fepayton's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Galactic Voyage]

Kind of fun. A few frustrations keep it from being really good.

The good: Nice 8-bit art and soundtrack. Defense/collect shooter mechanics are solid.

The OK: There are some resolution differences like the home station and the health bars that seem odd. The health works, but the station seems out of sync with the rest of the 8-bit graphics. The title has the same problem.

The frustrating: Turning left! The player has a choice to stay near the station in relative safety or go out and collect red orbs for health. That is a great choice for players to make. But then you go out and turn around coming back, effectively you stop shooting at your enemy. This is bad.

This feels like a first attempt and is a really solid try. Some balance with the health:damage and right facing only and we have a winner.

FrankJohnson responds:

Thanks for the criticism I will really keep it in mind! And for the turning left part I thought that it would be kind of a strategical thing of when to choose to go and risk getting your base hurt or staying and defending, But a lot of people have complained about it so I might just change it. Thanks again!

[2030]

This has huge potential and serious balance problems.

The good: The visual style is great. The controles take some getting use to but are functional. The music is good and fits the theme of the game (Though a little repetitive). The mix of different missions is good and the idea of slowly upgrading is also good. As you become more wanted, more enemies appear and they slowly become more difficult.
The world is randomly generated and the difficulty of different enemies makes for a variety of gameplay.

The bad: For a game to be great we have to think about how our decisions. Being an open world game you as the player have the choice of when to engage. If you don't want to take the fight to the enemy, you don't have to. This would be great if the upgrade system was closer matched with the risk/rewards.

Good Example: Mission: Destroy three rocks. Difficulty (tutorial/easy) get use to flying and shooting. The reward for the rocks is 1-3 gold. The mission once complete will then reward you with 15 gold (or worth of items).
This is a great mission; if you get caught in the after explosions of the rocks you'll need the 15 gold just to reful and repair. If you are good at this mission you will ony need to refule and your up 10-12 gold. The the return is a great positive.

Bad example: Mission: Destroy two crusers. Difficulty (medium/hard) You need to engage ships with superior fire-power and health. In addition, aonce you gain a wanted level for destroying a ship: other ships, and structures will start gunning for you. This will continue untill you pay the corruption fee to get them off your back or complete the mission. This mission is slightly cost effective. Each cruser is worth 100 gold, but you will easily pay 80 to refule and repair. I had to mine rocks untill I had both upgraded guns (200 total cost) to be able to engage them. I also spent about 20 gold worth if missles to take them and my persuers down. The reward for the mission was a pretty trivial number of bombs.

The effort of the mission did not reflect the reward. Additionally I felt after I had upgraded my guns, the real fire power was in consumable missles and bombs. Buying armour and extra fule was just a waste of money.

Overall:

With an open world you want to feel like your choices matter. With an upgrade system you want to feel that you will eventually become better than your foes. In this game you feel like that is achieveable, but only if you mine rocks for 20 hours.

How to fix it:
The key part of this needs to be the gradeation. As soon as you become wanted level 1 friendly bases start shooting down hostiles. But every hostile shot down increases your wanted level. This means that the longer you stay near friendly bases, the higher your wanted level will become. This feeling of being either the most wanted freedom fighter in a galactic war, or just some rock miner is what is turning people away from the game.

By stepping this out. E.g. Make the wanted system out of 100. Cargos and interceptiors add 1, cruisers add 8, bunkers add 15, ... up to the alien ship that adds 80. Make the level of wantedness meaningful. HQs won't fire at you if your wanted is anything less than 40. Cruisers will take the occasional post shot if your wanted is higher than ten but wont fire at full speed untill it passes 30 and they will hold back on the homeing missles untill your wanted level breaks 70. These are just rough numbers, but hopefully the idea is clear.

I love the fact that the updates are making this better, keep it up. I hope to come back in a couple months to a 5 of a game.

zzulian responds:

Fixed, and thanks again.

[Goblins at the Gates]

Good game but overly repetitive without a feeling of progression.

The art, sound and programming are all fine here. What holds this game back is the click fest.
To explain: The faster you click, the faster you shoot. This means that to do better, you need to click faster. This makes the game kind of painful.

The upgrades and premis are great, but unbalanced. For example: The relaod speed vs critical hits. In principal this seems to be a good choice: get more damage randomly or more damage overall. The problem is that it isn't proportional to the game. 10% chance of double damage should average to a 20% increase in damage. However this is a full 15 experience points and by that time enemies are appearing far more than 20% as often with much more than 20% more health. For a chance I reset and tried the relaod path: it had no noticable affect.

Why this became so frustrating was that the winning strategy was simply to click faster. My allies did too little, the upgrades did to little, and the spells did too little. If you have upgrades they need to feel like they are making a meaningful impact.

Sorry, but this needs to be entirely re-balanced.

Frederik77 responds:

Thanks for your review. We made an update, and went and did something about the click-fest and the late level difficulty balancing. Hope you will enjoy the new version.

[Electrikill]

Random and ok

The good: Not a bad shooter, with some nice upgrades. Art is good. Music (though repetitive) works.

The bad: Gameplay rewards and difficulty feel unplaned. Like watching a brainstorm hit paper. A great example is Test 9. Shoot down enemies in a time limit, using only a shotgun, without hitting friendlies. How do you beat this mission: you wait until you are lucky enough.

How to make this better?
This game has three skills: accuratly timed clicks, and upgrade choices and choosing when to go back and redo a mission. This works really well. Some missions need a certian upgraded type of gun to get the star bonus on. That adds some great stratigic choice. What holds this game back is that there is a huge chunck of random.

