Kwing's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Jump Quest]

I tried. I really did. Even though this game has no menu, presentation, or instructions at all, I went ahead and tried to score a single point in this damned game. Actually, that wasn't the hard part. The hard part is landing safely, which by rights should award you 10 points considering how damn hard it is. The squares you're supposed to avoid are way too slow; even with the jumping animation, it's very unlikely for you to be able to clear the square by the time you land. Worse, the squares come in groups and frequently it's IMPOSSIBLE to jump over them when they come together. On top of that, the game does not keep track of your score or really do anything other than stick you with one game over after another. The game isn't even decent enough to give you a game over screen, it just resets.

It might be your first game, but did you not even consider making it a little more balanced or skill-based?

kosiak97 responds:

An apology, I forgot to add to the description that there was a double jump. I fixed it now so maybe it will be a little bit easier. Although I did not think of adding a game over screen, but if it is that important, I'll have no problem adding it. Thanks.

[Stick Beard]

Pretty good. This is a little more showy in terms of graphics than it is smooth in terms of animation, but ultimately it's still really damn good. The game is colorful, the gems are really fucking hard to get, and the soundtrack is well done. I liked that the choices were varied but simple, however on replay I realized that there's really only one path to the end (Natives and Forest simply don't have routes) and that kind of left a sour taste in my mouth, since it tamped down the replay value considerably.

Factoring in that you can replay the dead-end routes like Natives and Forest for infinite gems, and that the gems are really only useful for upgrading your ship in the final level (why do you collect gems during that level, anyway?) it just seemed like this was a little lacking as a game. It makes up for these shortcomings by being very attractive, though.

Solid submission, but not really worth more than one playthrough.

Stone-Steven responds:

wow, I appreciate the solid and lengthy review!

[D.O.E.S]

I thought this was a joke when I first played it. In fact, I still think it is. From the obnoxious little jingles to the fact that your luck seldom ever rises above one, there's really nothing in this that can even be considered a game. Maybe I just don't get it. Or maybe you should have actually included a tutorial somewhere in your game that said something more than "click stuff, things will happen."

All I noticed was that I had no way of controlling what I uncovered, unlike, say, Minesweeper which gives the player hints which can help them logically determine things. Without any guidance, it's more like drawing from a deck of cards than exploring an area. Moreover, the combat system is impossible. You click on an enemy to deal damage, get countered for missing, and have to hurry up or you'll take damage. This would be nice if enemies didn't have a tendency to screw you royally. For instance, some enemies respond to an attack by dashing out of the way, meaning you can only hit them one at a time. If you try to be cautious, you may encounter a bomb and unwittingly cause your own death with your slowness. The only way to learn is trial and error, which would be fine if the game were more fun to begin with, but it's not.

Some randomly generated games are fun. This isn't one of them, the reason being that it takes far too much control away from the player.

Surn responds:

lol

[A Dance of Fire and Ice]

A little gimmicky. I've always hated one-button rhythm games (is that even a genre?) because it's really all about eyes and memory rather than brains or reflexes. Certainly this is fun and addictive, mainly due to the music chosen, but it gets old and quickly begins to rely on an unforgiving intolerance for mistakes to facilitate its difficulty. Personally, I prefer games with difficult tasks but many checkpoints to one with easy tasks assigned in large quantities, and because of that I would have preferred shorter levels with more confusing visuals (perhaps a hex grid) and complex rhythms (alternating or odd meters).

The layout and presentation is nice, but its simplicity is also its downfall as people are repeatedly faced with a very plain screen telling them that they have failed. I would have liked some kind of system that judged how close you were to hitting on the beat, as many other rhythm games do (Perfect, Great, Good, Almost, Boo).

fizzd responds:

Sorry you didn't enjoy it! It is by design meant to be a game of rhythmic endurance just as much as rhythmic gymnastics, and is meant to train the ability to keep a consistent beat throughout a song, so I'm not going to switch the design to exclusively short hard levels anytime soon. Definitely isn't for everyone!

