Kwing's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Silly Chicken]

Now that's cute. The graphics are really nice and the controls are solid. I noticed you used some of the sprites from Smithy's Quest, and the cows look quite familiar too. I really wasn't a fan of the sound - the effects were repetitive as hell and the music likewise.

The gameplay was pretty solid. As I said, the controls are smooth, although I wish there was a small indicator to tell players when they could set another bomb, and also a timer on the bomb, since I screwed up a few times because I couldn't time the bombing quite right. The game did get pretty hard, but I liked that you could respawn every level, making it much easier. It also felt kind of like a puzzle game as a result.

The minigames were a mixed bag. I thought the typing minigame was hilarious, but the Pokemon battle was lame and simplistic and the final boss pissed me off because of how horrible the controls were. It took me way too long to figure out I was really just tapping left and right and firing constantly.

Overall this game is fun, but considering how short it is, it could stand to have a level editor, and perhaps a bit more polish. For a 2013 game, this seems quite dated.

EggysGames responds:

I like your reviews on all my stuff Kwing. Some of the graphics are being reused a bit lately because I'm having trouble getting new artists :(

I'm glad you liked the chat bit, wasn't sure how that would go down.

Cheers for the overall review.

[Magnetized]

I gave up on the sixth to last level. I have to give it to you, this game is pretty damned good. Nice relaxing graphics and music, and the gameplay is brilliantly simple. I really like how there are three different types of gravity wells and how the smallest bit of timing can have huge effects on where your square goes. I also think it's cool how some parts of the track are reused, and how you can make a really simple level really long and complex based off of how the track works.

I was a little bit put off by the difficulty, yet I feel that the curve was done well. I simply ran out of patience before I beat the game. I also think it's funny how the yellow gravity well is so similar to my game Twins V2, although this is implemented much better, I will admit.

Overall I really, really like this game. However I feel it suffers from a little too much in the simplicity department, which is why levels like the one I quit on had to rely on just getting longer and longer to keep the game difficult. I was also a bit annoyed at how the spacebar is required to change the position of the box in the gravity wells. The game had been doing so well with the one-button control scheme... One of the best one-button games I'd ever played, next to a morse code game and The Impossible Game. Adding another button ruined the charm. Perhaps you could have shown the guide line without the mouse pressed, froze the player on a click, and swapped positions when the mouse was released?

Really great concept, but it needs a little more. Maybe optional paths, collectibles, or enemies.

rocky10529 responds:

thanks! and good advises! i'll keep working on it!

[Rock Hard Coliseum 1]

Nice work, Stone! I'm really loving the animations here. (Did you do all of them? The body types look a lot like yours...) Everything looks great from movements to particle effects to the sounds. This entire submission is just loaded with polish, and it shows. I also feel like you did some really great pairings, putting together fighters with similar styles which really made the animations more interesting.

What annoys me about this is that it seems like some kind of collab that was turned into a bunch of quicktime events at the last second. I'm not too happy about that. "Guessing" who's going to win, and then participating in short mashing sequences just doesn't do it for me. I'm also not really sure what the exact point is. If a QTE is helping the player you didn't vote on, do you just sit and let them fail? Or are the outcomes all predetermined? What determines how the mashing works? Is the difficulty of the QTE dependent on the actual poll from the original battle? And what the hell do I have to do in order to boost my score up to a 7 from a 6?

The whole game aspect of this just doesn't work out for me, and seems like a cheap way to label an animation as a game. Still, the game looks pretty, and looks are the meat and potatoes of this anyway.

Stone-Steven responds:

Hey I appreciate the lengthy comment. Yes, I did do all of these myself. I'm not much of a coder myself, so I tried to give it a little extra interactivity.

The meat and potatoes is the system of calculating and storing the users selections of characters in the RHC that really makes the user interact with the project as a whole. Even deciding what will happen next in it.

[Super Joe]

What a stressful game.

