Kwing's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Tonight we hunt Revenge]

Interesting game. The elephant in the room is the art, which looks phenomenal in terms of style, animation, and color scheme. It's clear a ton of work went into the animation and it has a great Devil May Cry flair to it. Unfortunately, the music is compressed and distorted so heavily to the point of being really distracting. Similarly, I found this game lagging quite a bit with Ruffle. Put together, these two things really broke the immersion.

The actual levels between bosses struck me as unnecessary. They're short, the mob enemies are annoying, and the platforming is stupidly easy. I can sort of understand that they're meant to tutorialize the jump attack and rolling, but you could just as easily have had one tutorial introduce all of these mechanics and then had a boss rush. The player's moveset isn't that big to begin with and the bosses really are the meat and potatoes of the game. I never quite understood the healing mechanism. It looks like you can heal twice per level, and an infinite number of times during boss fights, but with cooldown? It looks like the thing that flies around you indicates if you can heal, but it would be nice to know how many heals you have left, or what your cooldown is rather than just having a binary "canHeal" indicator.

I found the bosses to be frustrating if only because of the lack of telegraphing (however I did really like that each boss had two phases.) For instance, I didn't even realize it was the head that was damaging me during the first boss fight for quite some time. I kept taking damage when the enemy didn't seem to be attacking and got confused. The 2nd and 4th bosses were fairly easy after recognizing this, but the 3rd boss in particular can be quite annoying. He has a tendency to teleport right on top of you, and the flame pillars that shoot across the bottom can sometimes activate right after you jump, making it such that you don't have time to jump again before they activate. The telegraphing is also pretty subtle, especially if you're looking at the boss rather than the platform on the bottom.. Why not make their eyes have a bigger glow, or some other more obvious effect? The lightning attack can also be confusing, as the warning strike looks like an actual attack. It took me a while to train myself to remember that the small strike was a warning for a larger strike. Perhaps if it were a single beam instead of two separate ones this would be clearer to the player?

Overall a pretty fun action game. With better framerate, crisp audio quality, and a clear boss rush mode, this could feel a lot cleaner.

FsebastiamL responds:

thanks, I agree with you, when I saw about the flash jam I worked in this game in 2 weeks but I feel that I can improve the audio and music also I will add the indicators for the heal mechanic.

I will keep in mind all the critics that you made, Thanks :)

[Virtual Pet Rock DX 2000]

For a joke game this is actually pretty decent looking. I really do like the art, and the animations (specifically the poke) look pretty good. The buttons have a nice hand-drawn style and the music is fitting. The only thing that's missing aesthetically is a background (or two.)

The drag and drop is probably my biggest issue with what you have here. Some of the small objects are going to be hard to tap and drag on mobile, and having everything on-screen at once can feel very cluttered. Given that there are really only about 6 categories of things to add (ears, eyes, nose, mouth, hat, glasses) this could have looked really clean, especially if you kept the buttons to toggle items hidden inside of an alternate tab.

PegasuTV responds:

Hey thanks a lot for the thought out review!! Nice to hear you like the art, and all hand drawn UI stuff. I only kinda disagree with the background thing, because I was always thinking of the zoom out thing, and I couldn't think of a way to make it work with a bg smoothly like I wanted.

Now, about the drag and drop, you are absolutely right about the clutteredness, I actually tried doing draggable tabs in which each category would be in, but that didn't work so I just scratched that all together and threw everything on screen at once. It could really make things cleaner, but I am super limited when it comes to programming, all I know is stuff I've learned on NG tutorials from like 10 years ago(I might have gone through a few hoverman platform tutorials by a certaing Kwing user)

[Spacewar Championship]

If nothing else, I really enjoyed how smoothly this game runs in Ruffle. The controls are responsive and everything works without an inkling of slowdown.

The biggest gimmick of this game - that being the different ship types - is honestly not that interesting. Most of the variants are objectively bad, such as the random teleporter, the bullet going toward the center, or short-range rapid fire. On the other hand, I found the rockets and long range "sniper" ships to be significantly overpowered. These are things that should probably have some kind of tradeoff to make them all competitively viable against each other, or perhaps to have some kind of rock-paper-scissors where certain types have an advantage over others.

