Kwing's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Parry the night]

If this game had been finished it would have absolutely annihilated every other submission this year.

The insane production quality reminds me a lot of Arcane Maiden, the winner of the first (2021) FFGJ. Aesthetics on their own go a long way but I got REALLY hyped to play a tactical RPG (I haven't finished Fire Emblem but FFT is my all-time favorite game.)

Regarding the singular, partly working battle, the number of enemies is too much. You did well to have only some enemies engage the party and have to approach others, and not just due to the difficulty - waiting through an enemy phase in which all 30 enemies acted would have been incredibly tedious. I also liked that at least several of the characters had a very distinct identity; it took two playthroughs, but on my second go I was able to find niches where the general, archer, and white mage were effective and it made a gigantic difference.

As you're likely already aware, there are a bunch of game-breaking bugs. Characters will randomly stop being useable as if they already moved, even if the enemy phase has happened. Sometimes units are stuck gray, other times they're stuck at their normal color but selecting them isn't possible (the game thinks you're selecting the ground tile behind them.) Given enough time, these bugs will eat away your entire party until you have no party left to attack with, making the bugs a greater threat than the actual enemies. I even tried downloading this game and playing it in Flash Player offline in case these were Ruffle-only issues (I REALLY wanted to play this game...) but they continued to persist on both platforms.

Other bugs mostly include gibberish text and add to the confusion of a game that already has a lot of variables without explaining them to the player.

Excepting the bugs, I think the best improvement to make to this game would be to slim down the party size and size of the opposition for the first battle to make it easier for the player to learn their own arsenal. Perhaps one close-range, one long-range, one support, and one cavalry character would be a good, diverse cast without overwhelming the player (especially since the graphical distinctions between different characters are going to be lost on a new player that thinks they all look the same.) To this point, having allied characters flash a different color from enemy colors would also be useful, as I occasionally got confused as to which ones were mine.

Also, one of the features I liked about FFT was the ability to attempt to use skills even if there were no targets in range. This made it easy to see how far a ranged fighter could reach BEFORE moving them, allowing you to keep from wandering unnecessarily deep into enemy territory.

Absolutely awesome concept and the execution is almost there, but it looks like this game massively overscoped for the time given.

Alex303 responds:

Thank you that means the world to me hopfully one day I finish something on time, but I do like to try unusal things I guess.

Funny thing about The Arcane Maiden mention I used to work with the guy who made that game. Maybe he rubbed of on me idk haha.

As for the battle scene It wasnt supposed to be a singular its acutally the fith map, but when I was combining the Dialouge with the battle scenes the embeds broke. So I just decided to show the scene with the most action. (Probably wasnt the best choice espically sense it had no explaniation of the controls). As for the characters I wanted them to all be speical. I took a lot of refrence Im glad you like it.

Im chiping away at bugs as we speak it used to be a lot worse believe me! Thank you for letting me know what bugs you got. I havent seen the units turning to gray bug in a min. As for the reason im pretty sure some characters are not selectable. It mainly happens when ally dies then sometimes it bugs out. And Ruffle does have some bugs Im not normally seeing. Let me know if it was different for you but was the battle ui working better when you downloaded it. Some key presses dont seeom to work anymore with ruffle and im not sure why. (Im saying let me know like this isnt a single post comment system). The rest is my iffy coding and learning pathfinding as I went on.

I said it below but the gibrish was because the embed broke. I had no idea how to fix it so I spent all night reseting the text. I know how to speak english (I think atleast haha).Im checking the text and some of the stuff I updated isnt changing ahhhh!

Yea that was the goal start of small with short tutorials to get things going. But you can see how that went. I couldnt explaining anything till the embed was fixed. But now theirs a small tutorial that should have been their from the start. But im gonna follow your advice! the opening 5 chapters dont have more then 5 party members. Ill update it as soon as I can to fix the text and add the other stages. And ill go back and reduce some enemies on the later stages. I gotta remember not to over do it.

I need to play final fantasy tactics Ill looking to giving it a shot. Might be a great place to find some cool ideas. Thank thank thank you again, you dont know how much this motivates me to fix my buggy mess one line at a time.

update - After some bug fixing I found some errors are ruffle specific I dont know why exactly yet!. Specifically when an enemy kills an ally, it removes an ally from the array for some reason. I tried to recreate the effect in flash, but it didnt work it only happens in ruffle for some weird reason. So ill just need to find some way around it.

update 2 - managed to fix it using a new method so Ally units suddenly breaking shouldnt happen if it does for anyone let me know!

