Kwing's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Submachine 08: 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.

[Submachine 01: the Basement]

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.

[Beat The Stimpy]

Interesting. This interactive movie could use a lot of work, but what you have isn't bad at all. The animation is very good, and I appreciate the effort put into it being full body. You can definitely recognize Ren and Stimpy. I don't feel like this needs to be any longer, although a few more animations would be nice. Still, what this animation really needs is color, and maybe something that changes the animations based on how many times you've clicked.

[Perspective]

Decent. The graphics were really good, and the gameplay was interesting. It reminded me a bit of Time Fcuk, although I was expecting something closer to Echochrome from the description. The puzzles were challenging, bot bordered closer to frustrating than fun. I figured them all out without a walkthrough, and yet despite finding the game to be obnoxiously punitive, once I beat it the game somehow felt too short. The music is decent as well but gets repetitive way too quickly. I also felt like the plotline made very little sense. There isn't really enough to keep the player captivated, to be honest.

[Amoeba Amoeba]

Pure genius. I can't even remember how I found this but it's hilarious, the graphics are amazing despite being obnoxiously bright and a little pixelly, the animation is great, the sound effects are good, the music is really fitting, and the voice acting is top-notch.

The gameplay is a bit of a weak point given that some characters just have huge advantages over others; for instance, Granny's crouching punch attack has a huge range and is super spammable, while Butcher's cleaver has very little range. The addition of unique character endings is really great, though. Even if it's a twisted game. I guess one other problem I had with the game was that it's so short you can't get a very good feel for the control scheme. If you added one or two more characters that would have been resolved completely.

[One and One Story]

I can't believe it's not Eli! You've got a really good game here. Fun puzzle elements, nice and stimulating without being too hard. I liked the graphics and Carney did a great job with the soundtrack, as always.

My only real complaint is that the plotline lacked originality and had all of the depth of a Linkin Park song with all of its abstract droning about pain and heartbreak. Fixation's tale of murder wasn't exceptionally creative, but the dialogue and the very detailed plot made it so much more real and concrete. I would have liked to see some dialogue to draw us to these particular video game characters rather than just allowing the players to associate them with themselves.

Because the plot was rather watered down, I also noticed the game itself was really short. Even bonus mode only lasted a couple minutes. Perhaps it would have been cool to have full control over the level selection and ruleset in order to allow players to try every possible combination of every level, whether it was with the characters walking together, inverse, etc.

[Fisher-Diver]

Fun game! The graphics were really nice, and I especially loved the concept of shooting each part of a fish only once. This made taking aim really crucial and the gameplay interesting. Although it lagged once you started going deeper, I feel like you still could have done more to make the game a bit longer, especially with the journals. I liked the fusion of Motherload and flOw, but some upgrades just didn't feel worth it, especially the harpoon, since I had practically beaten the game by the time I got it.

The story was interesting, but I don't feel like it was up to the quality standards of your other work. The hunter becomes the hunted, okay, we've seen that before. Maybe I'm missing something. I feel like Carney could have done better when it came to the music, too. Somehow the mood of the game didn't really capture me the way your other games have.

Even so, this is a very original and fun game!

[Utopian Mining]

Could it go any slower? Honestly!! Boring Motherload clone with tile-ish graphics, a giant map, and a ridiculous depth limit, but worst of all, a game that runs so incredibly slow you could fall asleep while playing? Please, this robot should be moving at least three times as fast as he is, even if he uses up that much more gas. The boredom level is unbelievable! Be grateful I only took off a star and a half for this, I should have docked you twice as much.