the first few days, but when I realized how the game worked and went and bought the upgrades, the double jump and regeneration were a godsend and it lead for this to be a very balanced game. Collecting all of the gems had a very Castlevania-like feel to it, as the map wasn't huge and was mainly explored in a non-linear fashion. As a whole the stats which continually increased seemed balanced and were neither too generous nor too grindy, and the dialogue was entertaining. Being what it was, I felt like the difficulty was also pretty balanced too. While the platforming was a little dull, I felt motivated to find new "non-ghosted" gems and to beat that damned boss. The boss was difficult, but also a fun fight (albeit repetitive). The only thing I didn't like was that it was obscenely difficult to properly get the boulders to crush the nightmare - I think almost every time I managed to wallop him came from pure chance rather than me premeditating it.

I found the story to be quite fascinating as well. There were a few bits of humor and hints at breaking the fourth wall, but what got me more was the whole thing about the characters' memories being wiped and that nightmare that just kept coming back. I knew there was going to be something different when I bested the nightmare and retained my memories, and I was especially interested when I realized I was going to go to the computer to have the memories recovered. Let me get this clear though:

YOUR ENDING SUCKS!! I really didn't like how the male character was randomly turned into the antagonist. I get that it was supposed to be a plot twist, but seeing as he doesn't have a very large role in the game, I felt more like "Aw, damn it." than actually shitting bricks when I found out. Ultimately this game has the setup for a great fiction title - sci-fi, fantasy, or otherwise - but ultimately turns into a generic Bleach superhero-type thing with a 'to be continued' cliffhanger. I (accurately) guessed that even though this game was released six years ago, no actual sequel existed, and honestly, what with lost memories being such a pivotal part of this game, I don't think a second game would really make sense.

So, to recap... You took a shaky gameplay concept and salvaged it with awesome level design, and set up a great story, but you failed to wrap it up nicely. I would still say this is easily worth a 4.5/5, in spite of the things that bothered me.

[FPA: World 2]

Damn it. I've always loved Fancy Pants and I'm really not sure what I can say that hasn't been said already. The physics are impeccable. The animation is impeccable. This game is eye candy and finger candy - the controls are incredibly responsive and are polished to the point that they reflect more light than the moon. Grabbing, sliding, rolling - this game has all of it, and for every little thing is a seamless animation.

Now, that aside, there are a ton of problems with level design. It's not so much that there's anything wrong with the levels themselves, but more that the environment isn't challenging. You can waste a lot of time exploring, and the boss can prove to be a challenge due to only being able to take three hits, but the game doesn't really incorporate the fast-paced potential of this game into actual gameplay. You can look in the trophy room to see your fastest completion and that's literally it. The terrain is fairly boring if you're not interested in exploration and in the end it feels like one really long first level to a game. I'm still giving this full marks mainly because of what I stated in the first paragraph, but I think the principle still stands.

For everything it has going for it, Fancy Pants is ultimately brought down by its own simplicity. The bonus levels and snail shell objectives give this game quite a lot of replay value, but there isn't really much to challenge the player in a more high-octane environment, and that's really the direction a game like this should be going in. I would like to see time trials, and perhaps some puzzle elements or powerups to make the game a little bit more challenging. The hop-and-bop combat mechanics are fine, but the enemies are redundant. This definitely needs more.

[Madness Descent (Demo)]

Is there something I'm not getting here? This is really, really bad. There are no textures or environments - just black platforms. The characters are all the same - the basic Madness character with varying weapons. I tried a gun and it seemed useless. I tried the starting knife weapon and it killed most enemies in one hit. Ultimately I did a pretty decent runthrough of the game rushing past enemies and allowing my knife to collide with enemies as I got close enough to them. When I got low on health, I cleared out a room, camped in a corner and waited for my health to recover. This is ridiculous, there has to be a better way to make a game than this. Even for a demo, this lacks foundation.

[Platform Racing]

Taking everything into perspective, this was a damned impressive game when it came out. The multiplayer aspect was unusual, rare, and worked very well. I enjoyed all of the levels a lot, which I found to be quite balanced with a few exceptions (Buto was very luck-based, Going Down is too easy to skip entirely.) I remember that I definitely wanted a level editor and increasing stats, which were added in PR2, though this has a certain charm to it as well. A little disappointing that even with a high speed stat it runs pretty slowly, though when I first played this I didn't mind since it was all I knew.

Very good effort here.

[Humpty's shootout]

Is this supposed to be clunky? The graphics are simple but not great, the music is repetitive and terrible, but the gameplay is really the worst. The jumping mechanic is clunky, the physics are awful - in the first level, I landed squarely on the cheese block three times in a row, only to be pushed to the left by a mysterious force and die. The exploding mimes are even worse, pushing you backward off platforms, or having random spiked balls require near-impeccable timing to get past. It wasn't until I reached the invisible platforms that I realized this was a rage game, and that this was explicitly what you were going for (I hope.)

Considering this game is meant to frustrate and upset, it should come as no surprise that people aren't going to like it. I quit at the level with the rocket upgrade and the balloons, partially because nothing seemed to work, and partially because I just wasn't interested in playing more.

