FlashN00bie's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Nodiatis]

This game has tremendous potential to be a very, very engaging game. Its depth of character creation options, skills, abilities, equipment, and massive map give it a tremendous amount of fodder to play with from the respect of storytelling, thematic content, and replay value.

So what kills it? Three things:

1. Absolutely NO use of the larger story. All of your "quests" are given by this "seer" inside a church who tasks you with collecting objects, killing monsters, and killing bosses. And by the way, there isn't any rhyme or reason, and worse, the quests are one-shots, meaning that you will outrun the "content" before you catch up level-wise.

2. The outrageous profiteering angle. In most MMOs, "rest time" is bonus XP you're awarded from being responsible with your time by logging off. In this, "rest time" simply means you make full XP and gold. Once you run out of that, it drops to =one-sixth= of normal. The only way to get rid of this? Pay $54.95 for the "grinder" upgrade, and then keep dropping money on "time cards" that allow you to run with a smaller "out-of-rest-time" penalty. After buying the upgrade? Instead of one-sixth the cash/xp when you run out, it's now =half.= No thanks.

3. Most egregiously - THE GRIND. Dear God, the grind. The amount of grinding in this game manages to match the early days of EverQuest's famous grinds, and that's a very, very bad thing. In order to progress from one level to the next, you must advance four "stats" skills up to move forward. You can only train one at a time, and only in combat. This is fine. What isn't are the 300 other skills that are required to use virtually any equipment at all in the game can't be trained through combat, but only by sacrificing drops gained from killing monsters. There is a "passive advancement" skill that gives you a paltry 3XP per 2 seconds (which is halved for any "non-learning" skill) but it's not really worth it.

It's one thing to warn players that they'll need to slow down and read descriptions, do the math, and think while playing. It's entirely another to =force= the gameplay to such a crawl that you could write the next Great American Novel while waiting for your character to earn enough XP to get their next skill point. Seriously - even MOVING from square to square and looting items after combat has a global cooldown!

This game completely misses the point of F2P. If you want them to pay money, say it outright, don't force them to do it through a thousand cuts of annoyances you've coded into the game that only get better if you pay for it!

[Alien Splatter]

Pretty good, but there's a game-breaking bug with the pause function. If you pause the game, then click outside of the window, it gets stuck in pause mode. Pressing Enter to unpause advances the game by one frame, but it also ticks down the timer by one. So after about 200 or so presses, regardless of where you are, you're dead. And after that point, the game gets stuck in a loop and won't go back to where it was. I'd made it to the third screen of level 1 before this bug bit me.

I applaud the Nintendo Hard idea, but let's make the game Nintendo Hard because of challenge, not bugs, eh? ;)

SinclairStrange responds:

Mmm, I tried last night to re-create the bug on here and offline and I just can't do it? So that's a big puzzle to me. I'll look into it further but I can't see anything wrong. (Isn't that always the case sometimes.) Sorry about it happening to you though :(

[Aetherpunk 1.1]

Pretty good, but still some flaws in the gameplay.

Overall, it's a good game, with some interesting mechanics that help keep things interesting. However, there's still some things that are broken. For example, getting one-shotted by the mad bombers or the skirmishers - I found myself with roughly 90% of my HP, suddenly getting one-shotted by the a skirmisher around wave 16-18.

Healing is wonky - it stutters, stops, and doesn't really work properly. The tier 1 healing skill only actually heals you if you wait, then tap an arrow key to move. The tier 2 healing skill that lets you regenerate all the time works up until your health is about 90% full, and then it stops.

The tier 4 (hellburner) turret is absolutely useless; it does no more damage per hit than the tier 2 turret (impaler) and fires 5 times slower (1 shot every 5 seconds) - I bought it for one wave and then scrapped it because it was utterly pointless to keep.

Upgrading barricades seems like a waste of aether because the damage enemies do continually grows, to the point where a single striker can clear through a 100-HP barricade in two hits and a juggernaut can clear it in one by wave 18.