What you've got here is decent, but just feels unpolished. I can understand that this was a warm-up since you're getting back into programming, but there was a lot you could have fixed. I liked the puzzle element of each level being different, but the sheer difficulty of some levels oftentimes made it feel redundant. The old blood splatter and sound effect also roused some gamer PTSD I had from playing Stickya Adventurya.

Overall the gameplay suffered from minor mechanical issues, length, and difficulty. One really obnoxious issue I had was the last level, where the fan simply wouldn't trigger on some of the bullets, killing me. Another one that had me for a while was the level with ice, which had me struggling because momentum was changing so much. On top of the mechanics screwing with me for the right reasons, I also noticed certain jumps not having as much oomph in them as they should have. Little things like that made a hard game tougher for the wrong reasons.

Sound-wise, I feel like you just tossed in some Doctor Who remix and an old death sound effect without much thought. There aren't even sound effects for jumping or bullets. Because of the difficulty of the game but the length, the song got really repetitive, really quickly. A small playlist of different songs, especially something from the Audio Portal, would have given the game variety.

As far as graphics go, I can see you either used placeholders or slopped together stuff that was barely better. I'm not picky with graphics, and I like how easy it was to play because of its simplicity (nothing distractingly flashy) but you definitely could have done a bit more. The backgrounds are fine, but stick figures could have been bolstered a little bit more. You're not bad with graphics, but even if you didn't want to do anything, you still could have ripped some sprites from Smithy's Quest or something. Hell, you could have even used Tricksy!

Overall fun gameplay, but got really frustrating later on. It would have been really cool if you could go back and user new abilities later on, especially like using different items for different levels, so the same levels would be easier or tougher.

EggysGames responds:

Yeah I do agree with a lot of that. It is a bit rushed for a small game and my artists have all been away so I need some new ones for graphics instead of reusing old stuff.

[The Infection]

Really good game! The controls were super slick... WASD, Q for weapon selecting and E for switches. I found it very easy to get used to the controls, although I wish you could walk while crouching. That did bother me a little. Graphics are good, there are even a couple nice scares put in! Excellent atmosphere and the soundtrack was nice too.

The gameplay was a little bit of a letdown; it's nothing I haven't seen before. Just another one of those shooters. The weapon types were nice and kept things interesting, and the melee weapons were strong enough to not become useless towards the end of the game. One big complaint I have is the bosses had too few attacks. Each one only had two different moves, and they were easy to read.

One last thing that really bothered me was the lag. While playing my cursor lagged awfully, moving around in directions that I had moved my mouse in several seconds ago. This seemed to get better when I died and things 'reset' but in the end it feels like something that should have been fixed. Although it wasn't game breaking, it made the game a lot less fun, and discouraged me from trying Survival or Dodge modes.

EggysGames responds:

But Kwing its spooooky

[Naos]

This is so boring... The graphics would be nice, with the hand-drawn style, but it's sloppy to the point of almost not being able to see anything. The controls are sloppy and you move annoyingly slow, plus the drawing application is awkward to control. The music was somewhat repetitive, and the concept was not nearly as developed as it should have been. I understand this could be more of an experience than a game, but the dialogue is so sketchy it's really hard to make anything out of this. Plus the font makes it difficult to read.

Seagaia responds:

Ah, sorry to hear you found it boring and unpleasant in most (or possibly all??) aspects. I can't do much about that I guess. But from your medals I'm glad you stuck it through till the end (and wrote in detail as well!). It was a jam entry and I was playing around with the drawing idea, which was new for me (and led to the weird graphics style/etc.)

[Fixation]

Stunning. The graphics, while simple, are a huge upgrade from this game's sequel. I would have liked an option to switch to low quality, though, since the particle effects have a tendency to lag really badly (I wouldn't have minded switching back to high quality to read the dialogue). Another thing is that I accidentally finished a bunch of levels too quickly, before I had read all of the dialogue, when boxes popped up just as I was about to beat a level. An option to reread dialogue would have been nice. Other than that this game looks great! The textures look spot-on and the sound effects are satisfying, too. Working your ass off for that satisfying clicking noise that means you just hit the right switch makes it all worth it.

