sqykly's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[The Supersonic Fighters]

uh?

Documentation is somewhere between nonexistent and unintelligible. If you want to write games in English (monolingual neanderthals that most of us are), you need to learn English. Here are some things that confused me:

Why can my enemies teleport? Why can't I teleport? How can my opponent afford the priciest robot in the first match? Why did I get 'game over' after picking a new team, instead of when I actually lost the match? Is there any way to control when/if I do a close range attack (If indeed that's what that's supposed to be) vs. a long range attack? Why can my opponent knock me up against a wall from across the screen when my robot's most powerful attacks don't seem to budge the enemy?

And what the hell does dragon ball z have to do with this?! Or anything else?!

I think my biggest complaint is the "test room", which appeared to be intended as a tutorial. The text, however, moved at an absolutely agonizingly slow pace (maybe 40 seconds of "the walls hurt you!"), and I couldn't find any way out of the "test room" except to kill both of my robots, for which I was still charged. It's a good thing I knew I could kill myself with the walls!

The graphics are fairly well pre-rendered, and the game is not a bad concept at all, it just needs more documentation in better English with A LOT more bug testing and a lot less dragon ball z. Please.

[Storm the House 3]

Balance = epic, epic fail

I think we can all agree that buying a more expensive weapon, at least in the simulated consumer justice of a video game, should mean at least one of three things:
1. You can kill bigger things
2. You can kill things faster
3. You can kill more things at the same time
That's not so hard, eh? Like a fool, I assumed that this would be true of the weapons in this game. Unfortunately, each milestone in gun bigness was met with increasing frustration. The shotgun (both of them) takes so long to reload that you may as well just let the punks with swords have the house. The grenade launcher suffers from similar impracticality. The "upgraded" shotgun takes more trigger squeezes to kill many standard enemies than does the standard pistol. The flamethrower threw flames that didn't seem to do anything, and don't even ask about the chainsaw. The space laser was such an incredible joke (it failed to kill enemies the regular earth laser could handle, including jeeps) that they would probably let me carry it on an airplane. The rifle, uzi, and machine gun (but not the chaingun, not by a long shot) were worth their modest price tags, and I ended up using them to kill almost everything.

You get one point for running smoothly without bugs, and another for the inclusion of some limited wit, but you lose one point for wasting my time.

[Solar Chiefs ONLINE]

Addictive & fun

Graphics and sound are a little better than they need to be. The gameplay is very smooth for a multiplayer game. One thing I particularly liked is that the upgraded and researched weapons don't give the player an unbeatable advantage against a lower ranked opponent - you still have to know how to use them, and you still have to make sacrifices to make the investment.

There are only two improvements I would like to see. Even given the above balancing goodness, it's hard to get started as a noob because there's no single player or participative tutorial, so one must hope a more experienced player will give one a few turns to figure out what they're doing. It doesn't take more than a few turns, but that's enough time to lose a game, and that's enough to turn someone off of the game.

The other thing I'd like to see is related to promotions. I usually hit the win requirement well before the game requirement, and it would be nice to get my new research point without playing for another hour. I understand the point of requiring some number of games under one's belt for the first few promotions, but when you get into the higher ranks, the win count should be much more important, in my opinion.

[The Rise of a KING]

An improvement on the original; pretty good

I have no complaints about this game, except that it would be nice to be able to save right before the final boss. The art and sound are as good as they need to be. The only reason it loses points is that there's nothing revolutionary or spectacular about it. For its niche, it's very good.

SeethingSwarm responds:

Okay, cool.

[Knight of the Dead]

poor design, good production

The bells and whistles are nice, but the game itself brings nothing new to the table. Okay, you can hit the zombie with your shield while blocking, so you basically can't lose. Okay, your weapon can be upgraded. Okay, you have amulets that may randomly do something marginally useful.

The fact is, there's no strategy to killing the same bland set of enemies over and over, much less to picking upgrades. I could accept this if the game was focused on action rather than strategy, but it's way, way too slow paced to be entertaining in that respect. The zombies are slow, the knight walks slow, he swings his sword slow (and kind of awkwardly), and he can't even jump high and far enough to avoid picking up an item.

You should redesign this game with more innovative ideas for enemies and more options for the player. Even more importantly, make the game more fast paced and make the character more dynamic. Keep the art, because that's pretty good.

[intrusion]

Awesome! Awesome! Awesome!

There is nothing about this game that isn't fantastic. The graphics were, without exception, fabulous. Every detail was slick. The physics were really, really impressive - especially with regards to the ropes and such on which one could swing. I don't think I've seen any game on any platform model a flexible, stretchable object like that. I would like to see some more pendulum-esque swinging action in the gameplay to emphasize this feature in the sequel (god damn you, you WILL make a sequel!).

The bullet physics (and yes, I'm picky as hell about that) appeared a little slow and a little too few at first, but I did get shot a number of times, so I'm thinking it's just right. The plain vanilla enemies were well balanced between intelligence, firepower, and numbers, such that they presented a moderate challenge. The variety of non-boss enemies was more than adequate and kept things interesting. The bosses, though - the bosses were awesome! Especially that mech on the train! And the whole sequence where one pilots a mech!

