WarpZone's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[-= Surrounded=-]

Adheres a little too strictly to formula.

Graphics: Cool glowy neon ships. Kinda dull generic starfield. Shop menu looks cool, but that curve-slider, while cool, is annoying to use repeatedly while window-shopping.

Style: Classic arcade gameplay meets contemporary flash design! Actually, that's a polite way of saying they remade an old Atari game with vector graphics and added a levelling mechanic. Oh well, it still presents itself with pizzaz.

Sound: Understated shooting, check. Meaty explosions when you kill an enemy off-screen, check. Pulse-pumping techno soundtrack? Ch... hey... where'd the music go? Enjoy it while it lasts. It doesn't loop, for some reason.

Violence: Wow, I remember when blowing up spaceships was the most horrific thing a 12-year-old could do with his time.

Interactivity: This is where it goes straight down the tubes. Those stationary turret games offer more diverse gameplay than this. I would have prefered mouse aiming and directional movement controls (including diagonal movement.) But instead we get racecar steering and a straight shot turret.

The problem with this control scheme is, all gameplay essentially boils down to "fly really fast in one direction until all the ships have spawned, then turn 180 degrees and shoot parallel to your exhaust stream." Absolutely any other action you take will either get you rammed by a mine-ship that just spawned or shot up by gunships at point-blank before you can turn and face them.

The tacked on shopping menu neccessary before Armor Games will even consider sponsoring you these days looks pretty, but that novelty curve slider gets old REAL fast, because after the first few levels, everything you could even consider buying is off-screen when you enter the shop. If it just removed bought items from the list, the next thing you're gonna buy would ALWAYS be on top, and the slider could be an interesting but little-used diversion for oggling the stuff you can't buy yet. As it is, the further you advance, the more annoying it is to try and window-shop.

I can't speak to the overall powerup VS enemies balance, because I got tired of shooting my own exhaust smoke after a few levels. Don't get me wrong, I am willing to perform the same stupid task over and over again for hours in order to level up. But the stupid task has to be something fun. Defend Your Castle was fun because the stupid task was fun. Shooting my own exhaust just doesn't do it for me.

Overall: Another pretty flash game brought to its knees by boring gameplay. It sure gives a good first impression, though. Maybe it just wasn't for me. Thanks for making it, though. I look forward to seeing what else you can make.

A game should be challenging, fair, and complex. This game isn't fair if you're flying slow enough to actually see the enemy, and it's not challenging if you're flying fast enough to stay outside the perimeter. It certianly has complex components, but these get simplified when they are abstracted away to tiny dots on your radar 90% of the time.

Maybe I was playing it wrong. But when I tried playing it any other way, I would always lose 90% of my shield in one hit from a mine-ship.

[Luminara]

Delightfully complex vector sh'mup!

Graphics: Simple vector shapes with a surprising ammount of personality. You can tell the mine-layers from the homing drones from the richochets at a glance.

Style: Quirky, fun, and hyper. The squaresplosions, while distracting, are fun.

Sound: Generic techno music goes well with the simplictic, brightly-colored visuals. The "Let's go!" is a nice touch. Shots fired are subtle, except for the deliberately grating laser, which only makes the (thankfully temporary) powerup feel like that much more overkill. Most people around here will probably give you shit about the music, but it fits the visuals perfectly, contributing to an overall theme.

Violence: If it don't bleed, killing it in front of me is harmless.

Interactivity: Loved the unlimited shots. Loved the temporary invincibility. Loved the rapid level progression. Loved the powerups, especially "buddy." Tolerated the flashing cube explosions. Absolutely hated losing track of my goddamned cursor. I was clicking on ads at one point!

Ways to make the cursor visible:

-Just use the operating system's cursor! We're used to it, we can see it, it can never be covered up.

or

-Make the cursor graphic more distinct (a flashy targeting recticule, blinking arrows, thin line crosshairs that cover the entire screen, whatever.) and make sure it's on top. The easiest way to ensure this is to attach it to its own layer, and then attach all the other game objects to a lower layer. (Simmilar to the way I'd immagine you're currently doing the HUD.)

