Kwing's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Colour my Heart]

Am I missing out? No, no I'm not. The background is really nice, but it's hard to get immersed in it, most likely because of the camera. Simply having the camera zoom in and out slightly at different points, or better yet, adding in a way to control the camera's zoom with two buttons, would have made the whole game more engrossing. On top of that, I found the animation to be rather minimalistic and the controls to be a bit slow for my liking.

You say there are hidden features and that this game is an experience, but there isn't really anything to do except sit and watch. Most games that are more of an experience than being objective use the interactivity of games to build upon the experience, rather than to deliver more still images to the player. flOw is a good example of how this can be done, and Silent Hill is a close follow-up as well.

I guess the part of this game that really annoyed me the most was how the dialogue was so poorly written. It didn't really touch on anything serious or intelligent, in my opinion. I remember playing Colour My World, and both that and this game have romantic themes that don't really dive into the depth or complications of what love really is, which I find particularly ironic given that the black and white them and music are supposed to be more somber and even melancholy. I'd also note that the music itself got really annoying, probably due to the lack of a bass line to keep the whole piece grounded properly.

Anyway, the graphics look great but I think incorporating them into a game was a mistake. There's a right way and a wrong way to draw a gamer into art, and this is definitely the wrong way.

[AN Escape Series #1]

Excellent game. I love the simple graphics and the cozy feel of being trapped in a small area, rather than a point and click where you're exploring huge environments. In my opinion the code, especially the number, is really obscure and it's not really fair to expect us to get how to beat it, but for the most part the difficulty was nice and even.

[Doom Triple Pack]

One hell of a port. Can't really say much since you didn't make this, but I can tell you that the graphic quality is completely intact, the game runs without any lag, and the controls are extremely responsive! What more can you ask for?

[Hungry Gamers]

Interesting. I guess you could say it's well done, even as a joke, but goddamn is it frustrating, especially given that you're supposed to get medals during this...? My guess is you just have to die repeatedly until you get the right medals, like the Cato one, but holy shit this is mean. You could at least give players an extra couple seconds before they die. Worse, I couldn't really tell who was who, and if I remember correctly, the tributes are supposed to be lined up in numeric order.

Cruel joke, but good job. Too bad all this art and music is going to waste.

[SOLID SNEAK]

Not bad. The graphics are nice and simple, the music is good, and the gameplay is nice and simple, but there are some serious issues here, the first being that the game lags horribly once you shut the lights off, and it seems as if the game plays the same with the lights out anyway! I would have loved a way to shut the lights off to reduce the range at which enemies could spot you, but as it is there's no reason to add that effect when it makes my computer freeze. Second, I noticed some problems with neutralizing enemies that made some levels impossible for me. Maybe you should look into that. Third, when the game turned into a 3D look, it became kind of hard to understand where exactly the enemies' lines of sight were falling, and that made this game a lot more frustrating than it should have been. And last, the storyline looks good but is too enigmatic to be enjoyable.

Great effort, but needs tons of work.

[Awaken: Front Line]

Almost unplayable.

This game has great graphics, a great sound track, and a great concept, only the control scheme is just so awful I can't give it more than a 3/5. Normally I would give more stars from the effort, but since it's obvious that you're a good enough designer to know better, I'm giving you my full wrath and docking two full points for this screwup.

The single largest issue with this game is that soldiers act on their own WAY too much. Automatically reloading, automatically attacking, automatically looting. It was unbearably obnoxious and it made it physically hurt to play the game due to the fact that playing this game was an almost entirely passive experience.

I get that automatically reloading is supposed to be a convenient feature, but I would rather have the character flash orange when they're out of bullets and red when they're low on health... Also making interactive objects blink when the grid is set to appear would have been nice. This all snowballs into its own little problem of its own: As a game designer, it's important to let your audience know exactly what's going on in a game. Blind spots, whether in an action, adventure, driving, or strategy game (or all the other genres I didn't mention) are extremely annoying and can quickly make a great game unplayable.

Also let me point out how ludicrous it is to reload from a supply box one bullet at a time. If you wanted to make the game harder, you should have made the zombies stronger. Certain actions like that, or like the stat system which would have normally given the game more polish instead felt superficial, unrealistic, and annoying. You're severely lacking in aesthetics here!

That being said, I think the whole tile-based real-time strategy concept is awesome, and I think it's a great way to stimulate to make quick judgments while also being an extremely realistic way to think of battle tactics. Part of the reason this game pissed me off so much was because I genuinely wanted to enjoy and get to like this game.

dovganovskiy responds:

Hello!
Some notes about AI :)
We listen to many testers and made THIS Ai after listening much comments from different people. And here are reasons for that.
Soldiers don't attack zombies , while they are busy/looting---- It is made to increase income ! Imagine if your looters will shoot at everyone... No profit... And almost no damage.
Soldiers don't shoot to zombies , who are eating his friends :) ---- Soldiers choose closest enemy . Pretty egoistic , but if they will cover others , not themselves - they will be dead too...
Soldiers suddenly go to top of the screen ----- They go to the closest reloading point . I need to explain why?
PS Also we made ability to player to aim soldiers , if you has no time to do it - just press spacebar! Good luck :)

[Modern Tactics 4]

Getting better... The balance of complexity and simplification is fairly good, although the different weapons seem superfluous, as I was able to beat the game on Normal difficulty without really putting much thought into it. Graphics and sound are improved from previous versions, but the bad camera remains an issue. Most importantly, every single level feels the exact same. This is because every unit behaves so similarly to every other unit, and that is a problem worth fixing. Also, the fact that almost every attack took 90-100% of an enemy's health made the tactics very similar between rounds. I also felt that certain abilities were much more useful than others, such as the ultrapowerful frag grenades.

