Kwing's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[SPERT BALLS]

Have you played Brainsplatters 2? This reminds me a LOT of that game and it's hard not to directly compare the two (which is kind of crazy considering that game is nearly twice your age.) Anyway...

Virtually everything about the aesthetics of this game are pretty flawed. The drawings, voice acting, writing, and gameplay could all stand to get some major improvements. That said, I have a lot of appreciation for the level of detail put into giving this game every little bell and whistle, even if those bells and whistles are themselves flawed.

For instance, the animated intro, animated menu, and voice acting are all inclusions that aren't strictly necessary for a "click stick figures to shoot them" game, but contribute to a really cinematic experience. In a way, this feels more like a concept sketch or animatic of an actual game, given how lacking the assets are but how complete the structure is.

Aside from the rather generic advice of "put more effort into the graphics" something really critical in making this a better game would be ramping up the difficulty. Forcing the player to click the stick figures faster, making the stick figures move, or more complex methods of killing bad guys (similar to having to find the hiding sticks in the last level) would make this more engaging instead of allowing the player to cruise through the entirety of the game in a single attempt.

Ibs571 responds:

I did actually played Brainsplatters 2 about when I was 6 yrs old (8 yrs ago) on stickpage but the main inspiration I took was from a game called Sift Heads I remember playing that game with my brother years ago

Note: Originally I was going to add puzzles and different mechanics but the 2023 flash forward deadline was near and then I rushed it

[Ucogi GO]

There's not much here other than a walking simulator. The graphics and overall production quality are nice, but there's not enough here to really call it a game.

The biggest issue with what you have (and this issue really does stand front and center) is that rolling over the circles to move to them just feels really bizarre and unnecessarily tedious due to how small the circles are. Using arrow keys (even if the arrows have a button overlay on the screen, as many mobile games do) would make this feel so much more accessible. As it is, the awkwardness makes it feel like I'm playing a port even on its intended platform.

Veinom responds:

I wanted this to be a game that you can play with your mouse only, but you are right. I was considering making the blue circles bigger, and I will try adding keyboard controls as an alternative. Thank you.

[A Dress Up Game]

Well, it's a dress-up game, taken a bit more literally than anyone expected. The music and graphics are solid, but the clicking and dragging mechanic is a bit frustrating because the depth of the objects being manipulated can make it so the mouse gets stuck dragging objects around.

Some simple QoL improvements would be to have a toggler for things that are obviously meant to go in one place (such as clothes and accessories) and allowing the player to dynamically spawn and delete decorations like arrows, circles, and spirals, rather than just having a bunch of them shoved into the corner. Also, manipulating the background with something other than the spacebar would be nice, it seems like a total non-sequitur to include keyboard controls.

Cyberdevil responds:

Indeed it is, though hopefully that unexpected literal twist was an appreciable entertainment factor too; redeeming point of an otherwise functionally I agree somewhat limited game. ;) Mmm, I've wondered why the mouse sometimes gets stuck like that, it doesn't seem to happen often (for me at least) but I do agree, not ideal. An extra click seems to let go of the item that's being dragged when this happens.

Such things go beyond my coding capabilities, but all good ideas for sure. In regard to the background you can toggle it via one of the on-screen arrow buttons as well. Personally I feel like keyboard shortcuts are always a benefit; the quickest way to perform an action. If however you're on mobile/touchscreen everything but music can be toggled within the game also, thinking of it now I really should've added a button for music too if you actually do not have a keyboard, essential feature...

Appreciate the feedback Kwing! Maybe I'll up my coding capabilities a bit till next year.

[Tidying Up + Secrets of the Sewers]

The aesthetic for this game isn't my style, but there's no denying it works really well. The UI and music just look really polished, and you even have some filters (film grain and the scan lines over the character avatars) to make the game visually pop.

That said, there are a couple UI things that I found a bit annoying which should be easy fixes. The dialogue and music buttons take up a lot of the screen, and I'd rather just have a settings button for music and a popup for dialogue that went away completely after the cutscene finished, as they take up a lot of real estate and make the game screen look cluttered. The controls on the right also seem cluttered until you realize they're there for mobile players. This could potentially be something a desktop user could hide to free up more space, but it's less important. Finally (and this is really a 5 minute fix) I was confused by the fact that the only way to tell who the player is controlling is the "ACTIVE: 1" indicator at the top of the screen (and the sparkles, which only pop up for a fraction of a second and then are gone completely.) Why not have some kind of effect or even just a color change over the active player character?

One more small nitpick regarding presentation is that the amount of juice in the transitions and the quantity of dialogue (which is kind of cliche) make it feel like too small a percent of the time the player spends with the game open is actually gameplay, which only becomes more annoying with the puzzles themselves being so easy. I finished this game feeling unsatisfied, and while the level creation system hypothetically allows players to enjoy more content and more difficult levels, it feels a bit like outsourcing an important part of the game onto the player when the content included in story mode is so lean.

On a more fundamental level, there's an interesting concept here, but I REALLY didn't like the level design. Most of the levels are braindead easy, and the ones that are even slightly hard hinge entirely on keeping one of the characters trapped until the end of the level. Sliding puzzles where a character can only stop when they hit an obstacle are common, and the idea of being able to manipulate an obstacle (the capybara) so as to put the sliding character in optimal positions is a novel twist, but if all of the difficulty comes from keeping Capy locked away in a little area where she can't help, your level design has undone the exact mechanic which differentiates this game from every other slider puzzle.

I get why you made an easy game. Harder games score significantly lower on the site and it's clear whoever designed the game knew their audience. At the same time, there are ways to reward more skilled play, even if basic completion of the game is easy. The most obvious idea is to keep count of how many moves the player has made, and recognize if a player is able to complete the same level in fewer moves.

