sqykly's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Ultrakill! Early Pre-Alpha!]

Oh cool, another third party browser plugin with a closed standard. Hey, I broke it! I didn't and will not ever install Unity. Don't makes games for Unity if you want me to play and review and rate them. The same goes for any closed-standard zero-interoperability platform. We've been down this road countless times and it has never either failed due to a previous plugin with overlapping features, or introduced security risks that no one but the Unity author can solve (slowly, if ever).

AustinLabarbera responds:

I didn't realize our target audience was specifically you. This is the only place we can host it online for the public TO TEST! If you don't want to play, that's fine. Don't play then. Or wait until we have the game done and on Steam or somewhere. I know the Unity plug-in is weird, but it is what we have. It's a 3D game, we have no other option. Unity is allowed on NewGrounds.

[Starstuff 2D | v0.1.2a]

It's a cool concept, but it takes so much guesswork and time (3x is way too little) to get anything at all to happen. I'm afraid I'll have to abandon it, though if you continue to work at it, then PM me amd maybe I'll play it again.

Druidtton responds:

But it goes up to x100 speed! D:

Try the tutorial.
Anyway, the 2D version of the game is no longer under development, so there wont be any changes or fixes to this version of the game, but like I said in the description, we're working on a 3D version of the game with many more features.

This is basically what it looks like right now:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxKTfmGISLI

Thanks for the feedback either way!

[Praepotentia]

I love this genre, and my passion for it has gone largely unsatisfied for a long, long time. The story is present and as good as it needs to be, graphics are good enough, sounds are good enough. +1 presentation.

In addition to having done the beat-em-up right, your additions are solid. Characters are in good variety, each have ever-expanding options for their moveset. I like sequences instead of hotkeys, but hotkeys are in style, so whatever. I definitely haven't seen two-layer customization of special moves in a beat-em-up, if any game at all, so kudos. +1 design

The AI-controlled henchmen, each with dynamic skillset, means that your character and skill build can actually be customized to fit a party together in different ways. I'm actually having a hard time finding a party composition that just won't work without fiddling with the skill particulars. +1 design, +1 execution.

Would have been cool to see character attributes evolving or buy or find equips in secret rooms, but there is a lot of character building going on anyway.

Enemies were varied and original. They weren't all pulled directly from a Tolkien novel (or any of the bajillion games that have done so) so I didn't immediately know the best strategy for defeating them. Figuring out what they were and how to kill them was often over before I could finish the process of trial and error, but hey, at least I didn't see an isolated village of elves who don't care for the cave dwelling dwarves who reluctantly came together to help me fight orcs with axes, and ogres with blunt objects all the time. +1 design, +0.5 execution.

The game is a little fast-paced for me to really evaluate sidekick and enemy AI, but generally when I play the role I put together for my character within my party, I encountered the challenges I expected, won if I filled that role effectively, and lost if I didn't. Therefore, the sidekicks and enemies must have all known what they were doing. +1 execution,

I felt that the hitbox width and character reach were a little small; for reach, go ahead and make the attack animations a little more dramatic than a quick rotate arm/skew body, maybe make weapons a little longer. I can't even count how many times I whiffed repeatedly thinking surely I was in plane and within a sword's length. I did get used to it, though, so just -0.5 execution. For the fact that I often couldn't tell whether my character had actually done his or her skill animation or if instead I had slipped my finger and just attacked normally, I have to dock you -0.5 presentation too.

A lot of folks have complained that there is a lot of frameskip type lag. I didn't see this as game-breakingly bad running FF on Win7, computer maybe 4-5 years old that was not at all top of the line at the time. -0.5 execution.

The lag is what I call frameskip because it appears that time elapses even though it is not being drawn or accepting input. That means some threads of your code maintaining the game state are performing fine, but some step limits the rate at which the state can be rendered. I don't know a thing about flash, but if I was writing this for HTML5, I would rule out any physics, collision, mechanics, and AI as optimizations and focus on graphics and layers close to it. The circumstances I saw where there was some lag involved having a lot of enemies running around (i.e. the necromancer before I realized he was summoning more mobs) or a lot of status effects or other special effects going on. Obviously you'll want to limit the number of active characters - I do hope that necromancer boss has some sort of limit, and if so I think you should turn it down. If you haven't been doing so, some of the enemies and some of their animations can be pre-rendered to make them draw faster. I don't recall if they did any really dynamic stuff like ragdolling, but you can rasterize and cache just about anything else. This will be especially helpful if your textures or sprites are getting scaled down or rotated all the time. As for special effects, you always have to watch out for a lot of dynamic transparencies - especially dynamic radial gradients. Remember that these can be rasterized too, and while composition will still cost you, at least you won't be doing so many square roots on every frame. When I did this for 5ong (RIP) there was no perceptible quality loss and a truly epic performance improvement.

Just two other bugs bring your total down from 5 stars to 4.5. At some point (I'm gonna guess after I lost a battle then tried it again) the "Game Over" screen started to fade in over the battlefield every time I paused to use an item or fiddle with skills. The game didn't end at that point, so no big deal, just weird, -0.25. Finally, I often had to cycle through my whole party - I think several cycles at least once! - at the beginning of each battle in order to be in control over the character I wanted AND have the correct skill bar displayed. Again, no big since there wasn't usually an immediate ambush, I got used to mashing F a few times at the start of each battle, -0.25.

Your final score of 4.5 means that you have made a great game with a few pesky flaws that will not prevent me from finishing it and having good fun doing so. Probably right now. So cheers!

Tupo26 responds:

Thanks for review

The henchman AI is overpowerd compared to standard enemy AI, since it reacts alot faster than enemy. There is delay on enemy block action, henchmen don't have that. I wanted henchmen take care themselves and not have player worry about them.

