Kwing's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Cat Burglar & The Magic Museum]

I remember you posting about this on the forums and playing it before it was officially released. While some work could definitely be done to improve performance (the money particle effects are particularly bad - they should just have an animation where they fade out instead of programatically moving toward the player) the tradeoff is that the graphics also look pretty great.

Similar to my thoughts on the beta version, there's not a ton of strategy here. It's more of a touchy-feely thing where you try and guess how long you've been making noise and err on the side of caution. Security never increases fast enough to be especially punishing if you decide to be overly cautious. What is nice is that you can actually escape security this time! As many people said, in the earlier version you were basically dead once the guard was coming. I'm glad that both gloves and boots have a purpose now.

All in all the simplicity of the gameplay makes this pretty casual and sets a certain ceiling for how engaging it can be, but that doesn't mean it's not enjoyable.

Starblinky responds:

Thanks for the thought out review.

And yes I find some people are put off by the hyper casual nature of the game but that’s understandable.

The game has definitely come a long way.

There is not much optimization for the game so it could lag on older devices unfortunately. Once the jam judging is finished I’ll upload a new version with a bunch of improvements.

Thanks again 🙏

[The Flash Flood 2021]

The voice acting for this is hilarious. Pretty simple in every other respect - the sprites aren't especially detailed and there's very little gameplay to speak of.

I did find saving the people to be a bit annoying due to how small the clicking area was. I assume that's the point, but lack of checkpoints made it quite frustrating, especially since you still have to wait for the water to fill up the whole screen after saving everything.

Cyberdevil responds:

You're a tough critic Kwing. :) Simple sprites yes, suppose most of the drawing time actually went into the text here, and details you barely notice like the hundreds of minuscule bubbles as the water floods or the stars on the last level. But would definitely have been more detailed if I'd started this earlier/had more levels/probably have opted for checkpoints then.

Regarding the limited level count, maybe you'd be intrigued to know each item you click is actually a button within a unique MC with a runtime that syncs to the rising water level, and either directs to the game over screen on root after a certain frame count or to the last frame in the MC with a stop statement if you click it. The whole game's made with very basic goto/play/stop functionality. Would've probably had time for a few more if my coding skills were a bit more suited for this type of stuff, but in a way I do like figuring out workarounds like this with the most basic prerequisite programming knowledge that allow for games that probably seem at least a bit more advanced than they really are; paradoxically enough are maybe really unexpectedly complex because of said workarounds. And that's the nature of Flash I feel; why it's always been so awesome! :) Anyone can really do anything. No heavy skills required as long as you get creative with it. The optimal blend between game and animation-based functionality, where you can find shortcuts via the latter to make things seem more like the former, or whatever it is you strive to do.

Anyway you do provide fair critique. Waiting for the water to reach the top gets a bit slow when you're playing just to get back to the final level, could've maybe added a counter that each item adds to, and then sped up the water thing when it reached a certain amount hmm... will try that next time. Thanks for feedback; play!

['Brain-Toasting Dungeon']

It took all of about 2 seconds for me to recognize you as one of the guys that got really far into the animation deathmatch several years back. You really do have a trademark style.

Given that you're an animator by trade, it's no surprise that's the high point of this game. Everything is visually stunning. The game itself is pretty simple and the bad endings are extremely short, but if you enjoy it as an animation rather than a game, there's really not much to complain about.

Cute, fun, simple, short. Not a ton of replay value but it doesn't overstay its welcome.

Butzbo responds:

Wooow that's right!!, the classic NATA tournaments!!
Yeah part of me wanted to make some more elaborated endings, and even more branching routes, but ended up lowering the scope to finish well in time hahah.
thanks Kwing!!

[FAST FOOD FUNKIN']

Damn, if I'd known you were making this I would have been happy to throw down a verse for the soundtrack! The instrumental is fantastic. The rapping is a mixed bag but it's not bad. There's not much art but what I do see is quite nice.

