Kwing's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[no-one has to die.]

Sorry, but this is actually pretty boring. You're tossed into a situation with four characters who you don't know, and have to choose between saving them. Why should I know who to save? More importantly, why should I care? Christina and Steve are over-dramatic and completely unlikable. Lionel is obnoxious. Troy has a tragic story but I still know nothing about the guy.

Frankly the game just isn't interesting. It seems to me as if the player is thrown into the climax of a story that should have started much earlier on. I'll also note that the graphics are very minimalistic, with barely anything apart from the character avatars, and the soundtrack is unfitting mostly because I never got to feel for any of the characters. The gameplay was pretty dumb, too. More than once I just wanted to kill everyone off for the heck of it. But there's really no gameplay to speak of. You just take your best guess at a level, which is usually close to what you need to do, and then you restart and adapt your strategy.

The time travel gimmick was interesting and I could see how some might like it, but to me the idea of there being an 'ultimate' ending or 'good' ending takes away from the gravity of your decisions as a player. When all of your decisions end up with you watching a single 'definitive' ending, it just makes the game feel a whole lot less interactive. I would have preferred to have all of the endings jumbled up and know that in the end you could only pick one. Of course, I would also have preferred if this game were a spinoff or sequel to another story, or if it had come with some background information before the events of the game.

[CrateRun]

I got to level 20, so I feel like I have a decent feel for the game. I must say that despite the simple graphics, you have a really nice presentation and a good working platform engine. The controls are a bit strange, but I caught on about variable jumps and changing direction in midair soon enough.

I like the simplicity of the level design. The graphics remind me a lot of The Impossible Game, while the gameplay reminds me a lot of Meatboy. The difficulty curve seemed a bit much at first and there were several points at which I considered quitting, but it was only when I hit the mine level that I quit. Nailing the same incredibly narrow jump several times is what turned me off.

Anyway what you have here is decent, and I like how unique the controls work, but they are still clunky as others have said, and as platformers go this really doesn't bring anything new to the table.

[The Impossible Game Lite]

Wow, really? Come on. I know you have to make money, but this demo literally lasts under a minute before sticking you with an ad. As I bought this game on the PSN for a dollar, I can review the full game but I refuse to give this demo more than a 2/5. If you're going to upload a demo of this game, I'll rate the demo.

The Impossible Game is definitely a good idea. Rhythm-based platformer? Sounds good to me. Tough-as-nails platformer? Sounds good too. But when you send a player back to the beginning for one mistake, it ruins immersion, and when the practice mode has its sound replaced with something entirely different, it doesn't help you practice and it defeats the purpose of it being rhythm-based. This should have either been more lenient, or it should have shed the whole rhythm concept. But putting both together drives you nuts as you listen to the first few seconds of a song OVER AND OVER.

Anyway, you chose some great music from well-recognized artists on Newgrounds, but that doesn't mean much if you never get to hear it. I also feel like the graphics were way simpler than they had to be. Attractive? Yes. But couldn't you at least add some customization options? Maybe an audio visualizer around the perimeter of the screen that can be toggled? Or a freeplay mode that makes the game more musical?

By far the most annoying thing about this game is that you really only have one button. Which means that you could use any kind of graphic to cue the player to press a button. Hell, this game could have looked like Vuvu Hero. In fact, you could watch a video with different graphics while playing this game if it were synced correctly. The lack of interaction between the player and the game is a huge issue.

[Segway of the Dead]

What score am I supposed to give this? As always with these April 1st games, the polish is impeccable but there's really nothing to do in this game except mash a few buttons (or press them as slowly as you please) and lose. I was hoping for something at least a tiny bit different from last year's Hunger Games tribute.

Really digging the music though.

[Kill Bubbles (ppg)]

I had to watch this on YouTube because the file doesn't seem to be working.

Anyway, this Flash has a very nostalgic feel to it, which makes sense given that it's over a decade old now. The graphics are pretty good for their time; in fact, the vectors look great, very crisp and colorful.

The music selection, in particular, Closer, also make this feel very stylized and fit to the time period in which this was made. The poor animation and sound effects could have been fixed, in my opinion. Frame by frame animation was possible with early versions of Flash, wasn't it? I'd say the sounds could have been better too, but I know online sound libraries weren't as big or high-quality in 2001 as they are now.

Overall this is pretty good. The over-the-top violence and bad humor, plus the shooting bit at the end, make this very reminiscent of the types of games that existed back in the very early 00s.

[400 Years]

Ugh, yuck! What the hell is this?

Alright, first up the graphics are nice, and I like the textures and landscaping, but the first issue here is the pixel art. Sure, it's not bad, but the style just does NOT work at all. You need to pay more attention to fine detail, and then add in a lot more background graphics and animations. Because of how slow the character moves, you need to awe the player and give them something to look at as they dawdle their incredibly slow way from point A to point B. The animation could also use some work. But most of all, you should not be using rectangles as water. Make sure the water is hugging the ground, otherwise it looks tacky and horrible.

The music is good, as most things by Kevin MacLeod are done well, but it gets so horribly repetitive, it would have been nice if you had interspersed it with atmospheric sound effects, like rustling leaves, harsh winds, gentle breezes, or birds chirping. Perhaps a different music track for every season would be nice, too.

Gameplay is by far the most flawed part of this game. The instructions don't tell you squat, which leaves you floundering in the dark, and if you screw up you're penalized by having to wait more... And more... And more! There's a difference between a slow-paced game and a stupidly tedious game. I've played through Vagrant Story and consider it to be one of the greatest games of all time, so I know what it's like to spend a lot of time learning a game and warming up to unconventional gameplay. This game is just done badly.