The gameplay is excellent and reminds me a bit of Spewer. Implementing the mouse for both sprays and for smoke rings add a lot of replay value, especially with the whole teamwork thing. The difficulty curve is nice and smooth, albeit with a couple bumps, and I found this fun to play and experience.

One thing I'd point out (and I'm sure people will complain about this a lot) is the brutal difficulty. I think it might be nice to be able to skip certain levels (and see the dialogue so you don't miss out), and then be able to go back to it later. Perhaps a simple system like allowing one skipped level at a time would have allowed players to get better at the game in order to go back and solve puzzles on their own. As it was, I did have to look at a walkthrough for 5 or 6 of the levels.

I'd also like to congratulate Carney for composing great music once again! Both the original pieces and rehashes sound excellent and really drew me into the mood. You've got a brilliant storyline going here and this prequel did not disappoint. This easily deserves a 5/5.

FreeAsANerd responds:

What a nice reviewâEU"thanks a ton.

Yeah, I was a little iffy about letting people walk out on conversations, but I just made sure to not allow it for important story points (like at the end of the first chapter, for instance). In the end I figure that some people might decide to play it again because they knew they missed a few chat bubbles, and maybe in their second playthrough they'll understand more of the minor conversations in context and feel all smart about it and stuff.

Having a "level skip" button never seemed appropriate for this game, especially now that walkthroughs for Flash games are so common. After all, it can't be a story about somebody's hard times if it lets you skip the bits that are too tough!

[Awaken: Front Line]

Almost unplayable.

This game has great graphics, a great sound track, and a great concept, only the control scheme is just so awful I can't give it more than a 3/5. Normally I would give more stars from the effort, but since it's obvious that you're a good enough designer to know better, I'm giving you my full wrath and docking two full points for this screwup.

The single largest issue with this game is that soldiers act on their own WAY too much. Automatically reloading, automatically attacking, automatically looting. It was unbearably obnoxious and it made it physically hurt to play the game due to the fact that playing this game was an almost entirely passive experience.

I get that automatically reloading is supposed to be a convenient feature, but I would rather have the character flash orange when they're out of bullets and red when they're low on health... Also making interactive objects blink when the grid is set to appear would have been nice. This all snowballs into its own little problem of its own: As a game designer, it's important to let your audience know exactly what's going on in a game. Blind spots, whether in an action, adventure, driving, or strategy game (or all the other genres I didn't mention) are extremely annoying and can quickly make a great game unplayable.

Also let me point out how ludicrous it is to reload from a supply box one bullet at a time. If you wanted to make the game harder, you should have made the zombies stronger. Certain actions like that, or like the stat system which would have normally given the game more polish instead felt superficial, unrealistic, and annoying. You're severely lacking in aesthetics here!

That being said, I think the whole tile-based real-time strategy concept is awesome, and I think it's a great way to stimulate to make quick judgments while also being an extremely realistic way to think of battle tactics. Part of the reason this game pissed me off so much was because I genuinely wanted to enjoy and get to like this game.

dovganovskiy responds:

Hello!
Some notes about AI :)
We listen to many testers and made THIS Ai after listening much comments from different people. And here are reasons for that.
Soldiers don't attack zombies , while they are busy/looting---- It is made to increase income ! Imagine if your looters will shoot at everyone... No profit... And almost no damage.
Soldiers don't shoot to zombies , who are eating his friends :) ---- Soldiers choose closest enemy . Pretty egoistic , but if they will cover others , not themselves - they will be dead too...
Soldiers suddenly go to top of the screen ----- They go to the closest reloading point . I need to explain why?
PS Also we made ability to player to aim soldiers , if you has no time to do it - just press spacebar! Good luck :)

[Madness Scene Creator 5]

Whoa, serious issues here! Alright, since this is a scene creator rather than a game or movie with a beginning and end, I think the best thing to do is list the problems rather than put them in a paragraph:

1. Mute button doesn't work. Sorry to bitch, but it doesn't. It's not that hard to type in stopAllSounds(); so why not do it?