[The Awakening RPG]

I don't think anyone would argue that this isn't a flawed game, but it certainly has a charm to it. The graphics are very intricate and give this game an uncanny sense of magnitude on par with the Epic Battle Fantasy series. The music is somewhat dull and repetitive but is quite well done, though still a far cry from the Sonny soundtrack. The gameplay is overall really well-done and keeps players engaged with the active battle system, though I would have liked to see things played around with more, for instance attacks where you can hold down a button and consume extra stamina to deal extra damage, attacks that damaged an enemy's stamina, or enemies that feigned attacks or had certain conditions for which you made them unable to dodge.

This game suffers from several major pitfalls. First is that I noticed it lagged a lot. At the beginning of the game I recalled reading something about setting the quality to low, but skipped past it too quickly and wasn't able to find that information again. I pulled up every menu I could find and didn't manage to adjust the quality, which was a real pain since you walk SO slowly on the world map... If you wanted it to be atmospheric, you could have at least made the character smaller on the world map, like Chrono Trigger does.

That said, you balanced this out really well. I liked how you moved away from the grindier aspects of the game, allowing players to grind but not really making it necessary, especially when there were only a few pieces of equipment to be gotten. I got the Twin Serpent Blade and instantly fell in love with its massive damage bonus, and though I played this game for three hours only to change weapons once, I felt it actually worked out fine.

Also, the storyline was pretty lame, in all honesty. There were a lot of tropes... Waking up and not knowing anything, befriending a random magic user that seems to know anything (this was a very close parallel to Sonny and Luis...) and then the battle with the Golden Demon that was impossible to win... Which really annoyed me since I was really kicking his ass but ended up being funneled into the plot dialogue anyway. You use a lot of tropes and it's bad enough to the point of me not being able to take the narrative seriously at all. Thankfully there were a few moments of comic relief that broke it up, and the huge number of civilians in the towns also gave this game a sense of realness, even if the main plotline wasn't interesting.

Final verdict? Good game, though it was a bit slow and buggy at times. I would be interested in seeing the conclusion to the story, as well as what you had planned for the rest of the game. It would have been nice to have some kind of arcade or Colosseum mode where players could engage in battles and unlock story sequences without doing fetch quests and stuff - it would have been a nice easy way to wrap up this game without it feeling completely unfinished.

RockLou responds:

Thank you for the review and your input!
During the development of the game, I experimented with the attacking where you held down the attack button and a seperate bar would appear and fill up as you held the button. The longer you held it, the more damage your attack would take. It was an interested idea but one thing I like about the current battle system is how fast your attacks seem whenever you press the attack button. It happens instantly and you feel badass. :P
I also experimented with the spells. Whenever you made a spell you'd have to press a combination of numbers quickly and depending on how you performed, the spell took more or less damage. But that also took away the instant and fast-paced feel of the battle.

I can agree with you that the story is kind of lame. :P Most of it wasn't really thought out much. The future of the story (not in the game) is more thought out, if I ever would continue.
I didn't want to include any crystals or anything because it IS very cliché, but I really needed something to boost the plot.
I have thought of a colosseum in Savina city, but it seemed a bit out of place and would've been even more work... and I'm already tired of this goddamn game. -.-

[Etherworld]

There are some major problems here but also some major potential. The first thing I noticed was a style of minimalism which sometimes helped the game and sometimes hurt it. The silhouette platforms were good. The menu buttons were good. The voice acting was good (though repetitive). The lack of boss music was bad. The lack of animation for the enemies was really bad. The lack of any sort of AI apart from the boss was very bad. The lack of a menu background, bad. The general lack of things to do in the game, very bad. The fact that the difficulty only affects your health, also bad. Even when you have a crouch feature, you only use it a few times throughout the entire game.

