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.

[Hard.Point]

The premis of a good game is there. The tank handles like a tank, and the graphics are really pretty good.

Why a 1 then? There are some major missing elements.

The biggest problem is that to play again, you need to reload. This could be a firefox bug, having to reload the page every time was super frustrating.

The cannon firs in an arc which is great, but without even a centre reticle I felt like I was just shooting randomly.

I like that the tank gets damages in water, but powerups and enemy AI need to know that. I watched enemy tanks drive into and get stuck in water only to have there power ups grop there once I had killed them. If the tank had a magentic feild that pulled in powerups once they were in range, this would be solved.

Overall this game needs some tweeks. It could be great and there isn't a lot of work, but at time of writing, there are enough negitives to make it not that much fun.

Please update when you get the chance, would love to see a fuller version of this. :)

[Zombies]

Just badly designed.

The game has some good ideas. The mix of movement and directional shooting is good. The art and sound is good. The problem is progression.
You get money for killing zombies, but this money is multiplied by your kill streak. The more you kill in a row the more money you get.

The problem with this design. If you do well, you get the money to do even better. If you mess up, it breaks your kill streak, so you get less money (and have to buy health) so you do even worse.

What happens is it makes for a very polarizing experience. You ca nmake a small mistake and suddenly a game that seems like it was going well quickly gets really bad.

Secondls there is no perminance. When you die, thats it. Start again from scratch. This makes all the previous time spent feeling like it was a waste. When combined with an upgrade syste, a lack of perminance makes this feel twice as bad.

How to improve this. Persistant cash, keep what you earn even in death, or checkpoints once every third level. Alternatively, give money on a more static (i.e. level compleetion) measure. This makes the level feel like an accomplishment even if you just scraped by. A semi fix would be to halve the upgrade costs. It seems like I'm arguing for an easier game, but I think the difficulty is pretty good. The problem is that the extra contant (different enemeies and better upgrades) are kept away from the player because of the income system. You can't be just good at the first level, you have to be perfect, otherwise by level 3 you're behind the curve and only able to restock the health that you're loosing.

[Zombie Zero]

Some really good with a few bugs to fix.
The good: The art, music and sound are all great. Love the ligh effect and the music is erie. The zombies give a nice shuffle and moan. Everything fits art wise.
The gameplay is good. A mix of unlimited melee with a shotgun and grenades for a real punch. I like how zombies bounce (they will fly backwards like pool balls of you hi them). I love how they shuffle predictably towards you. Giving you the tactical edge to think about drawing them around a corner a couple at a time.

The bugs: I spent most of the game spamming the melee button. This was a great way to beat up zombies but seemed to give my movement unexpected side effects. I wanted to creep forward swinging my crowbar like Gordon freeman. What I would tent to do was to start skating forward as if I had the key held down. I would move forward into the enemy hord and shortly there after to my doom. The other bugs involved the bouncing zombies. I noticed that if there was a hord moving round a corner in something like a backwards L shape, I could shoot the bottom of the L and the entire hord would die. As if the impact caused a chain reaction to the zombies that were still out of sight.

Overall:
It feels like a beta. Something to iron the kinks out of. It is playable and pretty fun. The problem is the controls (could be a firefox thing) and the lack of any health indicator make the gameplay kind of frustrating as it can be hit and miss. Tune those up and you have an easy 5/5. As is are can only carry you half the way.

Keep it up.

[Crash Town]

Wow, everything about this is awesome. Can be frustrating at time though.

I ended up wasting soo much time on this it is so well put together. The sound, the concept, and especially the super bad driving. They don't have any reason to why they drive like that. This makes the game enoyable (and drives home an excellent message [pardon the pun]), but it can also make some levels very frustrating. For example: LV 24. The last wave of cars at the end just seems unstoppable. It feels like there is a solution, but that solution also feels very random. It has moved away from skill to chance.

How to make this better: A couple hints for those who are stuck (or itching for perfect).

[Zombie Die Hard 2]

The game is ok barely.

It is so much worse than pixle precision. Overall it was frustrating to play.

[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.

[Order of the Narwhal]

Actually this has some great potential, but its got too many flaws.

The music is a bit repettitive. The graphics are actually pretty nice. The problem is that the progression is extreemly limited. Enemies eventually spawn in at a rate that you don't have enough energy for. Once you hit he point where using the primary attack cant cope, you switch to the narwall power. And then you eventually run out of energy.

How to make this better:
You need another set of choices. In a horror game, when you run out of bullets or realize that your weapon is ineffective you turn to stealth or just run away. You use another choice.
The overused idea is an upgrade system. You die and then come back stronger.
Another idea would be having the narwall dive, like hiding under the waves. Makes you invincable, but stops your score from increasing and gives you time to recharge.

Final thoughts:
This is 2 min worth of time and then its done. With a few tweaks I think this could be an hour or two worth of entertainment. For the work thats been put in the pay off seem too little.