Kwing's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[V-tech Rampage]

Decent. This game was surprisingly enjoyable but I still found it to be kind of annoying. The graphics, being an 8-bit throwback, did their job, although it didn't look nearly as pretty as it could have. The sound, while not bad, seemed simplistic to the point of quiet. In a game that's supposed to simulate real-life events, sound effects for footsteps, screaming, outdoor ambiance, and scribbling in classrooms would have made the game feel a lot more 'alive'.

Now that the aesthetics are out of the way, I'll go into gameplay a bit. The first level kind of annoyed me, since I didn't know who it was I was supposed to be killing and I didn't know what she looked like. The slow movement speed amplified how annoying it was to get your bearings when playing. The second level had its own annoyances too, not showing very clear objectives and also having the dialogue appear in real-time when you made it to the slot. On top of the dialogue getting me a game over, I also failed several times because I didn't know what to do, even though I hit S by the mail slot. The area where you can hit the S button should be a little more lenient in my opinion. Finally, the last level was fun but only had one annoyance, that being that shooting people behind walls required you to move behind a wall to make it transparent. Little gimmicks like these picked away at the gameplay and ultimately killed most of the fun out of it.

As far as the subject matter goes, I'm not sure what I can say, since I'm not the most knowledgeable about the Virginia Tech massacre. That being said, this game seems like a simple recreation, nothing more. I didn't notice any terribly offensive humor, and the violence seemed more to be a simple recreation of history than anything else. Overall, this game struck me almost like some kind of educational game rather than something that was made to be offensive just for the heck of it.

Needs polish, but still good.

[Thoreau Redux]

"Why do you keep trying?"
"Because my friend made this."

Dude, where do I even begin on this one? The graphics and animation look good, I won't lie about that, but everything else is just pitiful. You move so slowly that I had to resort to tapping the up and down buttons repeatedly to break dance or bunny hop my way to the next trap in order to entertain myself. The sight ability is only useful for some abilities, and the limited uses really makes it annoying to look around without overusing it.

But by far the biggest issue with this game is just that each time you restart, you still move so slowly that you end up taking a long time to redo a small portion of the game, only to slightly misjudge a jump or react just a little too late and have to do it all again. This game is far more style over substance, and even then the style is degraded each time you redo the same thing again (and again).

Overall this game is slow, boring, difficult, and repetitive. I just can't seem to enjoy it at all, and the ending left me completely unsatisfied.

[Peter Bell Saves Christmas]

Damn it, this wasn't as good as I was hoping... Still fun, though. But you'd have thought between Christmas of 2011 and 2012 you could have done a little more fine-tuning.

The graphics look pretty good, with the simple style you used in the Lazer Collection making a comeback in full color and improved animation. The animation is similarly simple but surprisingly good. While I didn't mind the visual aesthetic of the animation, though, some of the choppy motions made the control scheme somewhat deceptive, and I took a lot of damage because the walking animation was just so odd.

The plot wasn't bad, though it was a little predictable, and uses the same style of humor from all of your YouTube videos. Though humorous, I never found myself laughing out loud at any of the cutscenes.

The music is pretty darned good, reusing a lot of the musical motifs from the Deck'D series, but it really sucks that the style has gotten kind of stale, too. This isn't a huge issue, though, and the voice acting and sound effects more than make up for it.

Now, onto the most important part: Gameplay. Well, I didn't know Darren could program, but maybe the real answer to that is that he can't (sorry!). The combat mechanics work, but tend to be very frustrating.

The first issue here is that you just don't get a very clear indicator when you take damage. Sure, you can always look at your health bar, but the 'impact' is missing when your character recoils, sometimes fooling you into thinking you aren't taking as many hits as you actually are.

The second issue is that grunts are just way too easy. From very early on, I just learned to bait enemies into following me until they were parallel, then repeatedly jumping and spamming the attack button. Since I was able to use jumping to eliminate that window of opportunity at the end of a combo, I was able to remain largely in the same place while still pressuring enemies with attacks that made them flinch. This made the non-boss levels extremely repetitive, and the one time I did die during a normal level (it was at the very end, damn it...) I just felt annoyed redoing it all.

As for the bosses, I felt these were kind of botched, too. Much of the time I was able to use the same jump-attacking pressuring technique to prevent bosses from nailing me, and the attacks that did hit felt cheap for several reasons. Some were just too fast to realistically dodge, while others were hard to read and basically spelled death if you hadn't seen the attack coming from the very beginning.