Ideally, you want the player to be able to see his ship and the crosshairs AT ALL TIMES, even when the screen is full of explosions.

Overall: Great game, with one minor issue that sorta breaks the playability.

jmtb02 responds:

Wow, a monstrous review, well critiqued. You made some good points and I appreciate it greatly. Thanks! -jmtb02

[Tower's Tactics: Throne]

Fun until you realize you have no control over it.

Graphics: Tiny Midevil Dudes with very distinct outfits. Great spell effects, though a tad ambiguous. (I.E. The first time you see an enemy cast a whooshy, swirly thing, you have no idea what they just did.) Excellent backgrounds featuring paralax scrolling, sun flares, and some nice high-end CG in the cutscenes.

Style: Everything comes together really nicely. Feels more cinematic than most movies! The sheer epic scale of this game is staggering for a Flash title, with different classes, armies fighting armies, an ongoing story, and a map screen with unlockable battles!

Sound: Great music, great sound, above-average voices. I'd really like to know where they got this music from. It's fuckin' epic. And I mean that literally.

Violence: Clang, clang, squish, UGH! Tiny characters and a general lack of gratuity make this less of a bloodbath than one might expect. In fact, this would have been a 0 if the sound effects weren't so convincing.

Interactivity: This is where it all falls apart. There's a few easy training levels... you think you're starting to get the hang of it, you level up and equip new skills, and then, BAM, you hit the Boss wall and start losing every battle you attempt.

Yes, death is a mild inconvenience in this game, which merely detracts points from your true life meter, your Favor. Yes, you get experience points for the valliant attempt. Technically, that probably makes the game "winnable" and "survivable" and whatnot. I suspect this was added at the last minute in response to player feedback.

Unfortunately, while the Favor system may make the game doable, it doesn't make the game FUN. Nobody wants to play a strategy game where the primary levelling mechanic is losing the same fight over and over again until you're strong enough to finally beat it.

There is very little, if any gameplay to be had in the actual battles. Clicking on enemies is almost impossible, coordinating a strategy in realtime (geek the mage, defend and heal the leader, attack their archer,) is a joke, and every split-second you spend pointing or clicking, means another sucessful hit by the bad guys.

If you picked the wrong classes to round out your party at the begining, and then you get stonewalled a few stages down the road, your options are basically Start Over or Stop Playing. I chose Stop Playing.

I might go back later, trying to min-max my way into a party of tanks who can survive unaided, but I don't feel like I have a very strong incentive to do so.

It's an unmitigated cluster-fuck. A bunch of guys stacked on top of each other going "clang" until one side dies. And since the other side can use skills easily, and you can't... you die. Period. Unless you've already died enough times to be higher level than them.

Overall: Fundamentally flawed game mechanics ruin a package that is otherwise gorgeous, epic, and deep. It really pains me, too, because the art direction, character design, story and effects are all ABOVE REPROACH. This is the work of an awesome game development team, here. It's just that the game sucks. :(

Here's my advice: Do-over. Keep the characters, story, and graphics. Re-do the scripting. Re-design the gameplay.

Maybe make it overhead-view. Maybe make it 3/4 view. Maybe make it turn-based. Maybe make it pause whenever you're in a menu doing something. Maybe just slow the enemy movement down to an insulting level so that noob players have time to think, click, and aim. Maybe make it automatic that monks stay back and heal, and grunts target spellcasters first. Maybe just let the player input all his commands before the battle starts. Maybe follow some suggestions other reviewers have had.

But you gotta do something here. This game... does not work. It is broken. Fix it. :(

Septenary responds:

Blegh, I didn't realise it was so bad. Thanks for the long review; I appreciate your comments. I'm glad you liked the graphics and style. Here's the suggestions I've interpreted, for use in the second version:

-More blood, larger characters and more violence
-Easier battles to win
-Take out favour and judgement (although no, it wasn't a last-minute add in: favour was one of the initial concepts that I started with)
-Pause the game while selecting enemies, so that more decisions can be made without taking damage
-Make more "strategic", less random damage
-Make it 3/4 view in order to make units less clustered and more visible

If you have any clarifications or more suggestions, I always appreciate personal messages.