The concept is simple but not bad. The swiping makes it pretty clear this was designed with mobile in mind. The fact that the arrows go down instead of up makes me think it would have been better to have ASDF as the desktop controls. Having played DDR for years my eyes are trained to recognize arrows when they're going up, but I think anyone would be able to handle the patterns if the linear pattern represented four keys that were also laid down in a linear order. The other obvious change would be for some button that takes the next order if you're on desktop that doesn't involve swiping such as the spacebar (I lost several arrows reaching for my mouse when I saw "swipe" on the screen.)

Unfortunately the issue that I really can't get past is that the arrows are straight up broken. The timing seems to be off, but even experimenting with hitting them early or late, I found the process of hitting them to be extremely inconsistent. I'm not sure what went wrong here but a fix is definitely necessary before this is really playable.

BrandyBuizel responds:

The game is designed for mobile but fully playable on the keyboard alone. I added your suggestion about using the ASDF keys, but in order to keep WASD for some players I instead made the use of the 1234 number keys work in the place of ASDF. Additionally you've always been able to use the right arrow key to swipe instead of reaching for the mouse, but that was unclear so I modified the UI to reflect that as an option! Lastly, the key presses/hit registration is much more generous to the player now so I hope you'll come back and try experiencing the full song :)

I regrettably had to rush publishing the game to make it in as part of the Flash Forward Jam, but I've spent the last few days cleaning up the game to be in a more fun/complete form so please enjoy!

[Diaphanous 0]

I nearly beat level 5, but when I got the jewel on the far left and couldn't get back to the chest I had to quit. This game is just too damn hard.

The mechanics feel a lot like a vertical Meat Boy. Jumping and stomping are extremely fast, as opposed to MB's super fast horizontal movement. This gets really interesting with the relatively slow falling speed, as a LOT can happen while you're airborne and this makes sticking landings especially difficult. I sometimes noticed I landed on people but still hit the spikes anyway. Very annoying.

I would highly recommend putting in some moderately difficult levels between 2 and 3, even on difficult games you never see difficulty ramp up this quickly.

Some other suggestions: Don't restart the music when the player dies. It happens too much and players will never hear more than the first 10 seconds of any given song. Give the spikes a bit more glow/contrast with the rest of the level. You can play these levels by instinct but everyone else has to use peripheral vision, so do what you can to make that part easier for us. I also think jumps where you have to wait for certain obstacles to go in and out of phase should be changed so that the window of opportunity happens with each cycle of animation. Waiting for two obstacles to go into phase and missing the jump anyway is probably one of the most frustrating things you can experience in this game.

The graphics are interesting (especially the psychedelic effects) but ultimately pretty basic. Though for something this challenging where you stare at the same things for a long time, it might be nice to have something even simpler, or at least just more high contrast (getting back into what I said about the spikes.)

All in all the game is fun and brutally difficult, but eels more difficult than rewarding, especially as there's no real downtime where you can take some time to breathe between the hardest parts.

EDIT: So I decided to give this another go and got to level VI. I've collected as many gems as I could see (one on far left, two in the small jumps on the right, two in the big jumps on the right) and it's still saying I need one more gem. I restarted the game and my save file was deleted so I got sent back to level 1. Some kind of bug?

HapPie responds:

Thanks a lot for the review, music restarting was a bug and now is fixed, thanks for pointing that out. I´ll look into making levels less frustrating in general as well.

[alter Matricks]

For as simple as this is, it's surprisingly addicting. Unfortunately the puzzle element ends up being pretty shallow with only two colors - I can only assume that's why the viruses are there. Ultimately I found the viruses make the game more tedious than difficult, but once the difficulty ramps up I did find myself actually thinking and playing actively. I still think that, even with the Matrix theme, more colors would have allowed the difficulty to feel more organic.

Some of the later levels lag a little too.

