SquizofrenicCat's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[SNEK: The Game]

Pretty cute simple toy, it's an interesting take on the classic Snake as you attempt to slow the progress to survive rather than aim at getting as large as possible. Of course, the problem with this premise is that this version of the game may never end, being designed as a ranked time trial, unlike the original title where there was a maximum length any player could achieve to end the playthrough (which was the well defined challenge that kept people playing it).

I cannot say I enjoyed the aesthetic very much. Mechanically, it stayed faithful to the classic nokia-3310 LED matrix, while the spritework for the snake/background/assets were very detailed; the choppy transition between each position on the grid contrasted a lot with the art direction to me. I feel there could have interpolated/animated transitions to make it look much more pleasing to look at.

I also did not understand why columns/lines of potions were classified as a single entity; probably to make picking them up easier. Maybe this could have been a different sprite that connected the flasks in some way. The way it is, the pickups seem independent, even though they aren't, and that's confusing design. As other reviewers pointed out, it's also hard to figure out what is going on at first, it took me a bit to really notice the potions reducing the size of the snake.

The Snake always seems to starts at the same position after the initial 3 second timer, with the first pickup never changing its location. This suggests that every time you start the game, you're in fact waiting 10 or so seconds before you can really start playing it. Randomizing it would be a good call, and a difficulty setting to increase the acceleration or even start the game at a higher speed would be much welcomed, I find.

Overall, it's still a funny experiment and even though I dislike time attack challenges it still got a laugh out of me. The music was a good choice, too.

Aprime responds:

At first I was going to reply to each of your points on why it was the way it was, but really, regardless of the reasons I did things this way, you're right - every single point you made.
I should get you to review everything I make, in fact, feel free to help yourself to my old work. Cheers,

[Chessformer]

Extremely cute game that makes intelligent use of the "common" knowledge of Chess piece movement to set up the puzzles. It's of course not Chess and even has some sort of gravity mechanic to it so it surely is its own brand of toy. It also previews and teaches you movement piece by piece with the starter levels, so even if you don't know how to move Chess pieces normally you can figure it out very quickly.

The music is a single short loop and having sat here for like an hour playing it I can't say that it bothered me at any point, so it's a very good track. The art is super simple and the small details for when you select and move pieces feel very natural.

Some of the challenges were a little bit frustrating, particularly the last one where you had to flush positioning quite often to stack things up so that took a little fumbling. There were some red herrings too (maybe a pawn or a platform that didn't get used) but maybe that was me finding a different solution.

I had to refresh the page and redo 24 again so the medal unlocked, but I was pretty satisfied just from completing the challenge. Great, simple game. You should sell this as a Mobile game before someone else steals it.

[Vampi 3D]

It's necessary to Toggle WebGL / Hardware Acceleration on in Browser settings for this game to work properly, and there's no indication of this.

Very nice art style, extremely comfortable environment. Bat mechanic was cool, a pity it was tied to the ring because you can easily get lost flying around and not make it back to it very easily. Extremely cute simple game.

[FRIDAY NIGHT FUNKIN']

Absolutely lovely aesthetic, and the audio is top notch. Extremely cute game.

There are some bugs here and there; not sure if it's because my computer is trash but the first time I loaded in the little dude was invisible unless I pressed a direction. I had to reload. After beating the first week, it put me back at the week select and the music seemed to glitch out and screech really loudly trying to start.

I feel that maybe the outlines on the arrows need to be intensified a little; some of the colors share resemblance with the little dude's, and it gets hard to see sometimes, specially when they come really fast.

Outside of the few bugs and the contrast issue, it's a very promising project you guys got. Looking forward to seeing wherever it is going.

[Karrion Killer]

Fun game, I enjoyed the controls of it. Very lenient with input, felt very responsive. Great work with that!

I think the creepy/fleshy art direction was very good for the theme, nice music too. However, the color scheme was absolutely putrid, and not in a thematic way. All enemies were shades of green, and would drop green splats, and also shoot green projectiles. In the later levels, the contrast no longer exists with all the mush; it becomes difficult to make out what is happening. Had contrasting colors been applied a bit better, with different colors for live enemies and for background splat details, it would have made the game less gross (mechanically) near the end.

Some mechanics like the enemy strength escalation and HP gain from Combos felt very off. It's very counter intuitive when the enemies up to a certain point simply deal 1 HP, then suddenly the bag head enemy takes away 3 HP and kills you instantly in the event you did not arbitrarily expire a combo to gain extra health. This got extremely confusing to me until I played a few more times, but it didn't feel like any sort of discovery, just that the game rules were being shown in an obtuse way.

Also, the game did not register my highscore, so that made me sad too. In any case, I still played the game to the end with a score of 12543 so obviously you guys definitely created an engaging work to say the least. I don't think I'd like to play it again, though.

ProsciuttoMan responds:

I think you've provided a largely fair assessment of the game, certainly.
The green colour scheme for enemies was chosen primarily just so that they stood out from the background and so the protagonist and the enemies could be easily distinguished from one another, and the baghead enemies are sort of meant as a much greater challenge compared to the rest of the game's cast.
I'll keep this in mind for future work :D

[Overlord's New Mansion]

Congrats on the engine! It's pretty smooth, and runs pretty decently.

