sqykly's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Astral Alliance]

This is a pretty good game; I'm actually really surprised that it hasn't gotten more attention. It's complex, but pretty elegantly designed. Graphics are good and it runs smoothly on my system. It's rare to see such a fleshed-out, polished RTS implemented in Flash, so I hope this gets the recognition it deserves.

That said, you lose points for two things. One is that, despite how much work goes into just the RTS basics (a lot, I know) this doesn't add a lot to the genre. You've got economy buildings and factory buildings, you've got towers, you've got ships, bigger ships, and ships that are bigger than that; that's a solid foundation. I've seen a lot less polished games either borrow concepts from other genres (e.g. control of a unit so that it's like a shooter, level up so it's like an RPG, etc. etc.) or come up with cool new stuff of their own, but I feel like I've seen everything in this game before. The other point is that you can't save your game without registering elsewhere. That strikes me as obnoxious. We have the technology to do a local save, so provide that option for the single player campaign. I guess the game was short, but I still didn't want to go through it in one sitting, so I'll probably never get past the level with the colony.

Anyway, tl;dr - good game, add local saves, keep engine, add more variety of units or upgrade paths or something, add more levels. Solid 3.5.

drfrankius responds:

Thanks for your review.. all fair points. Based on feedback from people the game has now been modified to save games locally as well as to your account. I originally thought that it would be confusing to do so.. but since most users seem to be opposed to registering its probably the better option.

[Battle for Gliese]

This is a pretty good reproduction of CrimsonLand by 10Tons Games in Flash. You got their permission to use their game, right? I'm surprised 10Tons Games wouldn't want to be credited in some way in a clone of their game, CrimsonLand by 10Tons Games.

I love CrimsonLand by 10Tons Games, so this was fun to play for a while. You forgot some of the CrimsonLand by 10Tons Games perks ('upgrades' in your clone thereof), though, including some of my favorites, like telekinesis. That takes some of the punch out of the bonus magnet + bonus economist + telekinesis trifecta. I also missed my homing rocket shotgun + angry reloader + fast reloader combo. Further, the descriptions in this clone lack the charm of those found in CrimsonLand by 10Tons Games.

CrimsonLand by 10Tons Games was, is, and ever shall be a great game whose elegance and effectiveness cause it to be recreated quite frequently in Flash. If you love CrimsonLand by 10Tons Games as much as I do (something tells me you do), you should probably credit it when credit is due (which it is). Otherwise, you really need to add something new to the mix, rather than just cutting good features. I saw a CrimsonLand by 10Tons Games clone once that had a robot instead of a soldier, had some non-ripped-off weapons & bosses, etc., for example. That was cool.

4 stars for cloning a good game (CrimsonLand by 10Tons Games)
-1 star for not adding anything original or crediting the original work (CrimsonLand by 10Tons Games)
-1 star for not living up to the original (CrimsonLand by 10Tons Games)
-0.5 stars for shoddy hit detection

that is all.

[Wrath of Evil]

Epic fail, indeed

Unplayable. Lag is inordinate for the amount of graphic complexity and frames are dropped to keep the game speed constant. Enemies jump forward in time and arrows pass harmlessly through them on dropped frames. Input isn't being handled the same way; clicks and their location proceed from their queue way out of sync with the rest of the game, way after they actually occur.

Another bug: if your last archer is sinking into the ground as his arrow kills the last enemy, you get an "Epic Fail" achievement, a game over screen, AND proceed to the next level. After killing one or two enemies, the upgrade shop appeared again, with my original total 'souls', and I had to start the level over.

One point for decent images, another for preserving the 'Quality' options on the default right click menu; even if they didn't help a lot, way too many flash games are getting rid of that, which is just rude.

[The Golden Gauntlet]

Meh

Pluses: Solid ideas about the RPG/Final Fight blend, well done character-specific upgrades, variety of character abilities.

Minuses: Silly control scheme that is negligently programmed, stolen background art (RMXP RTP), recycled character art and animation, bad english, unoriginal plot, lack of defend key, not enough character reach, no exploration within areas.

In summary, the game is sort of half-assed. I like your ideas, so it would be cool if you put more time and effort into developing the gameplay and obtaining more original art. There are plenty of bilingual gamers out there that would be happy to correct your english spelling and grammar, too.

[Gunfire Echoes]

Unplayable

Provide some way to lower the quality or don't disable the default right click menu. If I didn't have flashblock to stop the game from loading, I wouldn't have been able to write this review.

[Diesel Valkyrie]

Good art, BAD design decisions

It seems like you put a lot of effort into the art and content for this game - there's a lot of it and it's pretty good. Level design was above average, as well, in contrast to the defense/shooter standard in which a level is an empty background.

However, some gameplay design and technical issues really irk me. For example, I quote:
"We understand that many of you will not like having only 8 directions to shoot at, but we figured this would help the game's difficulty, as it is more about running and getting into strategic positions. It would also be virtually impossible to have 360 directions, since this would require creating and animating graphics for each degree."

No, it would not. It would be much more acceptable to have 8 character animations and rotated art for bullets than to play a mouse shooter where the mouse is functionless. You could have made it a SmashTV-style WASD/arrow shooter and the game would not have had to (poorly) estimate which direction I wanted to face. That the decision to sacrifice a key gameplay mechanism to make it look pretty was conscious and open is just annoying.

I also didn't find any way to alter the graphic quality. If you're going to disable the default right click menu, you need to provide that missing functionality in some other way. The game tries to draw and/or track a lot of objects at once, so ignoring a quality control altogether is just ignorant. Not everyone can afford to buy a new computer every time theirs leaves the top shelf.

Finally, the hit detection was way spotty.

[Tower of Doom!]

Nice simple game, wish I could play it!

A lot of flash applications have performance issues on my machine, more and more with every release of Flash, so this is only partly your fault. The problem is that when the game starts to lag, it skips frames rather than slowing down. There are a lot of frames skipped, and among them are the frames where the bullets from my towers were supposed to hit the enemies. Hence, when the peasants arrive in sufficient numbers to lag me, I see my three L4 fire towers hitting nothing but air and lose.

The message here is that you should never combine overlap-based collision detection with elapsed time-based physics. Never, ever.

[Castaway]

Argh! Why?!?

You get two stars for presentation, since the game was pretty. The images you're using over and over are nice.

However, the game's design and implementation are repugnant. MMOs are trendy for the same reasons as social networking, but the idea that MMO concepts translate into a fun single player game is perverse. Here's what I mean by "MMO concepts":

There's a designated place to get your quests. The quests themselves are flimsy pretenses for grinding and grinding-related errands. If you don't go out and grind some more, you'll never have enough gold or exp to get through the game. There is no plot. There are no characters. There are no meaningful choices to be made. It's not a real action game nor a real RPG as it lacks all of the features that make either genre interesting and entertaining. I can't think of any reason that anyone would enjoy playing this unless they've spent so much time with MMO"RPG"s that they really think this abomination is what an RPG is supposed to be.

Don't make a sequel. Please.