Overall the game showed signs of polish, but just as many signs of a lack of polish. The textures in the background were well-done, the character sprite is well-done, and the boss, interestingly enough, has well-drawn hands and a very sloppy looking body. I like how the lava had a delayed reaction in response to the boss' pounds, and how the screen shook with each attack. I see that you tried to spice things up with a flight mechanic in level 4, but it's not enough. You need to incorporate stuff like special abilities, collectibles, or features like climbing, sliding, or grabbing. This game is lacking in content and it hurts it a lot. Overall the gameplay becomes very formulaic due to the fact that the enemies don't even respond to the player. It also makes the player feel disengaged, which could have been rectified by implementing some kind of plotline.

I also want to mention that you really need to do something about that boss battle. I actually liked the physics - it's neat how the player moves faster while jumping - but I found many times that the player was sometimes fast enough to out-walk the boss' attacks, and was sometimes too slow. I noticed the player tended to die from this while walking outward from the center more often than if the player was walking toward the boss, but it wasn't a sure thing. The mechanics were at points sloppy, having once been pushed back into a wave of lava by a hand, or other times falling straight through the ground because I didn't jump quite high enough (at least stop the player from moving forward, show them that they've hit a wall).

Anyway I just want to reiterate that the boss fight is hell if you're going for achievement 05. It's frustrating and fickle and I feel like you didn't have enough people beta test the project. It would have been nice if the boss had more attacks, but more importantly the delay between the attacks needs to be greater, or at least more consistent.

Etherblood responds:

Hey, thank you very much for your detailed feedback, I agree with most of your points.
The main reason so many areas are lacking is due to my timelimit of 1 month. I never made a game with deadline before and pretty much messed up my time management (and adobe flash worked against me sometimes, it was pretty frustrating, I won't be using it from now on). I'll also spent a lot more time on games in the future.
The voice acting are just 'stolen' sounds from the League of Legends champion Nami (some enemies have Brand's voice and the boss has Malphite's), there wasn't much to take from, so yes it's repetive.
The combat in this game is pretty non-existant, your only attack is to stand still! and move your sword forward, and the enemies apart from the boss all have a set path, thats just sad...
I never encountered a bug where I was pushed through the floor, that obviously should not happen.
The boss battle is very easy when you know how it works, I think the problem is that the possibilities to beat him are pretty limited and the game has no hints at how whatsoever.
I personally find lv4 much more difficult than the boss fight (because I know how it works).
I ended up adding a lot of random because it got to repetive, adding more phases instead might have been a much better approach. I pretty much just forgot about boss battle music even though it's the most important part...
Well, again, thank you very much for your feedback, it's helpful and I'll make sure to reread it as soon as I'm working on the mentioned stuff in my next platformer.

[PewDuckPie - On the Run]

Overall this just seems like a more frustrating version of PewDiePie Adventures, only you can't play as Stephano or Piggy, and you have no abilities.

Since you've taken down the old version of this game, I'll just paste my old review right here:

Damn, how did you get Pewds to play this on the day it came out?

Well, it appears that the two of us have something in common in that we've both made very difficult PewDiePie-themed Flash platformers.

As someone familiar who played Eggy's original Unfair Platformer before the rage genre exploded, and as a regular on Platform Racing, I figure I'm probably immune to a lot of the dificulty in this game. Even so, I still found the traffic light in the first level to be unpassable.

First off, I really like the graphics. They're goofy and colorful, although the ground is rather redundant and the background remains constant rather than panning over gradually. The intro is really well-done, although I think the animation could have been a bit better than Pewds' legs simply rotating back and forth. The music is also redundant but I really like it, especially the change when you enter the cloud chase scene.

