Kwing's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[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!

[This Game Makes Sense]

Decent

This game looks to be done fairly well, with good animation, really good graphics, catchy music, and nice sound effects, but it suffers from incredibly difficult gameplay with absolutely no motivation to move on; while fun for a while, dying over and over because the controls are ridiculously slippery gets annoying when you aren't unlocking anything at all.

thinking-man responds:

The main thing that I impressed myself with, is making a working platformer engine that isn't glitchy at all.

[Math Pinball]

Had Great Potential

The physics are amazing. The ball rolls how it should, although it bounces just a little bit too much and is strangely lightweight. The rest of the game holds the problem, though. The shots are repetitive and the playing fields leave a lot to be desired. It's just hitting sections of the board over and over. The physics also disallow long, diagonal shots, making it very hard to hit faraway targets. The graphics are oversimplified and the sounds are repetitive.

Damned123 responds:

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Sorry but good game eh?

[Stealing the Diamond]

Very Good

I wasn't sure what to think when I saw this on the number one spot for game/interactive in the Top 50. The previous two had been good, but not this kind of quality. After playing it I can see why it's reached this spot, though. The graphics are much better this time around, with the sticks being the only thing that's really bland looking. The animation is extremely smooth, and there's also a ton of things to do in this game! The ideas and humor are decent, although none of them got me to laugh out loud. The music is well chosen. All in all it's pretty darn good. It does, however, still feel as if it's missing something. I also wish the menus were a little more comprehensive, as they look rather rough and artistic to a fault.

PuffballsUnited responds:

I will keep the menu thing in mind for the next one. I dunno what it could be missing, but I'll keep trying to add new things.

[Nyan Cat FLY!]

Excellent for What it Is

The graphics remain mostly true to the original Nyan cat, the sound likewise. As for the animation, I really like the easing on the rainbow, and the customizable Nyan cat was very nice and simple.

The gameplay was simple too, but something about it kind of bothered me, although I'm not sure what it was. Partially it was too simple, plus I never got much of an explanation as to what each treat and vegetable did... Plus I didn't get the bar at the top either. But that didn't make the game any less fun!

krangGAMES responds:

There's no actual difference between the specific types of yummies and veggies - yummies = good, veggies = bad :P
As for the bar on the top, filling it gives you a big point bonus! The text along the bottom of the screen details the points

[4 IN 1: Story Generator]

Mad Libs...?

A bunch of simple shapes and Flash filters, a simple tween animation, and some equally simple script to implement inputs into a longer string of text? This is really old, and we've had stuff like this since before computers existed. Even the buttons are square-ish and look unattractive, same as the UI. The font for Lonely Hearts was also difficult to read and obnoxious. The stories themselves tend to be nonsensical, of course.

All in all I found this to be rather boring and samey, and it didn't entertain me much at all.

Little-Radiodemon responds:

Poor you :(