Kwing's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[dotHack]

The Only Winning Move is Not to Play

Gosh, does this remind me of Thermonuclear War. The graphics are simple and look nice, which make this game feel easy to play except for two quirks: One, I wish darkened hexagons that were not currently moving anywhere had some kind of notification when they turned dark, like a white ripple coming from the hexagon. Second, some kind of timer such as a rapidly turning hourglass or a bar filling up repeatedly would have been nice. Since the numbers only changed every second, I kept getting this uncomfortable feeling of lag, even though nothing was going wrong.

The sound effects were good, albeit a bit repetitive. The music was similar; I would have liked if you had several tracks that shuffled themselves during gameplay. For a game as repetitive and methodical as this, neglecting to use Audio Portal integration was a dealbreaker for me.

Now onto the gameplay... This is kind of like the Japanese game Go, only there are a lot more flaws. The first of these is that it's always obvious where to go. Once you realize that the more tiles you dominate, the more resources you build up, it's inherently obvious that you should spread where you can and prevent the enemy from doing the same. Worse, the AI lacks any kind of strategy and seems to target random tiles whereas you can eliminate one group of enemy tiles at a time in order to prevent them from growing.

Where your tiles should go is obvious, and the only thing that ever screwed me up while I was playing was when arrows would disappear due to lack of resources coming from a particular tile. I feel like this is the wrong reason for this to happen; I would have preferred if the arrow turned a different color and went on standby mode until the tile built up enough resources to continue moving them to another tile. Another thing that bothered me about this was that it seemed like a really cheap excuse for making the game 'real-time'. Forcing the player to constantly re-routing their resources from place to place kept me busy enough not to realize how much strategy this lacked until I was several levels in... But unfortunately I did realize it, and I must say it shows how incredibly tedious this game can be.

I only made it 12 levels in and I have no interest in going farther. This game is addictive only because it puts the next level right in front of your face before you can think to stand up and walk away from the computer. Even so, it was a good effort. Perhaps more complexity would add more depth to this game, although tons of powerups and stuff might also wreck its elegance.

[Wink: the Game]

Excellent

I played this game a long time ago and somehow lost track of it because I kept confusing it with Thing Thing. I'm glad I finally found it again!

The graphics are minimalistic but very cute, and the simplicity of everything really makes it feel 'good' to look at it. The animation as well. Most of the in-game objects seem like highly polished placeholders, and for some reason I really like it that way. My only complaint is that on some surfaces which only have on color and nothing on them, you can quickly lose track of how far you've run in one direction, or how far you've fallen from a ledge.

The sound is excellent!! The voice acting is witty and done excellently, the music is really dramatic and high quality, and the sound effects are very satisfying to listen to.

The gameplay is quite complex, but works out well. I love how simple things work out with only a few extra buttons aside from the arrow keys. Certain things such as the ledge mechanism make the game look extra polished, plus stealth games are something that Newgrounds needs a lot more of.

I think the difficulty is balanced pretty well, motivating the player to use stealth, but the thing that really pissed me off was how easy it was to get lost. The up and down arrows are all but useless for looking up and down; it only gives you an extra 50 pixels of difference! Being able to look 400 pixels in any direction might have been a bit better. This is what caused me to miss the platform that lead up to the guard holding the Wind Staff the first time I played this, and it took me way longer than it should have this time around as well. Trying to figure out where every little nook and cranny is makes the game way too hard for the wrong reasons, and makes otherwise exciting gameplay tedious.

Even so, this game still turned out incredibly. I have to say I'm really glad I found it again!

[-Stick War-]

I Never Reviewed This?!

This has got to be one of the greatest real-time strategies ever created! Balance an economy with an army and overtake the enemy!

The graphics are great. Animation is mind-blowingly realistic and the stick figures are really good representations of troops. The ground and statues look gorgeous and the menu is also very well polished.

The music is great and the sound effects work too. Voice work is a nice addition and makes it feel more modern, though I wish there were more.

The gameplay's the best, of course. Each type of unit is unique, and all of the upgrades are equally tempting to get. There's a lot of strategy involved, yet taking control of a character also adds an action-like element as well. I cannot describe how great this feels to play!! The only problem I have is that there aren't any huge advantages or disadvantages due to position; adding elements like mountains or water would be a cool idea, and impeding the movement of troops would also make battles drag on longer for more strategic play.

AWESOME JOB!!!

[This Game Makes Sense]

Decent

This game looks to be done fairly well, with good animation, really good graphics, catchy music, and nice sound effects, but it suffers from incredibly difficult gameplay with absolutely no motivation to move on; while fun for a while, dying over and over because the controls are ridiculously slippery gets annoying when you aren't unlocking anything at all.

thinking-man responds:

The main thing that I impressed myself with, is making a working platformer engine that isn't glitchy at all.

