Kwing's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Mr. UFO]

When I saw you created your own open source Flash creator I originally thought the actual game was just going to be a minimalistic showcase of the features in it, but this is so much more. The controls feel great and the light puzzle elements (switches and mine bouncing) add a lot to the gameplay beyond just dodging and making tight gaps. I also like that this deepens the gameplay without even requiring a dedicated attack button.

The one thing I didn't like is that the deceleration of the player character doesn't appear to have a minimum cutoff. I've had some "slippery" controlled games like this and I like to have a "close enough" threshold where things come to a complete stop if their velocity falls below a certain amount. This was particularly annoying in levels where you had to squeeze through a really small gap and needed that granular control.

The graphics and sound are also great and make this feel like a complete experience.

As far as criticisms, I did find it a bit weird that finishing a level just put you into the next level immediately, with no indicator of what level you were on or how many levels there were total, and no way to exit to the menu and restart midway through from a level selector. It's not strictly necessary for a game this short, but I also enjoyed this enough that I wanted more content.

Some easy additions would be a death counter and a timer for someone looking complete the main game with tighter constraints. A more complicated solution (which would have been fucking awesome) would have been a level editor. Most of the levels are already the same assets pasted in different orientations, which makes this a great candidate for customization.

[Red goes to the Store]

It's rough, but the roughness adds something not unlike the old Johnny Rocketfingers games. The voice acting really does wonders here for the game's personality and elevates the writing from lackluster to quirky. The music is also great, which makes the audio as a whole a really engaging experience.

The mix of actual fonts (as selectable text?) and badly hand-drawn text, inappropriate colors (door randomly has a red outline?) and grunted sound effects give this a really homemade feel which would be bad if it weren't for the fact that the actual animation is pretty decent. Small things like the car bouncing after launching off the ramp subtly show the difference between "bad on purpose" and just bad.

My biggest frustration was probably that picking the wrong options often led to interesting outcomes, which meant that accidentally picking the right option could necessitate a second replay to see everything, but the short length of the game makes this a very minor issue (though the game being too short is something of a problem on its own.)

Games like these are ultimately a great experience in a Game Jam as they're short and sweet and you can play a bunch of them back to back and get a novel experience each time. On the other hand it's a bit lean from the perspective of this standing on its own.

If you're concerned about the filesize, you can go to Publish Settings, change the bitrate under Audio Stream and Audio Event to be lower, then check Override Sound Settings. At 48kbps I was able to compress Slasher Click 2 to about 11MB and it has nearly an hour's worth of audio in it.

Redead-ITA responds:

Fascinating, thanks for the audio tip, admittedly my main reason why i was worried about it was because i recorded most of my audio on wav and i didn't bother much on converting them to mp3 (with the exception of The music which i did in advance), then i saw that newgrounds devoured 10 out of the 12 mb so i suppose newgrounds also does some optimization under the hood.

the inappropriate colors are actually intended as a way to tell the player that they can click it to see interesting things, it has additional dialogue and everything.

thanks for playing non the less!

[By My Own Hand]

The instant death mechanic of the button is okay, but is less interesting when the actual content of this game is so bare-bones - it makes it hard to want to play again after making it decently far and then failing, especially when missing one shot is basically all it takes to lose.

Not much to say about the gameplay and the UI is minimalistic, but the animation on these 3D models looks fantastic, if somewhat out of place next to the other game assets.

[Chess Force]

I enjoyed this, but it's definitely a flawed game. The bullet hell genre is done well, though grinding is perhaps a bit more necessary than I wish it was; I went through the first two levels only to find I did basically no damage in the 3rd level, which was annoying as I was perfectly capable of dodging and attacking but simply didn't have the firepower, making level 3 tedious and leading to very few enemies actually dying and dropping money.

Regarding the actual upgrades, they're okay. Following chess as a theme obviously comes with certain limitations; you can't exactly have AoE attacks or homing bullets without betraying what the helper ships are meant to represent. Unfortunately, this also means that there isn't a ton of strategy to the upgrades, you just buy them when you can and do more damage. There were perhaps 2-3 instances over the whole game where I was able to strategically pick off enemies using the diagonal bullets fired by bishops and queens, but for the most part the utility I got came from these bullets making contact by dumb luck.

With that said, I really did like the way that the helper ships followed you. This made it possible to play more offensively or defensively depending on whether you simply got out of the way of the attack, or whether you got to the right altitude to line up with an enemy before wiggling horizontally to align all of the helpers. The delay on the following mechanism also made it possible to dodge an incoming beam from rooks while still letting your helpers dish out damage, which felt really good to do.

Boss phases are fun, creative, and definitely the highlight of the game. If this were to have any post-game content, I think I'd like some kind of boss rush, maybe with the ability to increase the refresh rate of the game for added difficulty.

My biggest complaint is that the pace of the game is slow. Partly this is due to the current memory leak in Ruffle, but this is an easy fix - just quit and restart the game. The main issue has to do with enemies appearing slowly, with large gaps of time in between waves, the levels themselves being quite long, and the difficulty of on-screen enemies being relatively low. Low difficulty and lack of checkpoints makes it so that most of the difficulty comes from making small mistakes during long, low-risk, high-consequence marathons, which leads to a very frustrating and artificially long game experience when I would have preferred much higher difficulty with less severe setbacks in case of a mistake.

This frustration is exacerbated by some visual issues; tracking your own bullets, the coins that enemies drop, and enemy projectiles is annoying, especially when enemy bullets can sometimes be shown at a lower depth than player bullets, leading to your own bullets hiding incoming fire. Combine this with pink bullets that match the pink background of the final level, the green and white projectiles that match the green and white projectiles that your rooks and queens fire, and the similar saturation of the main layer, background, and foreground elements, it's very easy to run into obstacles not because you made a mistake and got cornered, but because you didn't see the obstacle in the first place.