As for the review; the game is tagged as challenging, obviously, but overall the only reason that it felt like it posed any challenge was because of the process of getting used to how the character moves. Acceleration and Inertia are both strange to get used to in this game. The dash being a stop and quick precision move, into no momentum into free fall, was not very fun to me. It is something you simply have to learn to control because it is its own problem entirely, and once you get it down it's not very rewarding or cool to do (unlike something that would simply propel me forward in an arc for instance, or straight down if I held down before pressing the dash). The box puzzle (which I'm glad only showed up once honestly) kept inertia for when you jumped, so you kind of had the worst of both worlds on display for the player with that in my opinion.

The level of precision doesn't match how the heavily armored Overlord looks, specially since he's really speedy on top of it. A lot of the coins felt unnecessarily finicky to get. You could easily dash by without actually picking them up, which again doesn't feel fitting when you're a big armored dude. I also feel like a lot of the challenges were purposely designed to lack rhythm a lot of the times to get people killed, which is fair game, but considering movement did not feel very good to me it simply did not make the experience enjoyable.

In any case, the game still grabbed my attention until the end and I got every coin + the golden armor. I suppose this means you definitely did something right, but I definitely do not wish to play it again, lol. Congrats on doing every asset, it all looks very solid, and ghost girl is cute.

saantonandre responds:

Thanks for your review, you did hit most of the undeniable soft spots and I'm well aware of them all since I didn't miss a single comment. I will treasure the all the critiques and keep them in mind for future projects. Thanks I appreciate the compliments on the engine and assets :)

[Wrath of Nightmare]

Considering this is basically a tech demo for your GB skills, I think you did very well specially since it is ported here on the web. Great job on that.

As a standalone game without any context, it is a bit lackluster. It's easy to get lost on what to do next if you stop paying attention, as there are no indicators of what Quest Item you are holding currently. It's also hard to keep track of the names.

I'm not sure if there was a pattern for the Lost Woods esque segment, but it seemed to be about Brute Force and memorizing the path (iirc original Lost Woods had an amplitude shift on the music for when you were next to the incorrect entrance); this made me almost fall asleep. In fact, a lot of the game seemed to have brute forcing and exhausting dialogue options, which is not a design I can say I enjoy.

The audio unfortunately was hit and miss; the snare in music that played in the village felt very grating for instance. I'd complain about no mute, but this is a GB tech demo.

To improve a game like this I'd add more dialogue per event to make brute forcing less painful, a map, a way to show the current item, and maybe a character log. I believe the map and the item display could fit in a "Start" menu. I'd also try to implement the audio cues for the Woods in some way.

TheEnkian responds:

A menu for quest items is something I'd like to add. Definitely a good addition. As for the woods area, there's actually an NPC that Jason directs you to if you speak to him outside of the woods and you can eventually find a guide for the way through. I left in the ability to brute force it if people wanted to rather than make that NPC mandatory.

I think my mistake with the village snare sound is that music was the last thing I added so I didn't spend an awful lot of time listening to the snare during testing. I can replace the song with something more fitting.

[Puzzle Crafter]

I played the puzzles, or adventure mode as you call it, they were pretty cute and relaxing. The music sets the tone for an easy-going atmosphere. That said, I'm not really sure what this game is trying to be, specially with the the mini game section and unlocks. It really feels like a little showcase of random stuff you've been practicing all packed together, and I guess it all kinda works at the cost of being very simplistic. I can't give much direction as to how to make it much better gameplay wise.

Sadly the audio mixing was not good, the booster platforms exploded my ears first time they showed up because they are much louder than other things. Also a big loss on the score from me is due to the level browse buttons that open external pages without informing me they're going to do that until I click them. Always be upfront about that stuff, like put a Google Drive icon on it or somethin.

larrynachos responds:

The original game idea was the level editor tbh. I like making level editors, and this was probably my most successful attempt. The adventure mode is just a demonstration of the mechanics. I'm not a very creative level designer, so I knew adventure mode would be lackluster. I was hoping to get more custom level submissions from the community, but I've only received 2 small submissions so far. I made the minigames section because I love minigames. It's a great opportunity to test smaller mechanics in self contained environment, instead of making a whole game based on a small mechanic. I also try to include medals and scoreboards in my games, to keep people coming back.

I'll have a look at the booster volume, it didn't really strike me as bothersome until the adventure mode level that used them. Thanks for letting me know! And good call with the google drive icon. I originally wanted to have an iframe element that would stay within the game so you could browse and submit in-game, but I didn't get it working in time. I'll revisit it and try to get it working for the next update!

Thanks for the feedback, you've been very helpful :)

[Drake Madduck Is Lost In Time]

Maybe it's not my sort of game, but I couldn't play it for long.

I think the music either cut off on game start, or I had muted it somehow but I couldn't tell because there's no UI indicator. I feel controls could have been demonstrated rather than told, as I had to bash around to get the game to start. I also found the control presets to be awkward (Mouse 1/Mouse 2 for the gun could have worked better I believe).

Things that could be affected by the gun seemed to be very spaced apart and arbitrary, which sadly caused me to lose interest on the mechanic almost immediately.

On the bright side, the assets were very pleasing, and the game performance seemed good. If this had more time to work out its kinks and make the first impression less dull with more things to play with the gun, I could see it turning into a fun/pleasing game.