Shotgun fires at random angles. Scatter gun may or may not destroy an enemy when it hits. Friendlies may or may not fly off the close edge of the screen at who knows what speed. The choices we can make (above) are often removed by the random.

For a first attempt: great. To make this better you need to think alot more about game play.

Overall: Good for a bit, but not worth finishing.

Keep it up.

VictorGrunn responds:

Thanks much for the feedback - it's appreciated, and you have a sharp eye for what's going on in the game itself. I'll be carrying this into the next game made, and tweaking Ekill a bit as time goes on based on feedback. Test 6 really was too unforgiving, for example.

[Submarine Tactics]

Beautiful remake

The good:
The graphics are great and the effects are rather stunning.
The sound gets a little repetitive but is clear and a good indicator of whats going on. Nothing to complain about here.

The gameplay is hard to review.
Origional battleship had only ships of length 2 or more. I really like the placement rules that mean that once sunk there is no possibility for a ship to be adjacent. In the end it is all about the mines. Being single square means there is no real "efficient" way to find them, and the endgame is a slow scan of the entire board.

Why 8/10: gameplay knocks off 2 for me. Logic goes less than half way and then luck (and patience) take over. Loose the mines for an easy 10 (imho)

keyreal responds:

Each game needs to have a luck element, in my opinion. Thank you for the review!

[Anticristum]

Massive Bugs confus great game?

Visuals great, Music Great, Gameplay generally balanced.

Why a 5?
The bugs come out in force. There is a money bug that has items costing vastly different sums than advertised. (e.g. one upgrade shown at 600 cost 2000 to upgrade, but would upgrade for any value between 600 and 2000). Not all the bugs are bad. I cast an area of affect spell on the second level and it last till the games end.

This game is a 5/10 because it is barely playable. Given the behaviour of the bugs I could have a 2/10 or a 9/10 each time I played and it would always be different.

Simple bug fixes and this is easily a 9.

framar responds:

thanks for your constructive criticism. We will fix the bugs in few days.

Otherwise, let me explain that karma serves to balance the contest between the two opponents. In this way the Army with less life avance before to the next era.

[My Island [RPG]]

A case for simple math

It has all the makings of a good game, but what makes it unplayable (less than 5) is the math.
You train to build stats, balance your hours and try to progress in your career to buy buildings. The problem is that the numbers don't balance.
The best job in the game earns 200/hour and the most expensive building in the game is 1.1 million, or converted into hours worked 5500 (which would directly translate into mouse clicks).
Another example is gaining popularity. There are cars and houses that you can buy, but the mmost worth while is the cheapest cap. 1 pop for $150. The mest best is the race car at $4500 for 15 pop (or 1 for $300 which is half the cap).

To summarise, the math in this game is designed around real world math and not game world math, making it as exciting as the real world.

Sorry for the massivly harsh rating, but sitting down and readjusting the numbers to make it more of a game (and keep the click count for beating the game down to a more reasonable 1000-2000) would easily make this an 8 or 9.

RasmusiBoy responds:

heey, thanks for comment.
To earn money without clicking 5500 times you need to buy buildings, and earn money out of them. But I understand you, its a bit "overloaded", sometimes it can be hard to "stabilize" a game. After 3 months of developing this game I was a bit tired, I just wanted to release my game.

[Johnny Deep]

Felt Like I wasn't in control

For the most part this was a great game, but it had the same problem that most games of this type have, you don't have enough control.

When diving, I would see health and coins and oxygen, but because I can turn so little I couldn't get to them. Additionally, if there were mines in the way I had to wait for them to pass (read drown). To follow up on professor flashes comment about always having to press down, I think that if you could swim sideways, but cold only do so when not decending, that this would make for a much better game.

royalin responds:

Well, in most distance you can't control your character at all. Anyway we deliberately didn't want swimming to be too easy, like real life,we tried to make the game fun and yet challenging :)

[Spongy's Escape]

What makes this a 2 and not a 4

Sound: Great though a little repetitive
Art: Great simple and clean
Gameplay: great-ish

Trying to get the good stuff and avoid bad stuff is a great concept for a game. The controls are simple, all you can do is jump. So basically you get to jump on the good stuff and over he bad stuff.

The problem is the random. The number of times a good item spawned on a bod item that was over a bad item was painful, and frankly mad the game UNPLAYABLE past level 1.

How to make this better:
When you randomly spawn something, make sure nothing else can spawn relatively near it. This simple difference would have taken this game from a 2-vote to a 4-vote.

G-i-b responds:

We have had a few people test this difficulty before we uploaded the game and there was not really a problem, I guess you just had bad misfortune.

[Baby Vegeta Online]

A good start

Good stuff first:
The fade in music was nice. Walking sprite animation was cool and in general it was a clean job. The level transitions lacked a coherent style, but you got something ("bunnys") for winning.

Problems:
With any game you need to decide a style of play.
How to play this game. Walk forward and hold up-A. If this stops working at any time, do a little bit more walking.
In short, to make this game better you need to:
1) unify the style. (i.e. sprite vs ugly purple ball needs to go).
2) Give the player a choice. (maybe ranged attacks vs close attacks)
3) Give the AI a pattern that the player cn feel good about discovering. The AI in this was rush forward and attack (once provoked). Its not a bad start, but once it got going it was mindless. Patterns like move, quick attack, quick attack, pause, strong attack are classic (remember Mike Tysons Punch up). They can at first be confusing but it means that the player has to develope a counter pattern.

Enough ramble.
Good start, but it gets 2/10 because it feels unfinished (i.e. too much start).

TrillingBird responds:

thanks for the advice but did you really have to rate me so low