So anyway. Anything that wasn't spectacular in this game was more than adequate anyway. I didn't even actually miss music, which is weird; when you make a sequel, let me know and I'll do a few loops, no charge. This is the new bar for side scrolling shooters, as far as I'm concerned.

[Hero RPG]

Athalina RPG++

This is definitely an improvement over Athalina, overall a good game. The character classes are a nice touch, although it would be cool if the stats were all useful for each class. The skill trees make the character development pretty open-ended, but I really didn't find a use for some skills, like the stun skill for the warrior, or the melee skill for the mage. The quests were pretty generic, RPG standard tasks, without any plot development as of yet, but if you keep updates coming out, then I think they'll keep most of us busy. I miss getting quests from a variety of characters, but at least there are multiple towns. Graphics and most other details were about as good as they needed to be. The environments were much, much better than Athalina, perhaps the most significant improvement.

I came across a few bugs, only one of them really damning. The first time I started a game, I only had maybe 3 inventory slots for no particular reason, which made quests impossible. There really should be some way to get back to the main menu if something like this happens, but I couldn't find one.

The only thing that really, REALLY bugs me is the space bar. Why, oh why, do I need to press the space bar after every time I move & want to attack again? If this is due to some Flash quirk, I think you should try to find a way around it. If it's a design consideration, I REALLY think you should reconsider. It makes it much, much harder to play as a distance class because it's difficult to rapidly stick & move. I can buy idea of 'get used to it' if it's absolutely technically unavoidable, but not if the controls are just awkward for no reason.

[Areas]

Excellent!

Very good game! It took me a minute to figure out how to play, which is somewhat of a rare virtue, rather than a setback. The abstractness & originality really make it stick out; the new areas (powerups? bonuses?) in each level kept me playing, wondering what's next. Up until level 40 or so (42? maybe?) the bonus zones kept me coming up with tricks for how to use them, like when you have two of those big, constant, laser things, you can rotate them to squash the white bubble things, like scissors. Shooting through a shot-magnifying area, a shot-multiplying area, and a shot-redirecting area consecutively was also very effective. One downside to the uber abstractness is that it's hard to talk about, for instance in a review! I don't think I saw a single word except in the credits, but you definitely managed to pull it off with the non-verbal documentation and such! Everything really fit the theme, right down to the music.

The main reason that I'm not giving this a 10/10 or a 5/5 is that stretch of levels, 40-something through 50-something, that was all pickups. Sure, they were very helpful, they definitely maintained the sense of anticipation I got with the area bonuses, but the commonality of pickups and the effect they had on the gameplay was sort of a let down after all the originality in the previous levels. Area bonuses required that I figure out how to use them effectively, or at least to figure out what, exactly, they do. In contrast, in the pickup levels, while there was clearly an interesting variety, there wasn't much thinking involved. Either you were fast and lucky enough to get a few early on and start a chain reaction, in which case it might even become hard to find any white areas, or you got squished. The strategy was always the same: get as many pickups as you possibly can, and you're unstoppable.

That being said, I would've thought those levels were good if they weren't preceded by the greatness of the first 40 levels. If the pickup levels were mixed in, it would have been better, it just started to drag after a while. Overall, excellent game.

[Mardek Rpg: Chapter 2]

I hate to waste my review for this, but...

... I HATE HATE HATE bugs. This game crashed for me TWICE in 20 minutes, and it not only crashed the game, but crashed Firefox, which closed normally, but would not open again without ending the process via task manager. So here's the skinny: I was in the caves trolling around around the healing crystal right after letting the bandit, Gope, leave with his limbs still attached. The first time it crashed, Deugan was getting hit by a drillion with the attack that makes him lose defense. The second time, Deugan was hitting one of those virus looking things that casts barrier with his +50% damage attack. Both times, as soon as the numbers popped up, the game froze. A few seconds later (I may have clicked or pressed a button, not sure), the next frame was successfully rendered, but the game was clearly crashed at that point. The first time, I waited a moment to see if it was just uber-lagged, but this was not the case.

Like I said, I use firefox, and I haven't yet tried it with IE. I'm on a Dell Inspiron 1000 laptop, purchased in 2005, running windows XP, but I don't know the technical specs offhand. The only other programs open were the other Firefox window (I ran the game in a pop-up) and Winamp. I have the latest version of Flash, I'm pretty certain.

I would take a gander at the actionscript running during attack animations. I'll try to run the game with Internet Explorer, but if it doesn't load my saved game for whatever reason, I'm giving up. If I do try it, I'll let you know via PM how it works out.

Aside from the crashing, this is really great! My policy for fatal bugs is to cut my review score in half, but refrain from voting until its problems are addressed. So fix this bug so I can enjoy this! Please!

[Electronide]

As a (bio)chemist...

Only one part of this game really pisses me off: the five electrons thing.

So, there really are atoms with only one electron in their highest orbital, and they invariably want to give them away. Like sodium, lithium, etc.

Also, there really are atoms that want your electrons and will stop at nothing to get them, e.g. fluorine.

But there is nothing in the universe that likes having 5 electrons, nor any orbital that is stable with 5 electrons. If you made it 4N+2 (where N is any integer, your level, for instance), I still wouldn't really play the game again, but I'd give you a 5/5 just for knowing about 4N+2.