[The Last Stand.]

Great "defend your X" game!

Graphics: Clipart people track and fire at shuffling clipart zombies. Realistic gun designs, probably derived from photographs. Excellent diversity of characters, including a very rare zombie clown.

They made great use of color in this to evoke mood... nihilistic tones on the zombie horde contrast with a spectacularly beautiful sunrise.

"Surface" is a little rough, especially on the characters, but I wouldn't have it any other way, given the subject matter.

Not overly gorey, by Newgrounds' standards, but corpses pile up, which is a nice touch.

Style: I called these dudes "clipart people," and I stand by it. They look like "trace bitmap-ed" photographs, and are animated in an anatomically correct but otherwise unremarkable way. Nothing stands out, and nothing feels stylized.

(Normally, I would prefer crisp, stylized characters, but the drab realism works very well for this particular game.)

Sound: No music, but just the right sounds. You know? The chirping crickets add tons of ambiance, and there's gunfire and not much else. No moaning zombies, but I didn't miss them. I heard enough excessively moaning zombies when I played They Hunger to last me a lifetime.

Violence: On the headburstometer, these are actually some pretty damn tasteful decapitations. I've seen much worse.

Interactivity: Beautiful. I've played Defend Your X games before that threw too much or too little at you at a time. I've played flash games that sucked because the author milked the reloading animations. I've played Buy Stuff Games that had confusing menus, unfair prices, or too many simmilar items to choose from, sight unseen. The Last Stand avoids all of these problems by Keeping It Simple.

You start with a gun just tough enough to keep you alive while you recruit more survivors, you find new guns in a pre-determined order, and if the firing charecteristics of the new gun don't work out for your style of play, you can always keep your old favorite gun on-hand, just in case.

Your allies don't use the other guns you find, but if they did it would become a "Watch Your Turret" simulator. I've played those. They're funny to watch, but not good for much.

The game is short, yes. But it's not TOO short. This is important to note. If anything, the small number of levels just means you get new goodies to play with that much more frequently.

And my GOD, that final rifle is fun to use... I think my personal record is four with one shot, two of them headshots. :D

There's something to add. Records. Stats. Achievements. Bonuses for making a lot of headshots, that sort of thing. But they're certianly not neccessary for the game to be fun.

Not seeing the life meter of your ramparts makes you feel more threatened than you neccessarily are, which is always a good thing in a survival horror game.

Humor/Story: Heh. Post-it notes are funny. Not Living Dead funny, not even quite comedy relief, but just a very light touch. There was a story in there, too, but a lot of times I just plumb forgot to read the Diary after each level.

There's another suggestion. Make the diary page display automatically after each sunrise, with a simple click to get rid of it. That or make it possible to flip through previous days' diary pages. It was a nice surprise when I discovered it, but it was annoying that if I missed a day, I lost part of the story.

Overall: Excellent Zombie game! Excellent Defend Your Noun!

Not scary in any way, shape or form, of course. On that level, it fails as a Survival Horror Game. But I think we've already played enough geuinely scary zombie games that it's hard to give us anything new, especially in as visually limited a medium as Flash.

So, in the ambiance department, it was no Silent Hill. It wasn't even a Submachine, a Resident Evil, or a Parasite Eve. You're outnumbered, but you're powerful enough that you don't feel helpless. You know you can hold out indefinitely, as long as you're careful. So, more like Resident Evil 2 or Silent Hill 3.

Good Stuff!

[MindScape]

Woah! Fuck! Someone made a good game!

Graphics: Thick, crisp lines and a color aesthetic that's all over the charts bring a boring emo kid and an army of wacky enemies to life! Nice animations. I loved that lookin' around animation, even though I didn't notice it 'till level 4 because I was constantly on the move. Simple, well-designed stages come in a few flavors. An occasional trippy background adds WTF factor. Not to mention great cutscenes! This game has it all!

Style: I *really* have to hand it to you for maintaining such a strong, unifying art direction over such a wide variety of elements. The diverse parts all come together to form a cohesive, demented whole.