Needs work, but it's getting better bit by bit.

[Knight Tactics]

A fair attempt... The graphics and gameplay are simple and elegant, and I think you cloned the important gameplay aspects from Final Fantasy Tactics, but there are other issues, namely the control scheme. First off, the little red spinner showing whose turn it was helped, but not enough. Having a unit light up when its turn came would have been much easier. I also don't like that it's somewhat difficult to roll over the tile you want. This interrupted the flow of gameplay horribly, especially since there was no way to change the angle at which things were viewed. While it's not strictly necessary to make the whole map rotatable, I would have appreciated something even as simple as an overhead view, like Tactics Ogre does. Since this game doesn't make much use of the height stat (there are very few instances in which someone is too high or low to attack), I think the overhead view would have proved itself to be a much better option.

The graphic scheme also made the controls harder to handle. Enclosing each option for this or that within a box and adding more sound effects for each popup would have clearly highlighted every gameplay element, making things run smoother. The windows and interface also seemed to pop up in the wrong places, making it increasingly confusing to play the game.

That being said, I think the party system and point system were great ways to simplify a game that's otherwise much too complex for Flash, and the level editor is a really cool idea. The AI is fairly impressive, and what you have here is excellent groundwork for a better game.

I'm not much of a graphic snob, but the main thing getting in the way of this submission is the confusing nature of the graphic layout, which makes gameplay close to impossible. However, for 2007 this is pretty damned good.

[Madness Scene Creator 5]

Whoa, serious issues here! Alright, since this is a scene creator rather than a game or movie with a beginning and end, I think the best thing to do is list the problems rather than put them in a paragraph:

1. Mute button doesn't work. Sorry to bitch, but it doesn't. It's not that hard to type in stopAllSounds(); so why not do it?

2. The graphics are incomplete. There are tons of weapons and objects from Madness Combat that are missing, especially in the melee weapons category. I understand sprite crowding is an issue, but that brings me to another problem...

3. The interface is awful. It might be nice to have some kind of display box pop up, rather than having to hold down keys and press and hold to resize or rotate objects. Even as it is, there are issues with layers, and I've found things to screw up while resizing. I think the _xscale and _yscale are disproportionate with each other while enlarging and shrinking items.

4. No reset button. Say I screw something up and want to start over. Well damn, do I have to wait through an advertisement all over again? Apparently so. This should be an easy fix, man.

5. Copied and pasted sprites. WHY?!?! The least obstructive and easiest-to-use system for a scene creator would be to have a list of all of the sprites as buttons, possibly a scrollable list, and then have those buttons spawn your objects through linkage. This would reduce lag, make navigation easier, reduce crowding on the background, and it would make everything look much more elegant. It would also be great for deleting objects from the screen if they were resized wrong or something. Really, I can't recommend this enough.

6. Twitch-reflex rotation. Why do you have to just time your clicks to get your rotation how you want it? If objects had a pop-up window when you clicked on them, you could manually type in a rotation between 0 and 360 to make scene creating much, much easier!

I don't know how well tuned your ActionScript skills are, but if I were you I would look at the level editor in Happy Wheels or Crush the Castle and try to mimic those, as they have very pretty and easy-to-use interfaces.

Some terms to look up: getNextHighestDepth, getDepth, loadSound, useHandCursor, attachMovieClip, stopAllSounds.

F1Krazy responds:

Hoo boy. That's a lot of criticisms. All of them justified, I guess, so let's get down to it...

1. I did at least say that the mute button was broken. I think I tried that code in MSC4, and then it didn't un-mute itself again, there must be something I'm not doing right >.>

2. Yeah, there just isn't enough room to fit everything in (because of problem No.3), I wanna fit more in but physically can't.

3. I know, yeah. I just sort of crammed in all the items and code without thinking. I used to put everything in separate layers so I could keep track of and fix layering issues, but this time everything's in one layer so it's harder to do that. And I really need to fix the scaling issues.

4. I'll look into that for next time, it does seem to be a recurring request.

5. Yeah...this is the big one. Back when I made the first one I had no idea how to make things duplicate, so I just copy/pasted everything multiple times. I never learned the code for duplication, and nobody else really had an issue with it until recently, so I just kept it like this. I did get the code for duplication recently (I think it's the same method you suggested), but I felt I was too far along at that point to just scrap everything and redo it. I will fix this. Maybe not in this version, but I will fix it.

6. Maybe I made the rotation system a bit too fine this time around ^^'

As for how well tuned my ActionScript skills are...well, not very. I'd like to have better interfaces for everything but at the moment it's a bit beyond my skill level. Some of the other stuff, I'm sure I can try and fix.

I will definitely look up those terms, although some of them look familiar, probably from haphazard attempts at trying (and failing) to use them.

Thank you. This is probably the most helpful and detailed review I've gotten in a long time.