The map itself is very odd. The gravity well in the center is a neat idea, but it's way too strong and also doesn't matter for the AI players at all. What if your bullets didn't damage ships, but instead stunned or pushed them? Pushing an enemy into the gravity well would feel really satisfying. Having multiple arenas would be nice, too. What if the map was larger and had two gravity wells?

A couple other balance things are in order, I think. First, the ships need to loop around from one side of the map to the other faster. Too much of the combat happens completely off-screen, partly because you have to go far off screen to respawn on the other end, and partly because you can't spend as much time as you'd want near the center because of the aforementioned gravity well. Speaking of map balance, there seriously needs to be some invulnerability to prevent spawn killing.

The basic engine for this game feels great but this needs some pretty serious rebalancing.

IamJonathan responds:

Thanks for the detailed feedback! The map is the way it is because this is a remake of the original Spacewar game form the 60s. The idea behind the different ships was to have opponents of increasing strength for the singleplayer and I only added the option to play as other ships at the last moment. That being said, these are some great suggestions that I'll definitely consider if I ever make a sequel.

[Jaded Slasher]

It was honestly kind of painful to finish this. At first glance it looks like there's a lot of content (60 rooms!) but the whole game is just clicking to attack. There's no resource management (health potions are useless since you can always run back to a town and heal without taking damage) and the best way to grind is usually to find an area with a high spawn rate of chests and just click endlessly (especially as they respawn on their own.) The whole game can be beaten with a pretty simple formula:

- Click enemies until you meet the quota to unlock the next room or get low on health.
- Proceed to next room when possible.
- Heal when necessary.
- Spend excess money on stat upgrades.

The quests are generic "kill X of Y monster" and the lack of equipment or abilities really takes away from any variety the game might have with regards to actual gameplay. Combine that with basically no story and me mowing over the witch without taking any damage (not really interested in going back to kill the ogre superboss) and you have a pretty forgettable game.

Steps to improve? I think having the spatial element of the rooms coming into play would be nice. Right now you just kind of teleport from enemy to enemy and the positioning doesn't matter at all. What if there were some kind of stamina system and moving farther distances exhausted more stamina? What if enemies had an attack radius and attacking ANYTHING caused you to take damage from any enemy if you were within that radius? Stuff like this would make the player think more carefully before they acted. Also make it so just traveling from room to room carries some risk for the player.

If possible, try and discard any system that functions around making stats go up in favor of novel upgrades such as abilities. When the only thing that changes is a number indicating the damage you inflict or receive, it can really take away from the sense of progression because that progress is only represented in an abstract way.

Better player feedback would be nice, too. I'd like to see damage numbers by the characters when they attacked, and maybe a notification or pop-up that indicates when you have unspent skill points. Lack of player feedback made this game feel pretty obtuse.

Graphics are vibrant and colorful but get old fast, especially given how long (and padded) this game is. A shorter, more condensed game experience would have worked a lot better for this project I think.

Performance is also kind of weird on Ruffle, I had a much easier time playing in Flash.

applessmillion responds:

Thanks for the feedback! I'll see what I can do to improve upon the idea in the future. I will admit the current game has fewer elements of strategy than what I intended. There are two types of quests (kill X of Y; Collect X of Y) and would totally be open to a 3rd type, just couldn't figure out what that would be.
I'll definitely keep in mind your suggestions for the update I plan to release end of March/early April. Thanks again!

[Bullet Heaven 3 [Prototype]]

Pretty solid game here. Having played Realm of the Mad God for the past few months, I felt right at home with the bullet hell mechanics, though obviously there's a decent amount of other stuff to talk about.

I wasn't a fan of the upgrade mechanics. It introduces too much power creep to the game, to the point where there's really no point worrying about your rank as you can S rank the levels with better upgrades later on. Introducing a money multiplier based on your rank would be nice, as it would give incentive for players to get higher rankings earlier in the game, as well as add more options for grinding money other than repeatedly failing the hardest level they've unlocked.