Foumart responds:

Thanks for the feedback. It is being taken into account for the current and upcoming updates.

[TANKMEN : THE GAME (tech demo)]

Damn... It's way too bad this is incomplete, as the art looks absolutely phenomenal. Gameplay-wise, the acceleration is a bit slow and it strikes me as unfair that some of the platforms you need to reach are off-screen. That said this could have easily been a 9/10 game if it had been finished.

Blounty responds:

Life sadly gets in the way of game jams ;(

[Randy Learns Science]

OH MY GOD the aesthetic for this is soooooo good! Up until the creepypasta stuff started happening I thought the game was literally a port of an existing 90s game. It's that authentic. the graininess, the crude 3D, even the compressed audio quality and voice acting.

All that gushing about the theme out of the way... The games are solid. The quiz is, well, a quiz. The painting can be a bit hard as you can't just click anywhere on the periodic table to change color (I don't get why some elements do nothing.) The rearranging task seems pretty basic. The organ minigame is super hard, since there's a tiny bit of cursor lag.

The final boss and ending were a bit of a letdown. The boss doesn't keep with the aesthetic of the rest of the game, and its motivations feel a bit too generic. The fight is also just kind of a bunch of frantic mouse waving... Not very interesting. Part of what makes stuff like Sonic.exe so effective is that you don't really get an explanation other than the game just being "cursed" and I think that ambiguity could have helped more here. I also didn't like how some games are more "cursed" than others, as the most effective thing to do would be for the game to get increasingly cursed with each playthrough (this game still gave me goosebumps though.) You could either make several versions of each game or force them to be played in a linear order, but for maximum horror impact I think it's important.

Dungeonation responds:

Thanks for the thoughtful review! The ending was planned to be a bigger minigame, but time constraints of the jam and life happened. I feel ya there!

[Maestro Nav]

It's an okay game, but pretty basic. The things you have to avoid come pretty slowly and often it obstacles are clustered in two lanes while one remains wide open so you can just sit there with no risk of hitting something. The different hazards sliding around would probably feel a lot more like music if you had some kind of guide lines indicating which quarter/eighth note they were inside of. That, plus a more aggressive layout of hazards, could force the player to tap along to the beat. Finally, some kind of pulsing from the sprites is a great way to immerse the player in the music. Right now I can imagine it would be pretty easy to play this without sound at all, which is never a good sign for rhythm games.

Balance-wise the ability is kind of weird. I used invulnerability a couple times and restored a heart like once, but since the game is pretty easy these mechanics mostly went unused. There's one really hard section near the beginning but the rest is all pretty easy to do without hitting a hazard at all.

The graphics (specifically the player) are cute but get old very fast with basically no background and only four sprites (player, two hazards, carrot.) The song also feels longer than I would have liked. For something short like this, it might have been more fun to have three 1:30-2:00 songs with varying difficulties.

Technically speaking there are a handful of bugs involving things that should be deleted (the heart and transition animation.) Are you trying to use unloadMovie on these objects? Ruffle doesn't support these yet, so you have to swapDepth to a positive value and then call removeMovieClip.

Intrapath responds:

Yeah, I definitely see where you're coming from with your notes about the musical aspects, especially making the player tap along to a beat; there are a couple points where the player has to do that, but it isn't really consistent enough to get a player into a good flow, I think. I'm getting mixed feedback on the difficulty, funny enough; people playing on mobile think it's super hard, and the people on PC think it's super easy. It might be that the mobile buttons are too small to hit reliably, so there's some artificial difficulty in there; I'm gonna make a note to make those buttons bigger, and see if that evens things out. The pulsing is a great point too; there actually were pulsing animations early on, but I took them out for the sake of getting the game to run more smoothly. I'm planning on untangling some of my spaghetti code that I cobbled together to hit the deadline, and I've got my fingers crossed that that'll get things running smoothly enough that I can confidently put the pulsing animations back, and not worry about lag throwing off the rhythm of items spawning.

