Kwing's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Sift Heads 5]

Boring

The whole system of objectives is poor. You run around collecting objectives, finding random things to pick up, shooting things like security cameras... And it really distracts from the main gameplay elements. Not only that but it's hard to navigate the areas... Sometimes I found myself clicking a door and going back to an area I had already been to when I had meant to go to a new area. I couldn't tell which doors went where! This made the entire game VERY tedious. Another thing is that the missions were kind of bad. Sometimes I just had to go to a certain place, and all of the missions were pretty easy. When a bunch of enemies were trying to shoot me, they drew their guns so slowly it was impossible to get killed unless you ran out of ammo. None of the enemies were that far away and there was no need to use any weapon except your default one. The last mission was ridiculous because you could shoot Kiro and he wouldn't die. It would have been nice if he at least dodged the bullet so you knew you couldn't actually shoot him directly. The gameplay all in all was BAD.

The gameplay was also riddled with glitches and lag. Sometimes if you restarted a mission you would appear in the wrong area, etc. That kind of stuff got on my nerves and slowed down the game quite a bit for me.

Aside from that the music was alright, the graphics were very good, and I liked the art style. The storyline also glorifies an interesting perspective of justice that I found myself agreeing with most of the time. If the focus was more on the missions, and the missions had been a bit harder, I think I would have enjoyed the game a lot.

[Vinnie's Rampage - Act.1]

It Was Okay

The graphics were good and I loved the 3D effects when the cars rolled over. Unfortunately there were only 3 weapons, the Uzi obviously being the best choice... The gameplay was horribly bland... There's not much else to it. I get that you were trying to make a survival game out of this but it just didn't work out. I do love the voice after each round though, saying "son of a bitch!" or "cock-suckers!". That was pretty funny.

[Sift Heads 0]

Funny!

The beginning missions are hilarious! Seeing Vinnie as a baby or a drooling teenager really cracks me up! It's also cool getting some backstory from the later missions. The graphics are great, with an awesome black and white theme to it. The sound effects are perfect, although the music isn't as good as the rest of the Sift Heads series, and the gameplay is fun. It plays more like a puzzle game than a first-person shooter though... After beating them the first time around I managed to beat all of the missions in under two minutes, which gives the game limited replay value. Other than that it was pretty good!

[Sift Heads 2]

So Stylish!

Everything from the intro to the menu to the color scheme... It just teems with greatness! The graphics were very, very nicely done despite the fact that the characters were stick figures. The buttons and menu are super cool, although I was annoyed that I left the gun shop every time I bought something. Also on the note of mistakes, you spelled it "Bunty Hunter" on the main map. In fact, there are several grammatical errors throughout the game. Not only that, but when you select a gun for a mission, if you select a different gun, it tells you to choose a weapon when you've chosen one.

The music was especially good. It all fit perfectly to both the situation and the whole style of the game. I wish I could find all of the songs featured in Sift Heads, since the soundtrack is literally the best soundtrack I have ever heard in a Flash game, and better than most console games as well. I only wish you hadn't cut the loops so short. Maybe you could have loaded the entire songs externally...?

The gameplay was fun! The difficulty curve was just right, you never had to wait too long with the cutscenes, and each mission is presented very well. The only thing I didn't like was some weapons didn't target the center of the crosshair, which pissed me off a LOT.

One problem with the entire thing is that the right-click menu is unchanged. I actually managed to play through the mission at the port by hitting Play after it said it was the end of the demo.

[The Company of Myself]

Somber

Wow, where to begin... The menu is very nicely done, very easy to navigate, and has great music to it, although sad. The text for the game thankfully isn't in the same font, which would have been too extravagant. I love how the text isn't frustratingly vague, but revealing either. It just makes me crave the next line. One thing that annoyed me was that I accidentally skipped over a piece of text and wanted to re-read it. Instead of a Continue button, a Level Select button would have been nice. The graphics were good, although the cartoony style didn't fit with the storyline. On that topic, a few of the earlier lines in the game seemed like comic relief, but it just didn't fit the theme. While comic relief would have worked had you incorporated more characters, and had the comic relief been further into the game, it would have worked, but it just distracts from the overall scheme where you put it. Another thing is that the text near the beginning and end had different colors, which kind of vexed me and had no real reason behind it. The gameplay is almost an exact repeat of the console PSP game EchoShift, and there are several games that are like the few levels with Kathryn. The gameplay overall isn't original, but the level design is. They were just about the right difficulty for me, with the exception of the last level which I had to look up a tutorial for and seemed really cheap to me. It was a fun puzzle game though. Another thing that confused me was why he was running through these levels in the first place? Is he inside his own head or what? That would be a total ripoff of your game Reverb. And then there's the really... Er... Nasty twist at the end. They don't explain why he did it, or anything like that. I liked the story better when I thought that Kathryn's death had CAUSED the hermit's insanity. It was a lot more poetic. But from what I can tell about the story, he was mentally unstable the whole time. Some minor storyline alteration would have made this so beautiful I would have been left in tears... Which reminds me just how great raindrop effects are. If you could have added a simple drizzle of rain throughout all of the levels (or some specifically chosen levels), I think it would have enhanced the game a lot.

Overall, this was a fun game with a very sad but beautiful storyline. This video game is a work of art, although I will say the gameplay is a COMPLETE RIPOFF of EchoShift. The storyline is great though, and the way it's presented simply blew me away.

Eli, you are one of the most underrated Flash authors out there. I look forward to seeing more form you in the future, and I really hope you can get the publicity you deserve someday. You have a great history of game-making and I bet you have a great future ahead of you!