We've had this conversation at least once before; power creep and visual juice are hallmarks of your games. That's fine, and I've definitely put these features in my games, but one of the first things I do after adding any flashy background and particle effects is to add an option to turn them off. Having player bullets appear at 10% opacity, dimming the background, and disabling loot drops when you already have four queens would be massive quality of life improvements that would require relatively little work, and players that aren't bothered by these things would still get the same experience if they didn't change them in the options menu.

Not much to say about the visuals and sound other than that they're great. The colors are vibrant and varied. The animation is scaled back as you would expect from a Game Jam game, but the small bits of animation that are present look fantastic and there's a consistency among all of the assets that leads to this looking polished.

BoMToons responds:

Thanks for the thorough review. You'll be glad to hear that update to version 1.03 fixed the lag issue that you called a "Ruffle Memory Leak" (but was really an issue in the way I coded custom sound volumes naively).

I'm ok with putting an option to turn off the screen flash. Seems like that's the most-annoying component of the fx. Look for that update coming soon. Another good point is about enemy bullet depth... I'll see if re-arranging that can be done too.

[Sarah]

I wasn't able to unlock the phone without a hint, but given that this is relatively short I think it works well. The art is good, the music is good, and the twist is compelling. I could ask for a longer game or more puzzles but for 15 hours I think this is about as much as one could ask for.

[Besieged]

It's slow, but so were a lot of other games (especially tower defense games) of this era. Something I was pleasantly surprised by was the difficulty. At one point I was trying to survive 5 minutes and I had to sell several towers to afford an instant heal so I could tank the last unit which had slipped past my defenses. I think when a strategy game can force nonlinear decisions instead of just slowly optimizing toward maximum efficiency it's doing something right.

Something that DID seem too easy and simple is that building towers optimally around a ballista tower and splitting firepower evenly between all of the paths was something that seemed to inevitably lead to victory, and there wasn't too much to think about once you figured that part out in the first two levels. What ultimately caused me to quit the game wasn't losing, but accidentally selling an important tower midway through level 5 despite otherwise doing well. The slow pace of the game made salvaging that attempt (or restarting) both very painful to consider.

To this point, there were a lot of quality of life improvements that could have made this more enjoyable. For some of the levels where you start with a lot of money, the initial grace period before the first wave just isn't long enough because there are so many towers to place. There should be a confirm option before selling towers. Some way to skip the grace period and bring on the next wave sooner, or to make the gameplay run faster, would have also been nice. Trying to squeeze as many towers as possible into the range of the ballista tower was annoying without a grid system; having placements be tile-based would have made things feel way better. These are all more or less things that Gemcraft did (which was released literally a week after this game.)

[Mouse Avoider 2]

Simple but effective. There's something to appreciate about a game that has a few minutes worth of gameplay and doesn't try to pad it out with way too much content. Having every level feature at least some kind of animation is nice and makes the game feel a bit more alive. The difficulty curve is mostly good, but the second to last level is incredibly frustrating and mostly feels like luck, as there's no effective way to bait the chasing circle away from the finish and it ultimately is a mad dash to the finish.

Some variety with the graphics or music might have been nice, but for a game this short it's not too big of an issue.

[Mouse 1.0]

I was curious to find some of the most played mouse maze games and I have to say that 20 years later, this extremely dated game genre still holds up if it's done correctly.

I really enjoyed the different backgrounds and themes, and the difficult ramps up to a point that's difficult but never absurd, mostly because the levels aren't long enough to make failure too excruciating.

The most frustrating part of this has to be how losing is handled; going to a losing screen and back to the game takes just a few more seconds than it should, having the music restart every time becomes annoying, and I really dislike that some of the animation-dependent levels restart every time, making it frustrating for any level where you have to wait. A last note would be that some of the animations start really suddenly and the jerky motions are difficult in a way that rewards memorization more than dexterity. For many of these I felt more like I just had to fail the necessary number of times to become familiar with the animation, rather than relying on actual skill.

Still, this game is fun in 2025 and it's no surprise it was as successful as it was when it came out.

[Untitled Cat Interactivity]

Having to click through the dialogue on each repeat gets VERY old. I've tried all of the options, and while it sounds like petting the cat could change some invisible variables that make the other options lead to a better ending, having to click through the entire game every time discourages the player from trying every combination. (I tried petting and then going to sleep because the cat was tired and still got the same ending you get if you sleep immediately.)

The brevity of the game also makes the game feel a bit pointless. On one hand it's nice not having as much to click through, but on the other you don't get enough interactivity or story to become more invested. In practice it plays closer to one of the old "choose your animation" games than a true visual novel.

Beyond the gameplay, the art is cute but simple, and the UI looks decently clean.

Given that you still have time to tweak this, I'd highly recommend adding some kind of skip feature that you unlock by clicking through that same dialogue at least once. I'd be happy to help with that if you'd like.

sonicgilberth00 responds:

it was my first time doing interactive story with endings, whats the point.

thanks

i'm fine, but thanks as well

[Don't Shit Your Pants]

I played this back when it came out and thought it was hilarious and stupid at the time. Coming back 15 years later this thing holds up really well. The different endings/achievements are interesting enough to warrant some exploration, but there's a manageable level of content to the point where you aren't overwhelmed by it. Being able to commit suicide or shit before the game even starts are hilarious options. This game succeeds in everything it tries to do.