2. The graphics are incomplete. There are tons of weapons and objects from Madness Combat that are missing, especially in the melee weapons category. I understand sprite crowding is an issue, but that brings me to another problem...

3. The interface is awful. It might be nice to have some kind of display box pop up, rather than having to hold down keys and press and hold to resize or rotate objects. Even as it is, there are issues with layers, and I've found things to screw up while resizing. I think the _xscale and _yscale are disproportionate with each other while enlarging and shrinking items.

4. No reset button. Say I screw something up and want to start over. Well damn, do I have to wait through an advertisement all over again? Apparently so. This should be an easy fix, man.

5. Copied and pasted sprites. WHY?!?! The least obstructive and easiest-to-use system for a scene creator would be to have a list of all of the sprites as buttons, possibly a scrollable list, and then have those buttons spawn your objects through linkage. This would reduce lag, make navigation easier, reduce crowding on the background, and it would make everything look much more elegant. It would also be great for deleting objects from the screen if they were resized wrong or something. Really, I can't recommend this enough.

6. Twitch-reflex rotation. Why do you have to just time your clicks to get your rotation how you want it? If objects had a pop-up window when you clicked on them, you could manually type in a rotation between 0 and 360 to make scene creating much, much easier!

I don't know how well tuned your ActionScript skills are, but if I were you I would look at the level editor in Happy Wheels or Crush the Castle and try to mimic those, as they have very pretty and easy-to-use interfaces.

Some terms to look up: getNextHighestDepth, getDepth, loadSound, useHandCursor, attachMovieClip, stopAllSounds.

F1Krazy responds:

Hoo boy. That's a lot of criticisms. All of them justified, I guess, so let's get down to it...

1. I did at least say that the mute button was broken. I think I tried that code in MSC4, and then it didn't un-mute itself again, there must be something I'm not doing right >.>

2. Yeah, there just isn't enough room to fit everything in (because of problem No.3), I wanna fit more in but physically can't.

3. I know, yeah. I just sort of crammed in all the items and code without thinking. I used to put everything in separate layers so I could keep track of and fix layering issues, but this time everything's in one layer so it's harder to do that. And I really need to fix the scaling issues.

4. I'll look into that for next time, it does seem to be a recurring request.

5. Yeah...this is the big one. Back when I made the first one I had no idea how to make things duplicate, so I just copy/pasted everything multiple times. I never learned the code for duplication, and nobody else really had an issue with it until recently, so I just kept it like this. I did get the code for duplication recently (I think it's the same method you suggested), but I felt I was too far along at that point to just scrap everything and redo it. I will fix this. Maybe not in this version, but I will fix it.

6. Maybe I made the rotation system a bit too fine this time around ^^'

As for how well tuned my ActionScript skills are...well, not very. I'd like to have better interfaces for everything but at the moment it's a bit beyond my skill level. Some of the other stuff, I'm sure I can try and fix.

I will definitely look up those terms, although some of them look familiar, probably from haphazard attempts at trying (and failing) to use them.

Thank you. This is probably the most helpful and detailed review I've gotten in a long time.

[The Doctor's Run]

Hilariously awful... WOW. So where to start? The graphics are all ripped bitmaps with poor quality, either squashed or stretched to insane proportions that just make everything look bad. Filters are applied to every object but are obvious and overused, and really don't help with the polishing. The sound is just one song looping over and over. The gameplay is boring, has no instructions, and no real strategy, as the apples and custard spawn in the same place over and over, leaving you standing on the exact same spot to maximize your score. And to make it worse, the game doesn't even end!

kirrrbyyy responds:

I totally agree with you. I hate this piece of crap.
But thanks for playing!