sqykly's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Revenge of Robots]

I got tired of all the violence really fast. I wish it was more peaceful.

Breakdown
+1 good enough graphics
+1 no bugs
-1 not peaceful enough

[Tek Tactical]

I am afraid I have to coin a phrase to adequately describe what this game is: ridiculously high meta-game to game ratio. I imagine that the game was designed incrementally, with next to no deadlines; work naturally expands to fill available time, and feature creep snowballed into what I just played. Developer's enthusiasm for his/her work leads him/her to believe that players will also be interested in having every numeric parameter exposed or even spewed upon the monitor at nearly all times.

It sounds like I'm saying that's a bad thing, but I'm not - it's great to be enthusiastic about your game. There's just something about this that is extreme and bizarre and disproportionate, and it's far more remarkable in that respect than what I would otherwise write about in a review. It's like the content and gameplay are having some sort of lilliputian hallucination, and really can't tell how much depth they can swallow. Ridiculously high meta-game to game ratio.

That still seems a little abstract, so I'll try to spell it out. The basic activity of playing your game - the part where you can hypothetically win or lose regardless of any other preparatory steps - is the part where you run around and shoot people and pick stuff up. This part is pretty well done, though I found it a little difficult to predict or understand what defensive strategies would be effective when there is precious little cover and bullets travel at infinite speed. Normally, this sort of game is made interesting for more than a minute or two by providing additional content. Customization and character enhancements - even normal ones - don't ever carry a game alone for me once I run it out of content. There's just nothing you can do - no number of mathematical tweaks you can allow, no secondary mechanics that can enhance my efficiency at the primary game and/or other layers of meta-game - that will make the activity of shooting the same 3 guys (I am being generous with 3) in the same room interesting for a significant period of time. Rather than add rooms or other things to shoot or logical scenarios or something unpredictable or a plot or characters, you've instead offered me a million and one ways to walk back into that same room and shoot those same guys better. Adding layers to defer my character enhancements for a bigger payoff at a later time doesn't make it interesting to play unless I am really interesting in shooting those 3 guys in that room again. Sadly, I am not.

In summary:
+1 slick animations, overall good-enough-graphics
-0.5 tiny icons in the shop
+3 massive customization
-1 no corresponding content or gameplay depth to motivate use of customization
-0.5 too many numbers, not enough math to make sense of them (not that most people like math more than numbers)

Final score is 2 stars.

tedgaming responds:

You made a lot of valid points, but you also blended facts and opinion into one concoction. It's unfortunate to hear that you do not enjoy this genre of meta-gaming, but many people do and you can't just take that away just because you personally don't like it. It would be the equivalent of you walking into purse store and complaining that it's bs that they only sell purses.

[Jet Hero Alpha]

This has potential! Unless you're really dead set on quitting, keep working on this. There seemed to be a thick straight line drawn between my character and every enemy that appeared, but otherwise everything runs very smooth and looks slick.

I usually see borrowed sprites in games that are serving as help-wanted ads for an artist. If you want the game to be a serious thing, it needs to be its own IP. The fact that you can draw in a sword and gun at runtime is a good sign that your game isn't too tightly coupled to its sprites to transplant original stuff in later.

I say keep at it, and I will definitely play it again when there's some more continuity and sense of progression.

retrodude611 responds:

Thanks, I really appreciate the feedback,

It's not that I have quit on it, its more so that I have other projects to work on. This is just very low on my list of games to work-on. If I see that it's getting plays then I'll end up finishing it. I'm a bit busy at the moment, and since this was kinda built for fun I'll have to work on it slowly unless I notice that it is getting plays then I'd be more motivated to work on it.

[Hydranought]

I see potential here. The idea of having many parallel economies and tech trees invites me to customize each race's upgrades to maximize some aspect of their capabilities to form an intergalactic fleet whose power is far greater than the sum of its parts. And that is pretty cool. In theory.

But it's just too fast and easy to implement spam tactics that can carry you throughout the game, ending matches before the depth of strategy I wanted to see could manifest. Here's how I ruined the game for myself: I played each race's campaign only up to the point where I could afford their passive energy generation and economy ship - 3 or 4 battles. Then, I did that again for another race. And so on and so forth. In battles, I put each of my race's economy ships and max energy upgrades on auto. I waited for the maximum energy to get to 70, then turned off the max energy upgrade and set the ability to auto. I did this for each race - or I would have, but the battle was over before I could ever get all 8 abilities going.

Something needs to be rebalanced. You can't really nerf the economy ships, because that would make early battles really difficult. I would introduce some limitation that would affect all of your races, but choose carefully - the parallel economies and upgrade paths are what could someday make this a really deep strategy game, and you don't want to break that.

