Kwing's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[AN Escape Series #3]

Alright

I liked the minimalistic graphic style and the sound quality was really damn realistic, but what pissed me off was how stupid the gameplay was. It started out great but then got ridiculous.

Night5? How are we supposed to know that's a password? Sure it looks like a hint, but why would we find it there? That's pretty stupid. And why is Gush7 on the light? That makes no sense either! The only thing you find in those lamps are dead bugs... What a stupid gameplay quirk. I think it's also stupid you have to write down Arch as 2724, as multiple letters go to one number, meaning it would be more prudent if the telephone service rigged it up to some kind of street number. And then the words scrawled on the fountain. Who the hell did that? Why would that release a key?

By the time I hit the minigame I was incredulous. This game is so unrealistic it's not even funny. You can't even call 911, which would obviously have solved the entire puzzle in all of about 30 seconds. Next time maybe make it so either 9 or 1 is missing, and so that instead of passwords you have some kind of emergency hotline maybe... I don't know, but this game is wonky and surrealistic and it pissed me off. I really liked how the phone booth was such a cozy little place containing so much gameplay, and yet it was all ridiculous.

[Noob Cursor Tutorial fix]

A Nice Tutorial

I really like the layout you have. Nice, simple graphics, nothing too showy... Although I wish the buttons had been a slightly different color than the text, for a bit of clarity. Thankfully you got rid of a lot of the distractions lots of authors put in their submissions and you kept it simple. I would have liked a mute button though. Also, on the maze tutorial, you could have reduced the memory on the example maze, as right now it looks pretty rough and bumpy, which I find unappealing.

As for understandability, the screenshots are high-quality and explain things very well, and the Extras and Script buttons were helpful. However, it bothered me that you didn't explain the script for the watcher or chaser. When you break down the script, things such as radians and atan2 aren't noobish at all. These are the kinds of things you learn in trigonometry, which is pretty complex material. Even a simple explanation would be helpful. Also, there are four lines of code on the watcher script that aren't necessary at all; they just assign values to variables that are never used.

[Flash Rpg Game]

Wtf Did I Just Play?

The graphics are... Terrible. Just circles and squares, and no real animation aside from a simple tween. You can buy the same thing in the shop twice, which wastes your money big time. There are no sound effects, and the gameplay is just awful... But let me go into the gameplay more:

You can buy weapons which increase your strength and you can increase your stats. Since I'm assuming your damage is based on a multiple of your strength, increasing your strength is infinitely better than increasing your health points. The problem is you can buy weapons over and over, wasting money, and you can only use your mana for one magic attack. This means all you need to do is magic, attack, attack, magic, *attack, attack, attack, magic, repeat from asterisk. In fact, after a little while your normal attacks are stronger than the magic attack as well.

Next, some enemies give out the same amount of experience. Because of that, you should always defeat the weakest enemy that gives the most experience... Aside from that, this game is just pure click-mashing and grinding. And each time you level up it takes twice as much experience to level up again! That's unheard of! You can buy bombs which should deal lots of damage, but I found that my normal attack was actually stronger, so the bombs are a waste of money.

Overall, I found the best 'strategy' for this game is to repeatedly fight a monster weak enough for you to kill without using magic (Battle 7), so you can just mash one button, then repeat the battle over and over until you level up, at which point you dump your stats into strength and then repeat. The equipment increases exponentially, so you can just skip buying weapons until the last one is available.

I finally settled for Laser Spikes and beat the boss without magic. I kept grinding to $15,000, though, just to see the last weapon's graphic. Most of the time grinding I was tabbing the whole thing, so I had to hold down the Enter key for less than a second to win a battle. The "Epic Wep" was not as epic as I had hoped, although it was pretty strong, admittedly.

Overall... I didn't like it at all. If you don't understand why, re-read my review.

[Madness Mouse The Game]

Decent

I like the concept, but maybe some time limits, better animation, more levels, and obviously ways to lose would make it better. Even if you didn't animate all of the ways to lose, you could cut someone's time in half by clicking the wrong thing, for instance. The animation looked almost tweened a points, and I saw absolutely no effort in the easing at all. Maybe you could have animated this FBF with sticks and then traced over it later?

[It's Raining Cats and Dog]

Decent

I really liked the graphics. The art style you used was really cute and there was a really natural/organic feel to everything you had up there. And as it was, I actually think it did better without being animated at all. To fit the style, though, I think it would have been really cool if there had been a little white or brown outline around the graphics and then a drop shadow behind them. It would have made the graphics look cardboard-y and it would have given you some major bonus points.

It was a shame there were no sound effects or music. Just a little bit of ambient music from the Audio Portal would have done, and even though the sound effects could have gotten repetitive, at least a little 'ding' every time you hit a certain number of points would have livened it up just a little.

As for the gameplay... I really like what you did here. The concept isn't overly original but it's not by any means bad. The powerups you put in worked nicely and spiced up the experience. Perhaps you could have given the objects a principle of momentum, though. They look kind of odd the way they are now. One last thing I'd like to point out is the canvas size is obnoxiously large. Size it down a bit so that it can all fit on the screen at once and I'd have bumped up your score a little bit.

[Boring Game]

Frustrating

The graphics are really bad, although the animation is actually pretty decent with the coins. There's no sound, which I would have liked. The game being silent makes it... Well, boring. The gameplay was decent though. When you had to start avoiding things it got pretty difficult. What I didn't like was that you couldn't hold down the up button to jump. I lost dozens of life because I was holding down the up key but not jumping. While the game is fun, I wish there were checkpoints or something.

[Newgrounds HQ Showdown]

Disappointing

The graphics are very nicely done, and the animation is decent. The music is alright, but kind of annoying and no song is really memorable. The sound effects are very basic and sometimes I noticed hitting an enemy with no sound effect for making contact.

The gameplay of course is the main point of the game. This is where the real letdown is. This is just a copycat of Portal Defenders, with different graphics and more slide in the main character. It's also a lot easier. I wish the weapon you got said something about its damage/knockback/weight just so that you knew they were different... As it is I suspect they actually aren't different, especially as a lightsaber makes the same whacking sound effect. The keys are, at times, somewhat slow to respond. Characters also get knocked down way too often... Enemies should get knocked down around 4 or 5 times before they die, while the main character should fall down about 3 or 4 times before he or she dies. Another thing that bugged me is the strategy is the exact same for every level. Rush enemy, spam attack, done. There were no bosses early on that required you to block, and I couldn't even jump! No good combos to use, either. The hitTest is also very stingy, and if by some miracle you manage to die, you have to redo the same (boring) levels all over again. No checkpoints, and no way to recover health. I wouldn't mind if the levels were fresh and entertaining, but they're not.

This is basically just another game that BoMToons puts out, except there's now a different person who made almost the exact same game engine, and someone else did the graphics. Whoop de doo.