Balance-wise, funny enough, the abilities used to be switched (invul was 1 carrot, recovering health was 2). I think the way it's set up now is a little more interesting in terms of the mental "should I/shouldn't I?" play of when to use your carrots, but yeah, I could see PC players not using it that much. Once I get those mobile adjustments in, and I tweak the level design, that might even things out and make the abilities feel more valuable.

Definitely 100% agree w/ the note about the background & art getting old, fast- a scrolling BG of a motherboard (so it looks like you're actually *traveling through a stereo*) was in the works but had to get cut. That's one of the first things getting put back in. As for song length, yeah, I definitely see what you mean. I'm not totally sure if I'll add another song in a future update (maybe an encore kind of thing?), but if I do, it'll definitely be significantly shorter than this one. 5 minutes is probably pushing the upper limit here.

Surprised to hear about the deleting bugs; I didn't see any of that in my testing, but I'll definitely have to take a look again, thanks for pointing that out! Funny enough, I had no clue Ruffle didn't support unloadMovie for a while early on, and I was ripping my hair out trying to figure out what was up when it didn't work. Everything here is using removeMovieClip though.

All that said, I wanted to say thanks for writing such a thorough review! It's really great to be able to get clear feedback like this. Thanks a ton for taking the time to do that, and for playing!

[Arcane Maiden]

This is definitely one of the more polished looking games in the jam. The art is fantastic, and more importantly, consistent even with the UI (the pixelated fonts work really smoothly with the rest of the game, making the UI blend pretty well with all of the other elements.) Parts of this look like an authentic SNES experience. I also really like how well the mechanics translate for mobile play.

The gameplay is something that has a lot of potential, but ultimately suffers from a lack of balance. You can mostly stun-lock enemies with delay strike, to the point where they almost never get a chance to attack. Early in the game this isn't a huge issue, but as you get abilities that buff your mana recharge rate, it becomes a dominant strategy for any fight that's too hard. Particularly when it comes to the drain compound skill, you literally never need to do anything else. I eventually caught on and started using level 3 attacks (and limit breaks) during encounters with tankier bosses, but this was never a necessity so much as a convenience for bosses that had enormous amounts of HP.

The 7 abilities that the character uses could be more interesting if you could equip an ability as a level 1 or level 2 ability, buffing or nerfing it in the process, or maybe if the uses of an ability were situational. What if instead of delay attack, you could cancel an enemy's heavy attack only after they committed to it? This would allow the player to have more back and forth interaction with enemies rather than just whacking away at a damage sponge. Ultimately I felt like this game could have used more novel mechanics than the ones that were present (I couldn't even tell what the status effects such as burn even DID... they never had enough of an effect for them to influence my strategy.)

The leveling system is okay. Going back and grinding when a boss is too hard seems a bit obvious, but it's not terrible. I like the idea of the skill trees, but it's a bit intimidating the first time you look at it. The runic glyphs that show which skills unlock others isn't the clearest - something less aesthetic but more pragmatic would be much friendlier for a new player.

Beautiful looking game (especially with regards to sprite animation) but the gameplay could use some added depth.

MidNightMaren responds:

First, thanks for the compliments on the game. It was actually carefully thought out in terms of the vibe I tried to convey; from the graphics to the SFX, and Music (props to Hyenaedon).

The difficulty curve was left unbalanced on purpose, more or less, as I felt the game felt repetitive from a point; many things were left out. So it's more of an inverted parabola than a curve per say, with the second boss being the hardest on my opinion. Hence the 4th Skill on your companion to replenish your Limit, so you can sweep levels faster.

A lot of things on the gameplay were left out on paper unfortunately. Many ideas varied from having more action skills that you could switch on a 'Equip' type of thing, add elemental damage on your attacks, compounds having multiple levels instead of giving everything on one go etc. Who knows it can be improved on a second instance if it ever comes to it.

Thanks for playing