Sound: Great music, nothing annoying about the sparse sound effects, and TONS of atmosphere. Was I immagining things, or did you fade different tracks together everytime I turned a corner in the psychadelic section? Voice in the movies woulda been nice.

Violence: The ESRB probably things that robots punching a person counts as some sort of voilence. But Newgrounds regulars know better!

I dunno about you guys, but by now I'm desensitized to the point where my personal goreometer consists entirely of what happens when a character's head is crushed by a brick.

So If a bright red splotch comes out and barely interacts with the envrionment, that's a 1. A seven would be a really graphic head-crush with bits of bone and brain and the blood's all brown and kinda hemmorages a bit with the body twitches.

You don't wanna know what a ten is.

So anyway, don't take the 0 personally. It's not your fault.

Humor: Nothing was boring, not even the boring parts. Like, you know those monochromatic sections of blue wall in assylum stage? Not boring! Even those parts still managed to add to the ambiance in some way.

And I have a hard time classifying that ambiance. It was too goofy to be serious and too tragic to be funny.

So how do I, as a reviewer, convey that in statistical form? By putting a big ol' seven up there in the Humor category, even though it wasn't funny. (Also, by using several sentances to explain what the seven means!)

Interactivity: Loved the rotation, the switches, and the race at the end. Yes, they were all gimicks. I liked them anyway, because they were FUN gimicks that DIDN'T SUCK. They added new gameplay, without making the game annoying, tedious, or impossible.

Let me tell you a true story, about the gimick that had the potential to become the deal-breaker, here: The rabbit key fight.

As the battle ran longer than I expected it to, I had no way of knowing if my actions were having any effect. I began to wonder if there was somehting I was supposed to be DOING during the tug of war animation... I started to worry. And then he got faster, and I started not getting there in time, and it wasn't until then that I realized I could take damage from the misses. I started to panic. It was happening faster than I could possibly hope to get to the right hole...

Then I suddenly got him, for the LAST time, at around 1/3 health. Apparently through pure random chance, he popped out of a hole that was close enough. And when the animation sequence started, I let out a very real sigh of relief.

I don't know whether you used statistics, careful scripting, or just playtesting to determine that this fight would not be impossible. But it had the desired effect on me.

Overall: Everyone involved needs to PUT THIS ON THEIR RESUME. (Assuming you punk rebel types use those.)

In fact, do you think you could maybe do a Tutorial open-sourcing your control and movement code? Not the rotation, so much. Just the jumping and collision.

It's just that people keep submitting these crappy, half-assed platform games on NG all the time. You know the kind I mean? Where you get stuck in the walls, or fall through floors, and holding down the key makes you bunny-hop?

Well, your game had NONE of that bullshit! I wish every noob could work with this engine, instead of the de-facto standard, the 2001 tutorial they're all apparently using.

HeRetiK responds:

You took yourself the time to write such an elaborate review so I'll take myself the time to answer your questions.

-) I didn't fade different tracks in the psychedelic part. It would have been a cool idea though. Only thing I did was fading from one track to another when leaving / entering this section.
-) I did a lot of careful play testing at the rabbit key fight.
-) Actually I did use a tutorial for the collision detection part:
http://www.harveycartel.org/m etanet/tutorials.html
The greater part, however, was modding the basic engine in a way that would make gravity shifts possible.
-) I know what kind of platform games you mean, I made one of these myself until I got off my lazy ass and read through the tutorial mentioned before. And I hate reading tutorials. The things you do for a proper game engine...

Thanks for stopping by!

[Pico & the Mental Menace]

Play mechanics suffer a bit.

Graphics: It's Pico and friends, all drawn somewhat taller and thinner than you're used to. Sufficiently detailed backgrounds with lots of various objects and a nice texture overlay. Everything's animated pretty well, but since it seems to rely heavily on motion-tweening, the arms and legs always feel a bit stiff. Tacked-on Anime Schoolgirl didn't really interest me that much, as a character.