Overall, the biggest change this Flash needs to rectify its incredibly slow gameplay is a more detailed and immersive environment and atmosphere. On top of that, perhaps doing SOMETHING to speed up the gameplay might help a bit. I found myself stuck at the puzzles and at a couple points facepalmed when I looked up the solutions. I think it's because all of the waiting fried my brain. You could also hint a bit more at directions, or help cue players in on WHERE to wait, because a lot of the time I would end up waiting in the wrong area (and it seems like if I'm not in the right place, it won't matter how long I wait).

I guess the last reason this game ticked me off is because the ending is ridiculous. It doesn't explain anything, expand on any plot, or have any buildup whatsoever. Just 'jump down here and then you win'. Come on! You saved the world because you blocked an active volcano? Get real - even if a rock were able to block an entire volcano AND seal it (which is impossible), it would still only increase the amount of pressure and contain the buildup for a larger, more powerful explosion. Besides, lava melts everything except for diamond, and molten magma will melt even diamond.

Overall an interesting concept, but did you not test this AT ALL and realize how boring it is?

[Bloons Tower Defense 5]

Two steps forward, one step back... The graphics and overall interface are as they've always been: Attractive, simple, and functional, although somewhat less so now that you've come up with all of these upgrade paths and the experience bars. The gameplay is kind of frustrating to me, though.

I like the overall increase of upgrades. It puts a lot more emphasis on the strategy of the game, and allows players to make a lot of different choices. What I don't like is that you have to unlock these upgrades through experience meters... To me, this just seems like a way of making players wait longer, making progress more linear, and making that progress arbitrary. Although the system works, it has a certain 'feel' to it that I'm really not sure I like.

It feels a lot like the Bloons series has gravitated a lot more toward the mobile market, which isn't necessarily bad, but means that the gameplay is appealing to a different audience, which means that a lot of features have been added, but what these added features COULD have been has been dumbed down a bit.

Overall what annoys me is just how I feel like the game is holding my hand, giving me a pop-up every time I unlock a new feature, or flooding me with easy levels. I finally quit when I lost because of the lead camo level, which was just about one of the cheapest ways to get a game over. My overall response to this game is that it's reached a point where now it's just trying too hard. The game is still good, but the spark is gone now.

[Rock Hard Coliseum 1]

Nice work, Stone! I'm really loving the animations here. (Did you do all of them? The body types look a lot like yours...) Everything looks great from movements to particle effects to the sounds. This entire submission is just loaded with polish, and it shows. I also feel like you did some really great pairings, putting together fighters with similar styles which really made the animations more interesting.

What annoys me about this is that it seems like some kind of collab that was turned into a bunch of quicktime events at the last second. I'm not too happy about that. "Guessing" who's going to win, and then participating in short mashing sequences just doesn't do it for me. I'm also not really sure what the exact point is. If a QTE is helping the player you didn't vote on, do you just sit and let them fail? Or are the outcomes all predetermined? What determines how the mashing works? Is the difficulty of the QTE dependent on the actual poll from the original battle? And what the hell do I have to do in order to boost my score up to a 7 from a 6?

The whole game aspect of this just doesn't work out for me, and seems like a cheap way to label an animation as a game. Still, the game looks pretty, and looks are the meat and potatoes of this anyway.

Stone-Steven responds:

Hey I appreciate the lengthy comment. Yes, I did do all of these myself. I'm not much of a coder myself, so I tried to give it a little extra interactivity.

The meat and potatoes is the system of calculating and storing the users selections of characters in the RHC that really makes the user interact with the project as a whole. Even deciding what will happen next in it.

[Super Joe]

What a stressful game.

What you've got here is decent, but just feels unpolished. I can understand that this was a warm-up since you're getting back into programming, but there was a lot you could have fixed. I liked the puzzle element of each level being different, but the sheer difficulty of some levels oftentimes made it feel redundant. The old blood splatter and sound effect also roused some gamer PTSD I had from playing Stickya Adventurya.

Overall the gameplay suffered from minor mechanical issues, length, and difficulty. One really obnoxious issue I had was the last level, where the fan simply wouldn't trigger on some of the bullets, killing me. Another one that had me for a while was the level with ice, which had me struggling because momentum was changing so much. On top of the mechanics screwing with me for the right reasons, I also noticed certain jumps not having as much oomph in them as they should have. Little things like that made a hard game tougher for the wrong reasons.

Sound-wise, I feel like you just tossed in some Doctor Who remix and an old death sound effect without much thought. There aren't even sound effects for jumping or bullets. Because of the difficulty of the game but the length, the song got really repetitive, really quickly. A small playlist of different songs, especially something from the Audio Portal, would have given the game variety.

As far as graphics go, I can see you either used placeholders or slopped together stuff that was barely better. I'm not picky with graphics, and I like how easy it was to play because of its simplicity (nothing distractingly flashy) but you definitely could have done a bit more. The backgrounds are fine, but stick figures could have been bolstered a little bit more. You're not bad with graphics, but even if you didn't want to do anything, you still could have ripped some sprites from Smithy's Quest or something. Hell, you could have even used Tricksy!

Overall fun gameplay, but got really frustrating later on. It would have been really cool if you could go back and user new abilities later on, especially like using different items for different levels, so the same levels would be easier or tougher.

EggysGames responds:

Yeah I do agree with a lot of that. It is a bit rushed for a small game and my artists have all been away so I need some new ones for graphics instead of reusing old stuff.

[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.