Fire-rate upgrades don't seem to affect single-shot physical damage weapons even when the instant reload skill is purchased. It would seem like they should.

So, overall, pretty good, but there's a lot of small issues that keep it from being great.

[The Last Stand 2]

Nearly perfect.

Great theme, great execution with two very, very major exceptions:

The movement controls are sometimes awkward - collision detection for your character sometimes creates issues where you get stuck and have to mash buttons to free yourself.

The tougher aspect is that if you lose a round, the "Retry" option doesn't reset everything to the way you had it before you tried the round - so that means that any supplies you gathered, any traps you found, and any survivors you still had with you aren't there when you retry. Feels a little punitive and makes losing even a single round a very, very dangerous slope.

Other than that, it's an outstanding game.

[The Swords]

Good start, but...

...you need to get someone to rewrite the dialog. I understand the language barrier, but broken English just really bothers me.

You also might want to increase the text size; often times I had trouble reading text on the screen because it was so small.

[OCD+]

E-VIL.

Way to make a "game" that challenges people's idea of acceptability and...well, FUN. :D

I mean, really. 10,000 clicks? 14 hours of waiting? Hold the K key for one hour?

This isn't innovative, it's TORTURE. XD

You, sir, are a meanie.

[Rooftop Runner]

Okay overall, but nothing special

Good concept, and a really clear objective. Although there's a couple of bugs to be aware of. Because of the way the game "listens" for keypresses, multiple direction keys being pressed at once (especially when performing wall jumps) becomes difficult to perform.

The other issue is clipping. During the fourth course, I missed a jump and due to the way the game handles collisions, I actually fell -outside- the level and was unable to finish it. This occurred about 3/4 of the way through the stage.

Good initial effort, but...needs a little cleanup.

[Sparks and Dust]

Excellent graphics, but that's about it.

The graphics are very pretty to look at, and this is the game's strength. However, its major weaknesses come in the form of absolutely awful controls (there needs to be a separate attack button and the focus charge needs to be mapped differently), difficult-to-see objects and a horrendous tutorial that doesn't really tell you about some important things to know very early on (like the fact that dark "clouds" are not only solid but can be broken with an attack).

The "item jump" system is confusing; if you're in the ready position for an attack (after having double-jumped) you can't do an item jump, the tutorial does not make this clear. Using "down" or "S" to use focus is counterintuitive, this key would've worked much better as an attack key -- pressing up 3 times to charge focus would've made more sense.

I would have prefered some form of instruction screen that tells me the pertinent details.

Overall, the game is too art-heavy and looks like more of a concept piece with a game slapped over it than an actual -game-. The obscuring "cloud" style art, mixed-up controls, and poor tutorial combine to make a game that seemed distasteful to me.

[Polygonal Fury]

Good game, but...

There's a couple things I'd do differently. Rather than coloring the shapes differently, I'd use different colors to determine health level. The subtle color differences is too difficult to know when you're looking at an individual shape to be sure. At least, for me.

Also, I'd bound in the playfield so your "back" and "options" sections don't get in the way of the playfield itself -- I found myself wanting to click on shapes to start a reaction and they were in the way.

The last improvement I'd make is in the click detection - it felt like the actual hotspot to click on for the shapes was smaller than the shape itself, and even the text boxes were the same way - I'd click on a word my mouse pointer was clearly over and it would do nothing.

With those things, you'd have a perfect 10.

[Tankmen: Incursion]

Ultimate Camera Fail

Graphics: 10
Sound: 10
Playability: -999,999,999

The controls are fine, the graphics are outstanding and the sound is great, but the problem is that because the camera isn't fixed and "dynamically" zooms out, in, and around, it makes it virtually impossible to control your character, to see where the hell they are, and to even do something as simple as DODGE. Set the camera at one zoom level and LOCK IT THERE, damnit! Then I'll play this game for more than thirty seconds.