[Inquisitive Dave]

100% Amazing

By the time I saw Crazy Monkey Games, I knew it was going to be good. CMG, along with Armor Games, is one of the few sponsors for Flash games that I swear by.

The graphics are really good, and the animation really blew me away. While the whole 8-bit thing has been redone several times too many,the game still looks good and feels good.

The sound is decent, although it got somewhat repetitive after a while, especially if you ran back and forth between two areas with different music, confused, the way I did.

The gameplay felt really good as well. The basic wild goose chase thing was implemented better than I've seen it in any other game; I was never stuck for long, and everything seemed to make sense. The game played very quickly and didn't get tedious once. The only criticism I have is the improbability of knowing to put cake mix in a lake. That, and the boss battle, which I felt was frustrating due to the fact that you have to time the mirror flipping JUST right in order to hit him.

The storyline was absolutely phenomenal, although the writing for it should have been better. The satire at the beginning was amusing and kept me playing more than anything, and the statements about generic video games reminded me a lot of Half-Minute Hero. In fact, the 45-second dash to the castle had me thinking that, too.

When the Wizard at the tower started talking about the system, I was reminded slightly of The Matrix and its amazing storyline. The idea of the protagonist operating inside of a system was interesting, but I feel that the Wizard's jibes and taunts should have been written a lot better. Conceptually it was brilliant, but for something like that, you need an EXTREMELY talented writer... Someone who's pursuing an advanced degree in literature, writing or theater, for sure.

The final final battle was interesting, although it only took me about 30 seconds to realize that all you had to do was abstain from the system. The epilogue was pretty well written as well, although I found it pretty frustrating that Dave never even says anything. I understand the tones of freedom and determinism in the game, and I get that Dave is supposed to be a silent protagonist, but you could have at least had him talk to emphasize his newly-acquired freedom.

Overall, I thought this game was done very, very well! It seems like you thought this idea was a little more clever than it actually was, judging by the dialogue that takes place, but overall I think this is one of the best plotlines of anything found on Newgrounds. You, sir, have earned a 5, a favorite, and a new fan.

[Madness: Premeditation]

Fair

The graphics look good and the audio is high quality and fitting. All in all the presentation and looks are good, as is the layout. The game lags horribly, though, so I really think you should have simplified the graphics. Really, nobody would have minded if the game would just run smoother. Or at least you could have added a Quality option.

For the graphic layout of the nodes system, it might have been easier to use the arrow keys to navigate a dot on the path rather than clicking on it to create a node, as I regularly clicked a path I didn't mean to when it overlapped. On top of that, I got frustrated if a replay didn't allow me to go back to the menu and I knew it was bound to fail.

The gameplay is where it runs into serious issues, though. For one, while I like the style of movement, it gets frustrating when you get killed simply because you mapped out the patterns incorrectly. The way avoiding fire works simply constitutes that you look at the timer as an enemy attacks... Which you can't do until you've already mapped out an attack pattern first. But basically all you have to do is look at where the enemy is and when, and make sure to avoid this hit at this time.

The node system was frustrating for the reasons I listed above, but overall I really liked the system and thought it was a cool concept. Again, my biggest issue was that the 'strategy' consisted of watching where enemies moved and when; the way it's so static and formulaic takes the strategy out of a strategy game.

One last thing I'll mention is the arsenal system. Since it takes so long to get a point, I found the grenade thing to be horribly useless, as you only get one for the next round, so after I bought and used my first one, I never once thought to get another. Second, the whole gun thing was explained rather poorly and it was quite a while before I understood how it worked. Some kind of better explanation would have been nice.

One thing I'll say I did like was the ability to watch other peoples' replays. That was really cool, and obviously it gave a game surprising cinematic value. Kudos on that!

The concept is really cool, but seeing as you only lose if you map out a number wrong, I found it to get tedious and decided to grind after getting to the final boss, as it just isn't worth the trouble otherwise.

[Builder 3D]

Confusing

I didn't like the control scheme at all, and the controls were given very quickly and with little explanation. Personally, I would have made it so you could rotate the blocks with ASD and adjusted the view with SHIFT+WASD, to give the player full keyboard control. Also, making the blocks transparent and giving a zoom option would have been helpful.

As it is, I was struggling to figure out how to rotate something this way or that way... And yet, the shapes were so small I wasn't even struggling a little! One last criticism is that I couldn't stand the fact that you can't make the blocks fall any faster! This made the gameplay extremely slow.

Other than that, great job! I love the 3D concept!

[Hallow's Scars]

Grawr

I think most of the problems came between us having different versions of Flash. My engine played great on its own, and your graphics look amazing... Sadly it seems something was lost in translation when you plugged in everything. Still, a good step forward.