Onto the gameplay, watching Pewds play this game gave me a prelude to its difficulty. I actually made it to the traffic light on my first try, believe it or not. The physics are a little clunky, seeing as the player character is fairly slow. The enemies are total bullshit even though I was able to outsmart them 90% of the time. The wonky physics are actually a greater cause for concern than the 'surprise!' deaths that most rage games are known for, which I think is interesting and also makes the game much more fair once you get used to it. The few gimmicks I did notice, such as the 'infinite' hallway, were clever.

The cloud chase is also interesting. The platform engine you're using makes it very hit and miss. Sometimes it's easy, sometimes it's hard. I've tried to figure out how to outsmart the traffic light and I've noticed a few things:
- The cloud vanishes just before the creature bits away the floor. This should give the player time to jump to the left, but I've also noticed it become out of sync with the dinosaur attacking BEFORE the cloud vanishes.
- In one playthrough, I noticed a little gray pattern replace one of the pieces of the floor right next to the cloud before it begins chasing you. I haven't gotten this phenomena to occur again, but I assume it may be a shortcut?

Had this game a bit more clear instruction, I'm sure I would be able to review more than just the first level. As-is, the trick to beating the first level is simply too ambiguous, and I think I've given a more than fair review of an unfair game.

Now that that's out of the way, I do want to congratulate you on the new intro, which looks nice as hell, though it is a little on the long side. I also figured out the trick to the traffic light but honestly it's probably close to 90 degrees in my room right now and it's making me too agitated to sit through enough of the game to beat it again.

zoyer responds:

That was a really nice and mature review. The best and most fair review i've got so far on my game. I have no idea how I managed to get Felix to play this game so fast. I had luck i guess and i think his fabulous dress made him want to play it a bit more :D

This was actually the first version i uploaded but i took it down because i wanted to change the title of the game. Then when i had uploaded the new version I saw that pewdiepie actually had played my game and had linked to my old game so noone could actually press and enter the game themselves so I deleted the new version and saw i could take back the old one so i did. So that's the story behind that :)

The traffic light is actually really simple, you just have to do exactly what the shroom-guy says. You have to wait for the circle of the traffic light to turn green and not jump when the text comes up and tells you to jump, you always have to remember, it's an unfair game :) The horse that appears if you jump before or do not jump at all, it has nothing to do with the bricks that dissapears under you. The cloud dissapears automaticly, just go to the very right and it will dissapear, the horse only shows up if you jump before the light turns green or if you decide to not jump at all. But if you jump when the light turns green, then the floor will dissapear.

I realised when the game had been out for a while that i should have made the first level easier, at least i know it now so won't do the same mistake again. The game was super unfair before it got realeased completely but i had some testers so they could help me out so it wouldn't be that unfair and impossible. Thanks for the review and everything :)

[Pride and Punishment]

It's... Unfinished. What am I supposed to say about this? You have the makings of a really good and attractive game, but there's nothing here! What gameplay is here is also rather slow. The bow could be drawn faster, the jumping could happen faster. I also noticed you spawn at the top of the screen if you hit the spacebar.

I don't know why you can't finish this game. If your FLA got corrupted that's one thing, but otherwise hell, I'd finish the damned thing for you.

glitchs2d responds:

This was for the Newgrounds Game Jam, and done in only around 48 hours. I'm going to release an update for the game soon once I get things working the way I want. Also the space bar is the way how it is for testing reasons I forgot to disable it when I uploaded, since i was so pressed for time. The new one will have a lot of fixes, and be much more of a game than what it is in its current state.

[#Escape: The Waiting Room]

Polished but incomplete. I won't say anything about the graphics/sound/interface, I think they speak for themselves. What bothers me here is that goddamned username and password. Since when do usernames have a space in them? Couldn't you have just changed that character's name? God. DAMN. THAT. SUCKED.

I'll also say the game is too short and too simple. Not enough to do, not enough items. Also you can collect those little labels indefinitely... Lolwut. Storyline could have gone somewhere but it literally doesn't say more than 'some guy lost his memory'.

Aprime responds:

Usernames can have spaces in them...

Thanks for the review!