Everything else about the game is pretty good, but you might want to look into rotating the ship sprites as they move laterally, and adding some more varied effects instead of having every ship fling the same multicolored X's at each other all the time. Since most of the ships have special abilities, maybe add some flashy glitter there, too. Just something to indicate that the ability is being used is fine with me. Give the option to turn all that off in case it affects performance, but I have to say, I am impressed with how many ships I could crank out without any perceptible lag. Remember, I was sending nothing but economy ships downfield and winning, so there were a LOT of them. You have earned your graphics star on that alone.

Only one other thing. I don't even know if I should write this. Ah, what the hell. When an ad is about to interrupt the game, there's about a second before the modal overlay takes over where you can still click the exit button, thus skipping the ad. And the exit button is in the same place as it was on the previous screen, meaning your mouse is right over it, so it's pretty easy to pull off skipping every ad. If you fix that before you fix the balance issues, you have no soul.

Summary:
+1 good enough graphics
-0.5 invisible ship abilities
+0.5 great performance as ship count scales up
+2 lots of detail and customization
+1 no bugs that adversely affected gameplay
-1 severe balance issues prevent it from reaching its potential.

That is all.

[Too Many Ninjas]

"If this game doesn't start again after a game over, refresh the page"

No thanks.

[Feudalism III]

I feel bad about giving you a simply par score, because this is clearly a well put together, polished game - if you take the word "Feudalism" out of the title. Frankly, I'm a little disappointed, but only because the previous 2 games were really good.

The graphics have a lot more detail, but I don't really like the change in art style. Detailed designs with anime anatomy emphasize individuals by making them very distinguishable, which fits in an RPG or brawler or what have you, but not really in a mass-strategy game. The original art was fine, and it fit its genre better.

I did like the paused tactical mode, but it seemed like a hassle to give my units orders one at a time. And often, when exiting tactical mode, all the units remained in grayscale - forever. There goes the pretty colorful art.

Most frustrating were the good features that were cut, and the features that went with them that remained. Gone are the days when I needed to purchase a ship, and go to a port to board it. I skip about the continent unfettered by concerns about being ambushed by random bandits - or, you know, the locals I'm invading, who don't seem to mind me running around their territory anymore. In other words, all important geographical gameplay mechanics have been disposed of - so why do I still walk from place to place on a map? If there's nothing important between points A & B, why make me wait for my icon to travel there?

Yet more puzzling is the idea that I can no longer drop in at a town, do some shopping, talk to the locals, deliver a pizza, and leave peacefully. Part of the fun character building in previous Feudalisms was figuring out what nations had the best hats or swords or whatever for my character, and making sure I had a way to get there to upgrade without passing through a lot of territory in which I would face reasonable opposition because I was at war. Since all the equipment now requires a level instead of a specific stat, there isn't much point in trying to find a nice armor that will allow you to avoid blowing a lot of points on VIT anyway.

Which brings me to weapon skills. They are no more. Instead, my character is locked into a small set of weapons. I can learn techniques that use distance weapons even though I chose a melee character, but I can't carry both and switch in mid-battle, so there's no point in filling in half of my skill tree. I can't put points into passive skills that encourage me to develop an army that suits my character - good units are good, bad units and melee units are bad, end of story.

And no more mounted units? No more shields? What? Why?!

If your intent was to distill the goodness of Feudalism by reducing the feature set into something more elegant, I can understand that, but I think you've screwed it up badly. If you just wanted to make the game more accessible to more the more casual masses, at least make it a different IP so I will know I'm not really getting a new Feudalism. It simply lacks the depth of strategy, both in and out of battle, that made the first two installments special. I am disappoint.

[Empire Defender]

Cool game. Not anything groundbreaking, but a very solid 3.5 stars.

1 star for graphics that were good enough that I could tell what everything was. Animation & other presentation had no lack of frames or other issues.

1 star for being nearly bug-free and having a logical and easily learned interface. The only glitches I could find came up near the end and were as follows: If I tried to cast a spell that I was out of while holding my boomerang, I could subsequently throw two [sets of] boomerang[s] at a time instead of one until I selected something different. If I had a depleted item selected when my stocks regenerated, I had to re-select that item in order to use it even though it was no longer empty. Finally, I'm not sure what the circumstances were, but after one of my wall traps was destroyed on the last level and my traps regenerated, I was unable to place any trap in the spot that was occupied by said wall.

1.5 stars for keeping me interested almost all the way through. The difficulty curve was parabolic; the monsters became more durable slightly faster than I could upgrade at the beginning, resulting in increasing difficulty (this is desirable). However, many upgrades had synergism that made my ability to do damage and halt the enemy advance far outpace their increases in health and numbers by mid-game. At some point well before I obtained the regen upgrade, I would have difficulty expending my entire stock of weapons, spells, and traps over a given level. The synergism I'm talking about is between the weapon/spell levels, effect plus, damage plus, and bounce. Particularly, any level 3 weapon with effect plus 3 and bounce was pretty unstoppable. Level 3 spells combined with spell plus 3 were essentially all screen-clearers. Granted, I didn't have access to said combinations until the last level, but the last level should have been the hardest, and I was bored.