There is a dummied out equipment system with couple accessories. I cut it because the game was already huge.

Necromancer (I call him Collector since it's a contruct that builds, maintains and plants those walking corpses around the crypt and is the last line of defense between the player and the final room of the crypt) originally didn't have a minion limit, then I put 1000 minion limit, then 10 and finally 7 + 4 limit. Since the Collector is a guardian contruct that builds minions from corpses I wanted him to be very insane flunky boss. He was insane but I toned him more managable level.

When I started writing the story, I avoided using Tolkien as a primary inspiration. Very first rule I made: No elves, No dwarfs. Every fantasy cliche I hate got crushed in this story and cliches I love got in. The unwinnable battle at the beginning of the game sucked but it was necessary for story. The Fumus Empire (Hostile state that was mentioned here and there) originally had bigger presence on story but I cut it because I realized it didn't contribute much to the story. In hindsight it would have helped to flesh out universe more. My only regert in the story is the potrayal of goblins and ogres. Goblins and ogres are alot more civilized than this game shows. Also human world is full of empty towns and villages since the Great Chaos wiped out 2/3 of world population.

Also thanks for the tips on performance. I'm aware on performance hits on using gradient colors, rotations and tweening. This game's development started in the beginning of 2013 and I only recently learned about amazing program called Spriter which is for making spritesheet. Had I known about this program eariler, it would saved a lot of valuable performance budget.

I did definitely bite more than I could chew when making this game but I learn best when I doing things through hard way.

[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.

[Armored Assault Online]

Pay no attention to the critics of the core game elements - the turn system and line of sight are solid. I like the fact that you have to think ahead by a few turns, and I think that at least some of that would be lost if I could move everything at once, reacting immediately to newly visible threats, and having multiple options for how to deal with a given situation. As it stands, I need to exercise some caution with my scouts, I have to think about how I put together my offensive group before I send them out, and I need to consider positioning carefully. The AI does stuff like that remarkably well, too.

Graphics were a little bland, but I could almost always immediately tell what something was supposed to be, so you lose no points there. Lack of music is also forgiven because I know about grooveshark.

The only gameplay elements I would change are as follows:

- Use local saves for the single player campaign. I like the game, but I'm unlikely to play it again because my campaign progress, unit purchases, formation, and experience points were reset when I played a second time. I don't want to register for anything, and I don't care for multiplayer. Make it impossible to use a local save for multiplayer, of course, to prevent cheating and SP power-leveling.

- Add terrain, if only for the single player campaign. The flat map gets a little boring. I can see where it would be tough to balance for MP, and I can also see where the limited battlefield size would make it somewhat cramped if a lot of tiles were blocked off, but I think if you put some effort into it, it's not impossible to pull off, and would add a lot of variety.

- New units cost waaaay too much in comparison to how much coin you get for winning a battle. Together with the lack of terrain, objectives, and meaningful plot, this really detracts from the sense of progression out of the campaign. I understand that your focus has been multiplayer, and a lot of the mechanics are well thought out for that purpose, but I think it could be an enjoyable game in single player, too, if you put the same amount of effort into it.

Overall, good game, I'll play it again if you enable local saves.

mep630 responds:

Added, thanks for the feedback/suggestion.

[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.

[Tower Defence War]

Solid engine, bland design

The engine is solid, in that I didn't see any bugs, and everything was smooth.

However, you need to put a lot more time into this game. The enemies are all about the same (at least make them LOOK different!). The towers are about the same six towers we've been putting along the sides of roads since the first TD game was made. They all look about the same as one another. Most people will play and love an unoriginal game if it has great art, but there's nothing awe-inspiring about circles and recolors.

This is basically Another Tower Defense Game. Either add some jaw dropping bells and whistles or an original twist or feature.

Also, make it more difficult. I won on my first try with a $12000 surplus and a whole block of level 5 towers that had never fired a shot.

iovo responds:

Now we have final releace. Please recommend my game for a collectionection.

Thanks!

[Mecharon]

An excellent... plagiarism?

First of all, let me say that the game was very well done. The enemies were mostly original and had a good variety, and there were weapons that were new & different. There was plenty of polish, and I could tell that a lot of time had been put into the implementation. For those points, you get one star.

However, the game borrows *EXTENSIVELY* from CrimsonLand by 10Tons Entertainment in its design. I make the comparison a lot with other top down Smash TV style shooters, but a few new weapons and enemies are the only things that keep this from being a straight up port of CrimsonLand to Flash. The format (kill things in a featureless open playing field while collecting pickups and experience to gain a perk at each level) is identical. Most of the perks gained at level up are identical, many in name: Bonus Magnet, Unstoppable, Dodge = Dodger/Ninja, [X Weapon Type] Master, Bonus Warden = Bonus Economist, Cunning Reloader = Angry Reloader, Scientist = Bloody Mess, Instant Repair = Bandage, Radioactive bullets = Poison bullets, Boost Attack Speed = Fastshot, Repair droid = Regeneration (just to name a few). The only pickup that isn't in Crimsonland is the quad damage upgrade.

The bonuses ARE very common in games, but some aren't, and the fact that Crimsonland perks are Mecharon perks, Crimsonland pickups are Mecharon pickups, and in the context of the identical flow of gameplay, this is clearly plagiarism. I wouldn't believe you if you said that you had never played (and loved) Crimsonland, that the design similarities were coincidence.

episodeent responds:

I like Crimsonland and I wanted to make Flash Crimsonland. It was very very hard because flash gives much much LESS performance.
There are a lot of thing that aren't present in Crimsonland: Black hole, Bonus Rocket launcher (2 weapons at the same time), bosses, units which fight by your side etc.

[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.