But by far the biggest problem with the bosses is that you have to read them too quickly. The 2nd boss is a great example of this; the differences between his attacks (high flick, low flick, short range attack, charge attack) were so subtle and brief that the developers are really the only people that could have possibly felt reading them was easy. The polar bear racing level was a lot like this, too. The twitch-reflex thing just didn't float my boat, so overall I beat the game feeling rather empty.

One last thing I'll mention about the spirit gauge is that it just isn't very useful. I only ever felt myself using it during boss battles, and even then I found it easiest just to use normal attacks until the boss was low on health and then just using Singing Spirit to bullshit my way past the boss while they were attacking most frequently.

Overall this game just doesn't feel complete to me. I think the biggest issue is that you didn't have enough beta testers, or your beta testers got too accustomed to your game as you produced it to be able to give you good feedback on how the game would appear at face value.

[Ereban Dawn]

Frustrating... When I clicked this I was expecting something like Limbo. And it sure seemed like it at first, but I can't tell you how many times I just ended up going around in a damn circle. Plus the ceiling collisions are a little too aggressive; I missed a lot of jumps because of that. The gameplay just isn't fun or intriguing, all I noticed was a platformer that gave you no directions. Overall it was an exercise in frustration.

As far as sound goes, this may be one of the top reasons why the game wasn't as scary as it was meant to be. It seemed a little too loud and techno-like. Just taking music from another horror game or film would have been much more effective than using something on the Audio Portal. Penderecki is really the only person you can reliably go to for scary music, but you could have also used the Giygas Theme or something. Some kind of sound effects would have been nice too.

Now, graphics... Not good. I like the black and white thing, but it needs polish. Lots of it. There are some nice transparent fog and mist images you can find (just Google "mist filetype:png") that you could animate floating across the screen to give it a more grainy, textured look or feel. It might also have been a good idea to slightly blur the ground you're standing in, and possibly showing slowly moving environments in the background. For a black and white game, it's important to up the ante when it comes to effects and atmosphere. I'd also point out that the animation is rather poor, and the character could be drawn much better. There's only one playable character, right? So put some time into animating him!

Last, I'll address the scare value. Taking the whole concept of shadows and a limited line of sight, it looks almost as if this game was inspired by my Flash story Gemini. This is not entirely bad, but the game has some serious balance issues. The spectre guy that floats around comes too often and drains things too fast. Plus he doesn't even have any sound effect. When I first started the game I tried seeking out potential hazards just to see what dying was like. In the end it felt more like I was playing Platform Racing against the spectre than he was actually chasing me. The visibility penalty is annoying where it should be creepy. The only thing that really bothered me was when my line of sight dwindled to almost nothing. And that was because I thought something would jump me if I lost. When I realized it just gave a silent game over screen, I decided to quit. No point in going through the same boring landscape again only to fall and climb my way back up.

The biggest thing this Flash is missing is polish. It needs more atmosphere in looks and sound.

[Sift Heads]

Reminds me of Sin City. Like you said, the voices suck, but you chose an excellent soundtrack (if a bit repetitive) and the graphics are excellent and really set the mood, especially with the black and white thing going on. The gameplay is kind of simple and easy once you memorize things, but this is something you fixed in later installments.

Overall this was a good game but feels unfinished. Obviously a bit dated, and far inferior to the sequels.

[The Infection]

Really good game! The controls were super slick... WASD, Q for weapon selecting and E for switches. I found it very easy to get used to the controls, although I wish you could walk while crouching. That did bother me a little. Graphics are good, there are even a couple nice scares put in! Excellent atmosphere and the soundtrack was nice too.

The gameplay was a little bit of a letdown; it's nothing I haven't seen before. Just another one of those shooters. The weapon types were nice and kept things interesting, and the melee weapons were strong enough to not become useless towards the end of the game. One big complaint I have is the bosses had too few attacks. Each one only had two different moves, and they were easy to read.

One last thing that really bothered me was the lag. While playing my cursor lagged awfully, moving around in directions that I had moved my mouse in several seconds ago. This seemed to get better when I died and things 'reset' but in the end it feels like something that should have been fixed. Although it wasn't game breaking, it made the game a lot less fun, and discouraged me from trying Survival or Dodge modes.

EggysGames responds:

But Kwing its spooooky

[Submachine 8: the Plan]

Wow!! After playing the first Sub Machine on my PSP a few months ago, I was really surprised to find a sequel. I didn't even know there was a series, or that it was here on Newgrounds all along!