One slight gripe about the upgrades interface. It looks a lot simpler than it is. At first glance, you have a set of columns, but the fact that the levels of each upgrade were split amongst the columns makes it more like a rather complicated tree. At times, the phrase "Locked" was less than helpful because it wasn't immediately clear whether I was missing some prerequisite or I just didn't have enough coins. That seems like a really easy thing to fix.

[Brave Rocky]

Back to QA with you! For the simplicity of the graphic and gameplay design, there were far more bugs and much more lag than is permissible.

Presentation - The art can stay, but find some way to boost your performance. The game slowed down when there wasn't a lot going on. My laptop isn't a quantum supercomputer, but it isn't bad, and that shouldn't happen. People are going to complain about the single background and all the recolors. I counted three enemies. Over 20 some levels, you probably want more than that, or it gets repetitive fast. You might want to do something about the sound when a spell is cast and a lot of enemies are on the field - it sounds echo-y when you play the same sound effect in rapid succession.

It's hard to critique the gameplay in the face of all the bugs, because it's unclear what problems were due to design and what problems were unintentional. First off, my character could move as many times as he wanted before attacking, but could only step one square at a time. If I am supposed to be able to run as far as I want, there's no reason to make me click so many times. Learn a path checking algorithm. Speaking of pathing, the enemies were not very good at walking. Often, they hesitated to walk directly behind each other, especially when I put myself in front of the guy in front of them. Other times, especially when walking from off-screen, they could stack on top of one another so that there were two enemies in one space. The vast majority of them shared the same simple behavior, and the only ones that were challenging at all were the ones that poisoned me, because the poison effect was - unlike everything else in the game - real time. At least once, it carried over between levels. Due to the very simple behavior of the rest of the enemies, my unlimited movement, and the very rudimentary mechanics available to me, there was not much depth of strategy involved. The only degree of freedom I had aside from totally botching at blocking their approach intentionally was whether to replay old levels to grind for better stats and equipment.

The shop screen had its own problems. First, I was able to buy all of the rings soon after starting at no cost, and I'm not sure what precipitated this bug. The fourth tier sword had no magic and lower power than at least one lower priced weapon, so I can't imagine why I would buy it. Everything was a lot more expensive than I was willing to grind for - either make enemies drop way more loot or reduce the prices. Or make the gameplay less repetitive so replaying a level or two is tolerable.

[Zombie Hunter Robert]

This is an alright game; A for effort with the pre-rendering, I imagine it took forever. It must have, anyway, because there was an obvious paucity of frames in the animations. In particular, the walk animation was *hilarious*! I recommend playing this game at least once to see it. My recommendation to the developers is that they either find a more efficient way to do their animations, use more traditional sprite-based graphics (they don't look as unnatural when they have a 4 frame walk animation - are there even 4 frames here?), or, if I'm wrong about the efficiency issue, put more effort into the animations.

Now, I don't give scores based on graphics. If I can tell what everything is supposed to be, you get your graphics point, good for you. So here's where you lost points:

The controls were a little dodgy. For such a simple scheme, it felt way too easy to screw up; I ended up walking around zombies as often as swinging my sword/fist/nerf fork at them. At the same time, the simplicity didn't really equate to any elegance, it just didn't leave room for any strategic decision-making. Similarly, the AI and enemy abilities seemed to be all cut from the same cookie dough. If a theme is developing, it seems to be "spend more time on your game".

Finally, the one thing that can save an RPG from any superficial or even mechanical flaw is a killer plot. This game didn't really have that. It was pretty much The Story About Zombies that I've played through a million times, plus my character is married to a pregnant tween with some sort of anxiety disorder. You made characters with names and backstories (that's actually a lot better than some MMO-generation "RPG"s I've seen) but there wasn't enough dialogue or interaction to make it real.

My verdict is this: it's not ready. Your engine isn't bad, and your ideas aren't really bad, but you really need to integrate something other than clicking and watching zombies die. Don't throw away your code or resources, just find a more efficient animator, write more plot, write more AI, etc. etc.

[Heroes Empire]

Very good game! Graphics are good enough that I can tell what everything is; every aspect of the interface is easily found in a logical location; gameplay is a fresh mix of some of my favorite strategy franchises. I have only one gripe: your English translation is terrible. It didn't really get in the way mechanically, but if you want a serious plot someday (or if you have one?!) you'll want to get a native english speaker to fix up your dialogue.

Will play again!