[Fun Home: Part 1]

The atmosphere is great and I really like the level design - you get some short, easy tasks (key, bedroom, bathroom) to familiarize yourself with the map (and simultaneously build suspense) before the chase sequences begin. The non-linear tasks do a great job of forcing you to visit areas where Mr. Fingers is likely to be, which of course lends itself to having to bait him away from your objective before circling back via an indirect route.

The controls are a bit goofy but make sense when you realize that the arrow keys are meant to be face buttons. A lot of the menu options are unnecessary (brightness does nothing, there's no reason to keep the notes separate from items when your inventory is so small, the map could easily be an item in your inventory instead of its own option, that kind of thing) and I also dislike that the selected item in the menu jumps back to the first option any time you go backward in the menu hierarchy - this is a small thing but makes a huge difference.

By far the biggest issue in the game is that the combination of how easy it is to die and the lack of checkpoints can make for a very frustrating experience, especially with relatively slow animations throughout the game. The note to mash the down button to escape a grapple would have been nice if the font were a bit bigger, and I had to figure out on my own that tapping right (square?) repeatedly was necessary to actually run at a decent speed. This on its own is annoying, but it's also possible for Mr. Fingers to appear in a doorway just as you're trying to enter it, leading to you being caught immediately. Some kind of pity system (Mr. Fingers can't enter a door if you're close enough to it, and entering a room pushes Mr. Fingers back a minimum amount if he's right on the other side of the door) would make the game feel much more fair. As it is, there were points where I was tempted to just wait for him to show up so I didn't get flanked the instant I tried leaving a room, especially because restarting is so frustrating.

Aesthetically this game is great. The music is probably the high point, but the monochromatic blue of the house is surprisingly atmospheric for all its simplicity.

deathink responds:

Thanks for the in depth review.

First off, you are 100% about literally everything, but please let me explain why I did some of these mistakes, I'll address them in the order you brought them up:

Missing menu option: sadly, I just ran out of time before I could fully implement the brightness, but I do plan to patch it soon. And the lack of inventory items is because I plan to greatly expand this game in part 2 and 3, so I pre built out everything. Also regarding the "go back in menu" thing... man, I really dislike that too, I did have it set so It wouldn't do that, but there is a bug that I just couldn't fix. I will fix it, but it was just taking up so much time, so what I have now is like a band-aid,

The check point system is actually built and in the game, but just not turned on fully. I'm going release a band-aid patch for that too, so it will not be the full save system, but it will have check points. I really considered having it patched in from the start, I was just worried it would be too buggy.

The clown popping in and grabbing you is actually the pity system. Originally he'd just pop in and kill you, so my idea was to have him grab you with a chance to escape. It wasn't perfect, but I tried a few different things, and this was just the best I could come up with. I think once I implement the save/checkpoint system, this will be a lot less frustrating.

Again, thank you for all your feedback. It really help me a lot. With future releases, I will be able to play test it with people more and with luck it will be even better.

[Captain Laser Rabbit Saves The Earth!]

It took a few continues, but after finishing this game I found myself really enjoying it. The enemy and boss patterns are interesting and I like the idea of enemy chains rewarding the player with laser charge - it adds an incentive to hit optional criteria beyond just "kill all enemies."

The only time I ever used desperation bombs was on accident, and with maybe one exception I only ever used the laser against the boss. A big part of this was that there's so little room to breathe in the game that I didn't have much time to consider what alternative strategies or resources I might use; I was too busy blocking incoming fire to think about much else.

This also translates to a somewhat frustrating experience with the cannon speed moving a bit slower than you would want, combined with the fact that none of the enemies really have "vulnerable" states where they don't attack; in frantically trying to block and attack at the same time, it never feels like you can quite do what you're trying to do; nearly all of your time/bullets is spent on defense, making offensive progress move at a snail's pace. In a sense this is a legitimate design decision as it does keep the player challenged and engaged, but it feels Sisyphean at times. I actually found the final boss to be the easiest for this reason, as you could score a lot of hits on the boss' hurtbox while panning the cannon between the bullets being shot at you.