There are a LOT of enemy types here, and while the variety is pretty cool, it seems like there's a lot of potential for mixing different types that you didn't use at all. In most cases, dodging becomes very easy if you just get far enough away from the enemies. This creates a pretty redundant pattern of clearing a corner or side of the arena and then wiggling around in that area while clearing the rest of the room. It works, but there aren't many (if any) enemies that really punish this strategy or force other types of play. The other side of this is how enemies may spawn en masse before you're done clearing a wave. This is interesting and can keep the momentum going, but in some cases (particularly when there are still plenty of enemies left) it can feel really unfair, as the act of clearing enemies ultimately results in more appearing on screen. It can feel like the player is being punished for doing nothing wrong (it's also annoying when you rush in to grab some coins only to have to retreat immediately.) It would be more fair for only weaker enemies to spawn in these kinds of situations, and if your intent is to prevent players from camping in "cold spots" this could be done by a certain enemy type rather than through the game's spawning mechanic. You could also do this with more than just bullets; obstacles such as walls or traps (Amorphous uses puddles of things like oil or acid) would be a creative way to increase the skill ceiling of the game without just taking a "more is better" approach to the bullets.

Performance-wise, it honestly looks like you did the worst thing you possibly could. The number of objects moving on screen for a bullet hell is higher than potentially any other genre, and you did this while also putting glow effects on each of the bullets (since filters don't work in Ruffle, I'm guessing you used Soften Fill Edges?) I had to download this game and run it in Flash, and even then the game slowed down considerably. I switched the game quality to low, which worked for a few levels... and then, even on Flash Player and on low quality, I still experienced some significant slowdowns. Surely this game would run faster if your glow effects were pre-baked with PNGs?

Aesthetics-wise, the graphics look nice but it's obviously unfortunate that you had to re-use old assets. I thoroughly resented the music, but I'll admit that's a matter of taste.

Good game and engaging gameplay, but the content feels a bit padded.

matt-likes-swords responds:

Thanks for the feedback.

The bullets ARE bitmaps though!

[Ruffle:Another Mission]

Eh, it's okay. I like the silhouette-based graphics a lot, but the gameplay is in a pretty rough state. The first and most obvious issue is that J and H are pretty unintuitive keys for sniping. Given that this game uses WASD and won't have mobile integration, mouse aiming makes a lot more sense for shooting. The controls also feel weird regarding the platforming, specifically some of the jumps which require high precision.

Probably the biggest issue is the lines that you and the enemies have to telegraph where they're aiming. The limited range (both for the player and enemies) is inconsistent and makes it frustrating to know when and where you can be hit. Some kind of delay and audio telegraph would be nice, as it would give the player a chance to run the other way or try to quickscope enemies. The meat and potatoes of the game (running into the aiming path of an enemy, then sniping them before the line rolls over you) became intuitive with enough practice but never really felt enjoyable.

It's not a bad concept, but it feels clunky, as the actual challenge (timing when to come out of hiding and sniping quickly) feels pretty far removed from the actual concept of a run and gun.

speed8327 responds:

thanks for the feedback. ...really appreciated it.

And about the game controller layout, the game was developed with Mobile-first design approach ( arrows key movement and A/B button for sniping and shooting). So, it had to map the desktop controller layout.

But at the last minute of publishing because of this ruffle's GitHub issue ( https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle/issues/1972 ), had to drop the entry for mobile device (for time being).

If on getting more request and follow, I might upload another version of this game using openFl and haxe, adding extra levels with some extra playable characters with different abilities that might make the game more enjoyable.

So, stay tuned.

[Comic Reader- Art Forum Battle Royale Volume 1]

The art is great at some points and at others very inconsistent. Hard to put a rating on that as I don't think the better artists should suffer because others are stragglers. I'm also not sure if that's the point of this being a battle royale - is the competition only within the confines of the comic, or did the original forum eliminate competitors when their art was trumped by the art of a competing artist?