[Reverb-Part 1]

Wow!

Graphics are good, although the sticks are simple. Animation is smooth, easing is well-done and realistic, the music fits PERFECTLY. The gameplay is interesting during the battles and the puzzle sequences are intriguing and don't get boring. The biggest part, of course, is the storyline! I found the storyline to be very captivating, and I was hooked from the beginning! Bravo!!

Now all it needs is voice acting!

[Kock Kombat]

Decent

Really not that great though. The graphics are decent pixel-art... Well, actually pretty good. The sound and SFX are bad, though. The gameplay is bland, as you only have one attack, the enemies only have one attack, and the field you're fighting on is completely plain. I would have preferred that you had spiced it up just a little bit. Another thing that annoyed me was there was a background behind the player's health bar but not the enemy's. While you could see the amount of health your enemy had, you couldn't see what percentage of it you had taken away from attacking. Lastly, add more players. All of the players are the same as it is, which is misleading and obnoxious.

[Adventures of MikeMan 2]

Ah...

The graphics are pretty bad. While this is a 2005 game, some elements just shouldn't be there. I wish you could continue the cutscenes by clicking anywhere on the screen, for instance. Another annoyance with the graphic design/layout was that somethings, such as the fireballs, had black outlines that just made it look worse. The buildings looked like gray waffles, and I wish the water would have moved. The gradients would have been really bad, except for some reason they suited the style. The poorly animated character sprite, however, did not.

The music and sound effects got repetitive, although it fit the style of the game. The dialog was really bad in my opinion. Boring and not worth reading.

The gameplay was fun at times, and at other times not. The first big flaw is you start every level with one out of three health hearts. It made it absolutely essential to grab the rest of them. Another thing is the levels flowed badly and there was no principle of momentum. A third thing that got to me was how method the boss battles were. A couple were fun, but as a general rule they were really bad and just required quick reflexes. The layout of each level was rather poor, too. While I liked how you saw an overview of each level through the introductory text and picture, the font was just wrong and should have looked better,

Overall a good effort, but doesn't come close enough.

[Tax Time!]

Wow Haha

The music was great, the graphics followed a really good 8-bit style, and the concept was funny too. Unfortunately the gameplay was bad and it was too short. The choice of the Russian National Anthem really got me. I've been obsessing over that song for months now. I got a good laugh out of it too.

[Larry And The Gnomes]

Epic!

GOOD:
I loved the way the controls worked. While the level design could have used some work, the engine itself was very solid! The stamina system made the game a lot like a real-time version of Final Fantasy Tactics, much like FFT's system of using CT. The rage meter worked a lot like overdrives from RPGs, yet the gameplay was real-time. Combining the best of RPGs and fighting games really made this game enjoyable to me. Another thing I loved was hacking through levels and looking through all of the weapons for a better one. The only thing that pissed me off here was that I wasn't sure what the special parts of the weapons were. Obviously green meant poison, periwinkle slowed down the enemy, but I wasn't sure what some of the other ones were. The music was great, although it got repetitive at times and I would have preferred if it had been more loops than songs. Overall the music was good, but it didn't really stand out. The voice acting was really good, though! The sound quality was amazing, and you got a really good idea of who the characters were based on the voices! Larry is a punk, but I really like his character! Some of the humor at the end was kind of stupid, but it wasn't enough to ruin the story. However, one thing that did ruin it for me was you never found out why the gnomes were attacking or where the fire came from. Last I'll review the graphics. The animation is good, the graphics are good... The layout and presentation is very professional but not overly fancy. One thing that stood out was that the whole game stuck to a very well-established art style, which made it all fit really well.

BAD:
There were some things that bothered me. One was that with all of the dead bodies laying around, it got hard to see weapons or which weapon you were about to pick up. It would have been nice if there was a display that showed the weapon you would pick up if you hit E. Sometimes there were tons of weapons and I would try and pick up one and end up picking up the other. Another thing is that after a lot of boss fights, it was hard to grab your old weapon and continue fighting with it. This made the levels after the boss pretty hard. Lastly it was really easy to end up surrounded by bushes or the spinning blades and end up completely trapped. If the player had more recovery time, it would have been much better and more fair. Also the traps with the spikes in the ground sometimes got covered up by dead bodies, making it extremely hard to spot them, and sometimes impossible. I also would have liked customizable controls and maybe have the camera zoom out more the faster you were going. I also hated the sprinting controls. I wish it had been something like holding down Shift while running as opposed to the double tap. Also, when you pause, the health dots keep bobbing up and down. A simple healthnode.stop(); would have fixed that. On top of that, sometimes I wanted to run back to an earlier part of a level only to find out that I couldn't, or my momentum would drive me into the end of the level and I would be unable to turn around fast enough to break open a vase or crate. I also hated the final boss. It was set up so that you could get into position to unleash a huge combo on him, or he would end up hitting you, and as you were recovering he'd unleash 2 or 3 more attacks on him. It was all about luring him to either the upper side or lower side of the screen so he would only use melee attacks. It was really bad. Another thing that ticked me off about the boss battle was that it was easy to accidentally collect a health pack you didn't need. Not the normal ones, but the glowing ones. Also, the final boss had a jump attack that was way overpowered. If you were still recovering while he did it, it was very possible for you to die with over half of your health. I was also upset you couldn't replay specific levels or look at a compendium of all of the weapons you've collected, and how many there were total.

Some of the flaws really seep into the gameplay, but overall I loved it!