4.5/5 for a really solid concept, but I'd like to see a player pack flesh out the content with a bit more difficulty and replayability.

Bleak-Creep responds:

Thanks for the in-depth review! The character portrait labels are a bit buggy yet and could definitely use some work, I agree there. We're planning on having the characters flash briefly when switching between them in a future build too, we just ran out of time and used the sparkles as a simple replacement for the time being.

As for the levels themselves, I know we did struggle a bit at first at trying to determine exactly what levels mechanics would be kind of make sense in the house setting as well as how to keep Capy from feeling too "OP" once he's able to move around freely.

There's a good chance we might go back in and add some bonus levels that add more challenge later too, but we aimed toward making the storyline a more accessible experience so players could get the whole story within a a single sitting without getting too frustrated.

[Shadow Gauntlet]

I really wanted to like this. The concept is really cool, balancing the recoil for movement as well as attacking targets or grappling.

That said, the physics are really an acquired taste. The recoil is too weak and the player's momentum decays too slowly, making everything feel really floaty. I couldn't get past level 6 because of how unequipped the recoil strength is to counteract gravitational force.

Having a bit snappier controls, specifically stronger recoil and weaker gravity, would make this much more accessible.

EDIT: Finally figured out that where you grab the bird in level 6 affects its tilt and therefore the direction it flies (it flies straight, relative to where it's facing.) Still totally lost on how to unlock the portal in level 8.

VicBiss responds:

Thanks for the feedback! I've had to do all of the level design and testing over the past week or so to get it out for the Flash Forward Jam. So it's quite rushed. I actually just weakened the gravity a bit and think it is feeling better.

[Color Collision!]

Unfortunately this is just too simple to be worthwhile. From the name "Color Collision" I was expecting there to be some kind of system that centered around combining colors, or scoring bonus points by building up streaks of the same color, so just running around hitting every block indiscriminately was a bit of a disappointment. Despite there being multiple blocks and random spawning, in practice the game plays almost exactly like Pong.

First of all, I disliked that the blocks have to hit the registry point of the player, rather than touching any part of the sprite. This made it feel just a little bit harder as you have to wait just a bit longer for a block to fall into the registry point, or move just a bit further to the side to catch a block before changing direction and speeding off toward the next block.

That aside, I disliked that the random position and speed of the blocks made it impossible to avoid losing lives. In addition, the whole game is pretty slow, making the process of scoring 100 points more tedious than difficult.

[CypherGrid]

The high-effort graphics (excepting the big boobs which are very annoying,) animation, and juice really made me want to rate this highly, but after reading the whole thing about row priority 3-4 times, I just don't get it and I honestly don't want to. The logic is too obscure and its level of complexity outpaces the actual degree of fun a puzzle like this might have. Ultimately I brute-forced all of the puzzles past the tutorial.

I can understand that the quantity of digits by a row or column indicates how many tiles in that line need to be marked off, but the priority system feels incredibly arbitrary, and trying to figure out whether a 5 is the product of 1+4 or 2+3 just feels obscure and annoying. The fact that there are really only 4 puzzles after the tutorial, and two of them essentially have a timer going on during them, makes it prohibitively difficult to actually spend the time learning the mechanics, despite all of the time you've spent constructing a tutorial.

My biggest issue with this game is the ruleset itself; explaining the rules better, or having some kind of random mode that gives the player a set number of easy puzzles before gradually ramping it up, would make things more enjoyable, but I don't think any amount of QoL improvements would make the underlying game fun to play. Games like Sudoku have a certain intuitive simplicity to them, and the rules around priority in this game are the antithesis of this principle.

Veinom responds:

If you feel that the puzzles get hard early, that's because I wanted to showcase what my puzzle concept is capable of (like the Hack-time and the Quick Time Events in the final boss). If I had more time, I would add more puzzles in between, which is something I plan to do in future updates.

I will try to improve the tutorial regarding Priorities. Thank you for your long and detailed review.

[The Whicher]

I haven't played (or watched) The Witcher so I'm sure a lot of references flew over my head, but this was still pretty entertaining! The brevity of each encounter, followed by Geralt's :| face (especially if the player chooses the "idgaf" options) really sells this, and for as simple as it is the animation is solid as well.

The "always need 1 more alchemy than you have" was infuriating and took me way longer to realize than it should have. The biggest frustration for me was having to have preexisting knowledge of what was going to happen in order to see all of the content, and not being able to skip or save scum. As a result, some of the content requires you to replay the game from the beginning, which is a bit obnoxious.

Not too much else to say here. Being trolled by the game is funny, but not so funny that I'm willing to sit through the game (and its animations) several times to see all of it.

[Ruffle Adventures!]

I really wanted to like this. The concept of killing different sites and services associated with Flash is funny and different, but there are so many things in the way of this feeling like a fully fleshed out experience.

In terms of the story, the typos, font, and low contrast background (just increase the alpha a bit) make it hard to read the intro.

Regarding gameplay, the hitboxes for the actual fighting feel really imprecise. It's hard to tell if there are separate hitboxes for the player character and their weapon, as it kept feeling like I was taking damage while attacking. The characters are also big relative to their movement speed, making them feel slow and making dodging feel really hard. It felt less like I was managing attacks and more like I was managing how many frames two big, clumsy hitboxes were intersecting with each other. Having snappier controls is really the biggest thing you could do to make this feel better. As someone whose old (2008-ish) games felt like this, I know all too well how these kinds of controls can feel natural to you as the developer but frustrating for the player.

The eyes and mouths on the graphics are cute and decently well-drawn, most of the other graphics look a little sloppy but that's okay.