Style: I didn't care for the tall n' skinny take on the characters. I'm one of those people who thinks the original artist is the one who decides how the characters "should" look. Gimme the ol' school hand-drawn big-heads! The shotgun blast was depressingly boring. Pico's screeching-to-a-halt added personality, but at the cost of gameplay (see below). I liked the look and feel of the robots, especially the giant boss robot.

Sound: Sad piano music loop was a little short. Most of the music was decent NG audio portal fodder. Combat sound effects were present where required. No voice. Minimal menu noise. Nothing on the title screen. Nothing too unique or original, but nothing sounded "bad" either.

Violence: Man shoots robots. Robots don't mind. Pico dies, gets x-rayed. Player quits before seeing later levels. Reviewer has uninformed opinion, but suspects this is considerably less bloody than the usual Pico battles.

Interactivity: This is where the flash suffered the most.

Now, don't get me wrong. It's passable.

The ducking play mechanic makes the game playable, and if you time it just right, you can fire two shots every time the average robot fires one. Lots of spike puzzles that are just barely doable and only take off one heart if you screw up on them. Double-robot fights that are entirely survivable if you but extended flash time and enough hearts.

However...

While the controls were just about easy enough to pick up, they are far too restrictive to allow the player to engage the world's challenges on his own terms. This reiminded me a lot of the old SNES Beavis and Butt-head game, in terms of how the combat played out. Superfluous animations such as the Castlevania-style pre-and-post-jump crouching, the ininterruptable recocking of the shotgun after every shot, and that cute skid-to-a-halt I mentioned earlier, all serve to make simple movement and combat more of a hassle than they need to be.

Battling robots, something which is normally a whole lot of fun, instead becomes a repetitive timing puzzle with only one solution, and the high HP on the robots means you have to enter the correct solution over and over again in order to win. And the one powerup that would let you mindlessly blast your way through the tedious hordes (regeneration) costs so much that there's no way to buy it until much later in the game than I was prepared to play.

Ultimately, this boils down to a "do-it-my-way-or-else-you-die" gameplay formula. I hate those. Especially when there's only one correct pattern and every single fight is exactly the same. I would have much prefered a "most enemies are weak enough that you can easily trash them with a couple of hits, but a combination of different enemy types, varying terrain, and random or emergent attack patterns keep you guessing" type of game.

Overall: A simple 2D platformer with a tacked-on shopping mechanism. Nice graphics and animations, and great, sprawling backgrounds, but ultimately the rules of engagement that are too stifling for the fun to survive. Given the rush job, I think the author can be forgiven for making a game that's playable-but-not-quite-enterta ining.

Happy Pico Day.

[Thorenzitha - episode 2]

Shows promise, but needs work.

Graphics: You get points for ambitions design, but then lose them again for making the characters and backgrounds so ugly and boring. You could have rendered better robots than this in Blender or something, or even used actual people. Likewise, the backgrounds are expertly rendered using a what seems like a variety of programs or tecniques, but the end result is the boringest moon base I've ever seen. 10 on the graphical execution. 2 on the design. :/

Style: I really don't know what to say. Everything's so lifeless and drab, but not in a claustrophobic, dystopian, ambiant way. In a first-gen 3D 1998 budget Myst clone kind of way. Your technical mastery tells me you are indeed a professional 3D artist. You just... you need inspiration, or something. You should try to make a statement with these exosuits and space stations. And the statement should not be "no comment."

Sound: That's a pretty decent, soul-tugging ambiance loop you've got there. Unfortunately, like all loops, it gets old fast.

Violence: Them bugs burst nice n' juicy when you step on 'em.

Interactivity: Shooting was good, but it felt painfully, unneccesarily slow between shots. Took me a few beetles to the groin to figure out that I was actually out of ammo, not just lagging.

And god, walking was SUCKFULLY slow. You need to let the player move around freely, especially when the solutions to puzzles are not obvious and require a non-trivial ammount of exploration. I mean the character's as tall as the screen, so he should be able to cross the screen in a second or two.

On the subject of mobility, diagonal walking would have been nice too, but I realize there are technical reasons why this would be difficult to implement.

I gave up looking for the remote, so I didn't see anything past the screen that has the beetle battle in it.

