fepayton's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Girl Catcher]

Addictive but unbalanced.

Nice simple design, good art and music, but needed play testing badly.

Why only 6/10?: I needed too much luck before I could use skill.

The problem: Everything to too expensive for the amount of income that you can earn in a level. **The rates of income and expense aren't balanced.**

Example: Compare Level 1 where you need to get $3 in 10 seconds and Level 7 where you need $250 in 25 seconds.
Level one needs the character to be collecting about $0.3 a second where level 7 needs the player to be getting $10 a second. It's a nice difficulty curve, until you consider the upgrade costs and the rate at which income falls from the sky.
Until I had the speed upgrade (at $20) I was too slow to go after $50+ coins. In short, I needed not only to beat the early levels, but to beat them by $30-$50 to have a chance at the later levels. This made level 1 a target of $43 in 10 seconds.

How to fix it:
1) Halve the level targets. This will lengthen game play and allow the players to plan on getting upgrades as opposed to just getting lucky and deciding to buy them.
2) Drop the "1 Round" upgrades to $7 and $15 from $50 and $80. With the current cost so high it is unlikely that a player can recuperate their costs, let alone get ahead.
3) Give some advanced warning about big incoming payouts. This lets the player plan their moves. e.g. A yellow star shines overhead 2 seconds before a yellow coin falls from that position. I could gamble and race to that position possibly collecting some red coins.

Summary: Catchers type games are reactive in nature. Upgrade games are pro-active. What cost this game so badly was that without upgrades the reactions were too slow to allow me to get ahead and be pro-active. Half of the game prevented me from enjoying the other half.

Spend the extra time to balance the next one. And make a next one!

[Z-Rox]

Phantastic

Absolutely sublime, with great art music and comcept.
Let me explain the 9.

A puzzle game is derived on some sort of patter recognition or logic. The first 10 levels are great. And then the game changes tract slightly (I hope I don't ruin anything by saying that level 11 is the first word answer). The problem here is that the game offers no hint (starting instructions aside). This is a minor complaint, but it's been training us to look for matching letters on the keyboard.

A good fix would be to make one of the early (effectively tutorial) levels a pair of letters, possibly a duplicate of a problem that we have already solved. This makes the jump from single character to multiple character answers softer.

A second fix would be to have the game (over time or attempts) make the problem easier (for example widening the bar every time we get it wrong).

Again, all this is minor. and I still think this game is a 5/5, 9/10. The seldom, but existent jumps in the learning curve are the only fault. I could ignore them entirely if this wasn't a puzzle game that halted your progress until you figured it out.

Seriously though, well done!

[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.

[Armada Tanks]

Demo aside

A a flash game it was solid. Graphics Nice, Sound Good, Music Fine.
As a demo it became frustrating. Rather than enjoying my flash game I was told about this other BETTER 3D game.

Well, even if he graphics were better, the game-play still needs work.
1) The mix of powerups was nice, but they were too often.
2) The semi deformable terrain was nice, but my strategy became destroy all walls. See point 3, next.
3) The player advantage of being able to shoot diagonally was huge. (i.e. I was never at risk)
4) The enemy AI had no sense of objective. <-- this means that the enemy AI was non-existent. They moved (almost randomly) and shot (almost randomly) which made them enemies, but that was it. It would take me a great deal of patience to actually get killed, and even more; to loose.

Long story short. The selling points of the demo were good levels and better graphics. These were the two things that the flash already had. What it failed to promise was better game-play for having those additions.

Flash get 7/10
Anticipation of Product gets 3/10
Willingness to spend money 0/10

[Jetbot]

Lunar lander

This is solid flash, with a nice look, but it fails to be a game.

Remember Lunar Lander. Note the lunar. Low gravity makes things managable. Regular gravity literally makes playing this game rocket science.

So many things were done well. (The limitless lives for example)
But the basic game mechanic was flawed.

I'm not so sure how easy a fix this is given the level design, but I would suggest that damage over instant death could be a quick fix to make this a playable game.

Just my thoughts. Personally I'm a ham handed casual gamer.
Overall good job. Could be great for the twitch gamers.

[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

[Advanced Ninja]

Sweet concept

Nice physics and a sweet concept, but the ninja handles like a cow in a shopping cart. The wall jumping is a bit erratic ans some of the collisions are funny.
Example, the wall jump was semi predictable from level one. the description seems to indicate that you jump towards a wall and then spring away (which happens some times) but if I jumped towards the first ledge I kind of did a double jump. Level three starts with my ninja hovering several pixels above his rock.

The shift targeting was sweet and the graphics were good.
Needed sound and a better recovery when he climbs (i.e. he can scale the wall, but he cant get to the top).

Fantastic rag doll splats kept me playing (thought totally frustrated at the controls) for the first half dozen levels though.

Keep it up!

[Knights Castle]

Just needs polish

Great graphics, good sound and some nice AI, everything a good game should have.
Problem: Game balance. It has timing problem up the wazoo!

To beat the game I ignored the damage skills. After you have the healing side you get lightning. With Holy armor and lightning you have the game beat for a while. I could jump into a crowd with my temporary invincibility and then, once they were in a nice group I could zap them all.
From this point on the big bosses weren't bosses but time wasters while my lightning recharged. I love the fact that they pull back and swing, giving the nimble adventurer time to get out of the way. It lets you bait them back and forth across the bridge taunting them.
The problem is that when you get a group of them the strategy doesn't change, except that you might need to heal or use you invincibility again it one of the group strays from chasing you and decides that the castle is more interesting. In the later levels I actually used meteor and fire angle because getting them was like cutting lightning's recharge time in half. I used used all of them for the last level.

I guess the point of this is that the recharge rate are all so slow that the game isn't about swinging your sword, it's about slowly running in circles while your real weapons recharge. This meant letting monsters live, while I danced in circles.

I liked how you were trying to switch things up with the green mages that turn you into a pig and some of the little men that could run fast, but unfortunately their differences were minor when considering the overall game.

In general defense games have two things that the player has to balance:
How quickly enemies approach and how much damage they can take. Consider how long it takes you to respawn (10 seconds). This is enough time for every kind of enemy to get from one side of the map to the other. Consider that fireballs deal easily 1/3 the damage of a sword but take 15 times as long to recharge. These numbers aren't close so there are no decisions for the player. There is A winning strategy, just one of them (which is bait and recharge).

How to improve it: I don't think that just cutting all the recharge times in half would solve much. I would suggest making each more reasonable. For the damage it does fireball could go from 15 to 2. Healing was well paced as were the upper end, but waiting 20 seconds for a barrel that looked big but did little was disappointing. By then end I had all but given up on the sword for doing anything but landing the killing blow one everything had recharged. Making your sword improve might help.

Still 7/10. Still awsome.

EggysGames responds:

Thanks for the great detailed review. Most of the problems you mentioned are probably to do with the whole overall game, and no snmall change is going to fix them, I should have had it better balanced from the beginning.

[Mental]

Almost perfect

Nice game, good style, intuitive characters. They could have walked a bit faster and some sort of character select would have been nice. In the sewers I managed to get the little guy stuck behind the FreeWorldGroup link. Nothing too terrible, it was just a couple little things (like walk speed).