Having some kind of indicator when the mouse rolls over the planet to indicate that clicking it would use a desperation bomb would be useful (at least for desktop players) to prevent accidental usage.

There's a huge gap in difficulty between Normal and Hard and I think it might have made more sense to have a single difficulty (easy or normal) but some kind of ranked scoring at the end where getting an A rating required a similar amount of skill as completing Hard does now.

Visually the game assets look solid, but the UI could use some cleaning up.

Fun and well-designed, but also a bit overwhelming at times.

TeamTamago responds:

Thanks for the feedback! Yeah, my biggest worry was that because I've played it so much, and I wasn't really able to have other people play test it, was that I would make it crazy hard for the normal folk! The number one thing I'd like to improve is balancing and ranking, but it is possible to hit every single enemy! Anyway, a lot to consider, thanks!

[Based Defense]

This is a really rough experience. The 2-4 buttons at the bottom suggest you can recruit allies and independently assign characters to defend different areas of your base, but having to select your character before moving and attacking when you only have one results in the game feeling massively more difficult to control. It seemed like I just couldn't get my character to do what I wanted them to, or they did it so slowly that I watched helplessly as I lost.

The small UI, overabundance of buttons, lack of explanation, and high difficulty also make this a really unfriendly game. A slower difficulty curve with some better explanation toward the beginning would make it easier for the player to experiment with the different features and get a sense for how the game worked before being thrust into difficult situations that could result in early game overs. Even after playing several times, I found myself heavily reliant on the ion cannon, with upgrades feeling so prohibitively expensive that I couldn't survive long enough to get a feel for what was worth buying and what wasn't.

Regarding the theme, it's really hard to parse out how many layers of irony there are here and if there's any kind of sincere message or if it's just provocative for the sake of provocative.

Jin responds:

Thanks for the substantial feedback! This is really valuable information and I really appreciate it. Have made some changes to hopefully be more player friendly, but I also see many areas requiring improvements. For the theme, it's just something I find funny. It's very light-hearted, meant to entertain.

[Faceless Assassin]

This game is broken beyond belief. The mission briefings tell you no useful information on how to identify the target, failing the first mission breaks the game and makes it impossible to start another mission, and the audio overlaps each time you visit the menu.

Beyond that, of the three working missions in the game, all of them just show characters standing around; there's no animation or movement and characters don't react to gunshots, so there's really no difficulty because you can always try to shoot again if you somehow miss.

The art isn't bad and the plain black on white color scheme looks more reminiscent of Xiao Xiao 4 while the assassin theme feels more like Sift Heads. Not bad in concept, but this is blatantly unfinished.

ErasmusMagnus responds:

Permadeath mode removed based on feedback. Scorned client email viruses remain dangerous until next update. Three and a half stars to go!

[Windowz 98 NetTowns Edition]

We get one of these every year but this one is really nothing special, at least as far as I can tell. It's always interesting picking through the different menus and options and seeing what's there, but in this case, such a large percentage of the content are just old text websites that are accurate depictions of the 90s (in terms of the topics covered and the low quality GIF assets) and after looking at 4-5 of them they're all kind of the same.

The mediocre framerate makes me wish there was an option to disable the cursor, and some way to see what page elements are clickable (EDIT: WITHOUT searching around with the mouse - for instance if ALL hyperlinks were blue) would make it a bit easier to skim through the pages quickly. I suppose poking around and exploring everything slowly was probably the point, but the actual content being perused needs to be interesting enough to incentivize that as a user experience.

There's a lot here, but it seems like an exercise in quantity over quality.

Kolumbo responds:

saying "they're all kind of the same" is an overstatement. also, "we get one of these every year" is just false.

buttons in the browser make the cursor change to the hand cursor, as they do in real browsers, so there is a way to know what's clickable

anyway, thanks for playing - although it seems like you didn't actually play it

[The Whicher 2]

Jesus Christ this is good. I was expecting something similar to the first game, and the humor is definitely still there but the sheer length of this game is absolutely absurd and the humor basically never misses (which in and of itself is insanely hard to do.) That's before we mention the art, animation, and music, which are so meticulously done you could have 1/3 of the content and I'd still be surprised that you did it all in 4 months.

There are a decent number of typos and the audio quality (and voice acting) are a bit shaky at times. I also wish you could skip some animations and scenes during replays of the game. But none of these are enough to warrant subtracting from the score when this game brings so much else to the table.