What to say... The worlds system allows for many different art styles, and a really interesting puzzler kind of like the Fog World and Otherworld in Silent Hill Origins. The appearance of the key items definitely helps in figuring out where things go. Unfortunately the sheer size of this game gives me a headache, and honestly it stretches on too damn long. At points it's boring and way too hard. At the end, after I made sure all the rods were at the correct height and the blue thing didn't show up, I just quit. Toward the end I was already dragging my feet anyway, relying on the walkthrough more and more as I lost interest.

So what are my biggest problems with the game? Let's see...
- The places where you move up, down, or side to side are annoying to click. Several times I thought I was clicking a button while I was actually clicking the area to the right or left. Considering there's blank space on all sides of the game screen, you should have just put the buttons in the margins there.
- I get that the different areas are supposed to be confusing, and how certain areas int he same world are inaccessible unless you use another world as a proxy, but it's too damned much. You should have given a little indicator in the corner that told you your position (for instance, B3-1 meaning the third row on the second column of the map in the first world).

Overall the difficulty and magnitude of this game are just too damned brutal. What I liked about the first Sub Machine was its simplicity and fast pacing. While this game stayed fun for the majority of its length, in the end it was too much. This isn't the Bartimaeus trilogy... Seven worlds is too much to cope with, it should have been five at the most. The difficulty also makes the story unfold a lot slower than it should, and the lack of characters or events makes the story seem all the more tedious.

[Submachine1: extended]

Excellent!

I found Sub Machine at "PSP Media Place" a very long time ago. It was one of the few games compatible with the PSP system, using only the mouse and being made in Flash 6. I still have the original 'un-extended' version on my PSP.

I see you've made a few steps forward in this one! The horizontal/vertical puzzle has had its solution changed, as well as the spoon being in a different place and the radio drawer being a new addition. The map size was confusingly large but added just the right amount of difficulty, and the diary entry was really interesting. Like the original, the difficulty was light enough that I never got stuck but interesting; I was never bored while playing.

You've got a great game here! Only criticisms are that I feel the screen is a little small, the audio is somewhat lacking, and the story isn't expanded on. Other than that this game is perfect, definitely one of my favorite point and clicks.

[Nazi Doctor]

Not bad, I'm kind of surprised that people are getting so offended by this. Newgrounds has really gotten soft over the past few years.

I guess the first issue with this game is its simplicity. In the experiments, all you do is mash buttons. But worse yet, you don't even have to use any particular order. For instance, in later levels where you mash A and D, or N, A, Z, and I, you can mash them all together instead of alternating. A simple circuit that required you to actually alternate between A and D, or spell out N-A-Z-I repeatedly would have made the game feel a little more complete and polished.

As far as the graphics go, I don't mind the minimalistic approach, but it could have used some special effects or something. Again, pixel art isn't necessarily bad, but it still should have had a little more, to keep the player interested if nothing else.

As far as the concept goes, the text about the experiments was in rather small font, and advancing with the mouse was kind of annoying. I wish you had at least put something like 'Press Space to continue', especially seeing as this is primarily a keyboard-controlled game. The small text, while readable, somehow messed with the immersion factor for me. So did the incredibly simple gameplay. Putting in more sound effects would have definitely made this game better, and the one song that plays is a little annoying (not bad, but gets old fast).

In my opinion, the best way to make this game funnier would have been to incorporate some kind of mechanical sound effects to really illustrate the experiments themselves. Screams would have also given this game a more morbidly offensive humor value, and I think that's what you were going for.

[The Code Master]

I would have given you 2/10, but giving this one star out of five looks so much meaner, so I'll bump this up to a 1.5. This game has a good concept, but doesn't deliver at all. The main issue is the animation, which is just too damned slow. While I can tell the animation is coded to show each part for each segment, you still could have animated it faster to make it more 'fun' looking, AND so players don't have to wait so long before seeing whether they beat a level or not.

Other than the animation, the other thing that bothered me was the simplicity of the game. It would have been cool if enemies' attacks got a lot more complex, for instance taking a sequence of attacks determined by a variable, and then making the player crack that sequence to consistently block each attack. You could also make the player combine ifs and whiles (for instance, if an enemy is using a grenade OR a high block, use a low attack). Or possibly and conditions if you changed the enemies' attacks even more. Alternatively, what if you used else statements? Defend if the enemy is attacking, OTHERWISE use an attack of your own.

This could have been really cool but just doesn't do it for me. There's a game similar to this... I think it was Madness: Premeditation which had a really cool take on it.