[Super Splash Cannon]

Kind of crappy, honestly. The controls are smooth but there's very little to do in this game but run and gun. Moreover, enemies have a tendency of changing to green just before you shoot them, and frequently you'll shoot one at close range only to lose a life. There doesn't seem to be much of an objective here, and multiple times I cleared the entire map only to be stuck until I inevitably died.

[Mooniverse]

I little dull. I like the presentation a lot but there's nothing to do except jump in the direction of the arrow and fly into black holes repeatedly. Add SOMETHING. A timer, collectibles, enemies, anything.

[Etherworld]

There are some major problems here but also some major potential. The first thing I noticed was a style of minimalism which sometimes helped the game and sometimes hurt it. The silhouette platforms were good. The menu buttons were good. The voice acting was good (though repetitive). The lack of boss music was bad. The lack of animation for the enemies was really bad. The lack of any sort of AI apart from the boss was very bad. The lack of a menu background, bad. The general lack of things to do in the game, very bad. The fact that the difficulty only affects your health, also bad. Even when you have a crouch feature, you only use it a few times throughout the entire game.

Overall the game showed signs of polish, but just as many signs of a lack of polish. The textures in the background were well-done, the character sprite is well-done, and the boss, interestingly enough, has well-drawn hands and a very sloppy looking body. I like how the lava had a delayed reaction in response to the boss' pounds, and how the screen shook with each attack. I see that you tried to spice things up with a flight mechanic in level 4, but it's not enough. You need to incorporate stuff like special abilities, collectibles, or features like climbing, sliding, or grabbing. This game is lacking in content and it hurts it a lot. Overall the gameplay becomes very formulaic due to the fact that the enemies don't even respond to the player. It also makes the player feel disengaged, which could have been rectified by implementing some kind of plotline.

I also want to mention that you really need to do something about that boss battle. I actually liked the physics - it's neat how the player moves faster while jumping - but I found many times that the player was sometimes fast enough to out-walk the boss' attacks, and was sometimes too slow. I noticed the player tended to die from this while walking outward from the center more often than if the player was walking toward the boss, but it wasn't a sure thing. The mechanics were at points sloppy, having once been pushed back into a wave of lava by a hand, or other times falling straight through the ground because I didn't jump quite high enough (at least stop the player from moving forward, show them that they've hit a wall).

Anyway I just want to reiterate that the boss fight is hell if you're going for achievement 05. It's frustrating and fickle and I feel like you didn't have enough people beta test the project. It would have been nice if the boss had more attacks, but more importantly the delay between the attacks needs to be greater, or at least more consistent.

Etherblood responds:

Hey, thank you very much for your detailed feedback, I agree with most of your points.
The main reason so many areas are lacking is due to my timelimit of 1 month. I never made a game with deadline before and pretty much messed up my time management (and adobe flash worked against me sometimes, it was pretty frustrating, I won't be using it from now on). I'll also spent a lot more time on games in the future.
The voice acting are just 'stolen' sounds from the League of Legends champion Nami (some enemies have Brand's voice and the boss has Malphite's), there wasn't much to take from, so yes it's repetive.
The combat in this game is pretty non-existant, your only attack is to stand still! and move your sword forward, and the enemies apart from the boss all have a set path, thats just sad...
I never encountered a bug where I was pushed through the floor, that obviously should not happen.
The boss battle is very easy when you know how it works, I think the problem is that the possibilities to beat him are pretty limited and the game has no hints at how whatsoever.
I personally find lv4 much more difficult than the boss fight (because I know how it works).
I ended up adding a lot of random because it got to repetive, adding more phases instead might have been a much better approach. I pretty much just forgot about boss battle music even though it's the most important part...
Well, again, thank you very much for your feedback, it's helpful and I'll make sure to reread it as soon as I'm working on the mentioned stuff in my next platformer.

[flapping bird]

What can you say that hasn't already been said about Flappy Bird? Same graphics (nice color scheme though), same sound effects (nice music though), and the same gameplay. I was a little annoyed by the fact that the bird moves so slowly in this version, but considering it doesn't really matter how far you get I wasn't really frustrated.

What did frustrate me was that the game hiccuped like crazy. From the moment I started the game, the music frequently cut out for split seconds, and it was common for my spacebar to decide not to work while playing. I don't know if this is made in HTML5 or Unity or what, but you probably could have made this exact same game in Flash 5 and it would have been more stable.

That said, the dialogue was decent, well-written, and poetic. What I found odd about it was that you used Flappy Bird as a medium to express the text. I get that there's this whole "jumping through hoops" thing but honestly the hype surrounding Flappy Bird made it very hard to take this seriously. One of the things that made Flappy Bird viral was how STUPID the game was, in a funny sort of way. That doesn't translate well into the existential depression expressed in this game. This doesn't catch me in the gut the way Billy Suicide did, or provide original gameplay like Fixation did - it just presented a sub-par game with a message that tried to fit in and didn't. The result is that the two clash pretty badly. Oh well, if nothing else it's kind of funny.