Joeyag responds:

thank you so much for your review!

[Caretaker]

The graphics look good but this is obviously unfinished.

I recommend learning a bit more about how layers work in Flash (both on the timeline as well as the "depth" property you may be using.) There are some conflicts where world objects appear over UI, particularly the bunny appearing over the menu.

Beyond that there are some obvious issues (no confirmation upon buying food, food not costing money, feeding animals not bound by the amount of food in inventory, different foods not having any different effects, no explanation of why money goes up over time, settings button not working.) The cat walking back and forth also jumps instead of the cat walking back toward where it came before looping.

That said, I think this is an appropriate scope of complexity for a Game Jam game and it would be totally realistic to finish this at a later date.

EmeraldSquid64 responds:

Thanks for the feedback man. The bunny got added in RIGHT before the upload so Stevo didn't have time to iron out the bugs with it. We plan to get all of these issues fixed with the next update; Stevo intends to get it out tomorrow hopefully. Eventually this will get polished and it'll be a nice, playable little game, but for now this is mostly just a proof of concept I feel. Again, thank you for the feedback and for checking out this little project!

[saraOS]

"Choose your animation" Flashes are a dime a dozen but this one really surprised me. The presentation of a really well-drawn UI with all of the animations on the monitor having a consistent art style makes this really look fantastic, and small things like the lerping of the buttons as you scroll up and down just contribute to an overall professional feel.

The early animations are kind of a "meh" experience where you just scroll through one after the other, curious to see what's there. My first "wait, what?" moment was when I realized clicking toggled the timer display on Nyan Cat, which hinted that there might be more interactivity in these than I expected. Invader and Romance genuinely surprised me, though it would have been cool for Invader to have been slightly more involved. Romance on the other hand was perfect. The brain cancer line literally made me laugh out loud.

Minus half a star because only 3/10 of the animations had an interesting interactive twist. Alternatively, some of the plain animations could have been a bit longer, more interesting, or more funny. Still, well-drawn and well-animated.

Nabella responds:

Thank you for the review, honorable Kwing. It is not very often that I get thorough but positive feedback like this, so I appreciate you taking the time to type this out.

Adding interactivity or a small amount of variety whenever an animation plays was done late in development. It was around the period when I was working on Fishy when I realized I could nest more ActionScript into a symbol's timeline to make it do extra things, but by then I had already done most of the groundwork for the prior animations. Reworking each one to have a gimmick before the deadline wasn't feasible unfortunately.

For the later ones that DO have a gimmick, I discovered quickly that making an interactive mini-game with a punchline actually takes longer than doing a simple animation. Beyond attempting to make it funny, the interactive ones needed to actually function properly and give the viewer/player something simple to do. The trouble was worth it, though, because Invader and Romance feel like the most unique out of the 10 I did.

[Stinger Flash]

It's not bad, but it does feel quite bare-bones. The simplicity of the background, bees' projectiles, and music are short, easy fixes and currently make a big difference in how limited this feels as a complete product.

Beyond that, the first time I started the game the bees didn't attack and my character refused to move. Restarting the game seemed to fix that but initially put a bad taste in my mouth. The inconsistency of the player's bullets also played into the feel of the game being unpolished (sometimes the attack happened really fast, and sometimes the bullets spawned really sporadically.) I also wish that the player autofired, since there's really no reason not to hold the fire button down the whole time.

My last major issue is that the hitboxes are unclear and the player flashing seems like an underwhelming way to indicate that the player has taken damage. The hitboxes being generous is nice but I think I'd rather have the bullets themselves look smaller so that they're more accurate to what the player is actually trying to dodge.

Flannelson responds:

Hey! Thanks for the feedback.

- I couldn't recreate what you were referring to but it sounds like you hit the pause button? That's a clarity issue & it's been fixed. Good catch.

- You have more movement speed if you don't shoot so that's the primary reason to let go of the button which is especially helpful during avoiding heavy bullet patterns in maniac mode.

- Your bullets spawn much quicker the closer you are to the enemies so you can point-blank them! It's a common technique in modern Shmup games.

- The hitboxes are extremely tiny on the enemy bullets so if I made them as accurate to their actual size, the player would have to physically move closer to their screen just to see them! I don't want to strain anyone's eyes.