As far as the rest of the submission, it's pretty clunky. The page flip animation is a bit basic and could have benefitted from being just a bit longer and smoother. It's also disorienting that the frames change only after the animation finishes. There should definitely be a mute button. Most importantly, whatever zoom-in feature is advertised in the help menu doesn't appear to actually work, and this makes most of the dialogue completely unreadable.

dw bro i got u

I'm assuming the comic book panels are stored within a single Movie Clip, and you're navigating between frames on that Movie Clip? If the registry point of that MC is the center of the stage, try this code:

https://www.newgrounds.com/dump/item/abb76c2053be98383cbedbfe78546171

Mabelma responds:

Thank you tons! For the wonderful feedback I will definitely put it into practice for the next version, and I appreciate the code greatly! I’ll check it out 🙌🙏

[Torture the Blammer]

There's not a ton to write home about here. The graphics are pretty basic, and there's only a few things to click on. Clicking on the victim himself only advances a set of predetermined frames with no animation, and the ending doesn't have much more than a few basic tweens.

I get that AS2 is hard to get into if you're trying to make something quickly, but it would have been easy enough to have different body parts take damage independently from one another, and also to have animations advancing them from one state of injury to the next.

Little-Radiodemon responds:

umadbro

[Type Help]

I really wanted to like this, but it's just too obscure. The first room with the towel and chamber pot are nice and feel like a text adventure should, but the demon riddle is annoying, as it's unclear that it's even a riddle in the first place - I spent a lot of time searching other rooms for some kind of solution and found nothing. I understand the logic, but it just doesn't feel like good design.

The apple is where things completely fall apart. The fact that the player can turn spoilers on, ignore a warning and break the game seems to imply a "right" way to beat the game, without tampering too much with the commands given to you. Yet the way the apple is obtained still requires you to manually edit the game itself. The line between solving puzzles and breaking the game gets too fuzzy here, and while the logic of this is kind of explained, it's never demonstrated in a way that would make it user-friendly, nor does it really feel fun to actually accomplish.

Then after you finally get past these two awful sections of the game, barely anything happens before the game itself ends. Just like that? No real story, and no puzzles between the super obvious bits of the start and finish and the two horribly impossible puzzles in between? The game requires a lot of investment to understand and is so wholly unrewarding that it just doesn't feel like it's worth it.

If anything, this game (particularly the apple puzzle) feels like a weird tutorial for understanding how the story builder feature works, but doesn't provide enough substance for me to have faith that user-generated games would be any better.

Would also be nice if pressing up allowed you to look at past commands similar to a real terminal.

BoMToons responds:

Yes, it's mostly a tutorial for learning the editor. That's the point, but I do understand how obscure it is, so I'm not disagreeing with your comments, mostly agreeing.

The first version of the game hid the things now marked as "spoilers" completely, but a reviewer complained about that fact and said it contradicted the "open-ness" of the game's concept. So, I compromised and put in the spoiler stuff... I do see how it's a bit contradictory now though :-/

The demon name puzzle is very obscure, I know, but I liked it too much and felt too clever to exclude it... but a lot hinges on it, so... I left it :-)

I agree about the up command... how could that be implemented and keep the page scrolling/paging feature though? (I don't want to code a scroll bar, and Ruffle doesn't support Flash's native components)

[Epic Battle Fantasy]

I remembered playing this back in the day but never beat it. After seeing EBF5 in the portal, I decided I didn't have time for a 30 hour game and decided I'd give this another go instead.

It's decent, but the gameplay is a bit drawn out and monotonous. Not knowing the type of an enemy except based on the damage you deal is a bit annoying, and I found many of the items to be significantly more important than others while in the shop (potions, ethers, and revives are by far the most important, and ethers get used the most.)

I liked the idea of balancing healing and damage with Goku at the end (the fact that Judgment heals you makes this interesting, as your mage might heal the swordsman, but is better off using Judgment to heal herself.) However, aside from that, the game doesn't have a ton of strategy to it, and not knowing how long until you reach the shop or how long each wave lasts makes the game feel longer than it otherwise would.

matt-likes-swords responds:

Yeah, if you only play the oldest game, you're gonna get an outdated experience.