Overall: Resident Evil it ain't. Which is sad, because I think it coulda been. I get the feeling this game was designed in committee. You need to let the gameplay paradigms evolve a little bit more to appease the player.

For one thing, I'd make camera-turning automatic if I were you (again, like Resident Evil) unless there's a good reason why this would hurt gameplay.

And for christ sakes, please double or tripple the walk speed. You can say whatever you want about the gravity on Mars or building suspense, but it won't change the fact that while nobody wants to search every inch of a room tapping Enter, it's even worse when you have to do so at a snail's pace.

Finally, you might want to consider switching to the old mouse-click paradigm for manipulating objects and collecting them. Something about switching from keyboard to mouse, and looking in the upper-right hand corner of the screen, then hitting enter, just felt awkward and uneccessarily complicated.

I hope you don't feel these suggestions undermine the inegrity of your game design. I'm trying to be helpful here, providing my honest feedback as a player. You've done a lot of innovative stuff, here. But sometimes a simpler, tried-and-true solution can make the game less tedious and more fun.

IMHO, if you can provide an interface everyone already knows, while keeping your characters and settings and story innovative, there's really no reason not to.

Ideally, the interface should be as simple as breathing. This game was more like peeing into a catheter. Maybe that's what you were going for, it being an astronaut simulation and all, but somehow I doubt most players appreciate being challenged by the interface.

[for ear,for fun]

Great new game idea!

Graphics: None. :P

Style: Very cool! Very original!

Sound: Good music! But pauses between notes made the game harder!

Interactivity: After I put on headphones, it worked great! But, with modern 3D games, the sounds are quieter when they're behind the player's head. That didn't seem to happen here. It would have helped. Sometimes, I thought I faced the sound, but I had to walk backwards!

Overall: Very cool new idea for a game!

[- Circlo -]

Novel Concept. Flawless Execution.

Graphics were weak and unimaginative, except for the background which was kinda cool when it changed. The gameplay and overall fun factor more than made up for the lackluster bubbles, though I liked the various types of puzzles, I loved how smoothly the game reset itself after a critical loss, but what really floored me was the high quality of the scripting job.

I was amazed at how bulletproof the game mechanics seemed. After that final bubble was popped at the hub level, that was it. Game over, man. Nothin's gonna screw this up, now. The cannons hold their fire, the timer stops counting down, and I win. As it should be! You almost never see a Flash game that had that much care/forethought/testing put into it.

The puzzle designs were varied and interesting, and the speacial shots and cannons all added to the fun factor. I got stuck at some of the faster puzzles with tinier holes, but I have a relatively slow computer, and I'm not a bust-a-move veteren or anything, so I can't be trusted to appreciate this game's later levels. If anything, the fact that the game eventually wore me down proves it's a solid title with decently scaling difficulty.

Overall: Great job! If you'd drawn the bubbles to be some of those anime glass-bead-lookin' jewel thingies, and given it some characters of some sort watching the puzzle unfold, it could have gotten huge points for graphics. At it stands it's sorta like the old game Zoop for the PS1. Great fun, new puzzle twist, great design, music you can tolerate for a long time, but very dull graphics despite nice color and style.

[Trigger!]

Simple. Too Short. Nice crisp style. Not bad.

Graphics: Nice colors, crisp lines, and iconic shapes make for decent visuals. The whole maze has a nice machine-like sense of purpose. Boring character, but hey, can't have everything.

Style: Uhhh... See Graphics. :)

Sound: Add sound please. Google it. It's not that hard, sir.

Interactivity: I hate these mouse maze games. But yours was nicely done. The boulder was uber-cheap cuz I wasn't expecting it. (Maybe if you'd shown it there, attached to one wall, and then when I hit the button maybe it would wiggle a little, come out of its socket, and slowly roll out before following the path it did, the noob player would have had more of a chance to react to it. Instead this is on-the-job-training, which kinda sucks.)

Overall: A nice little game. You used a lot of good ideas that made this more than the typical mouse-maze. Too short, and needs sound, but other than that, good job! :) For your next project, try something a little more original.

AceDecade responds:

Thanks for the long and thought out review! =D
Yeah, alot of people hate me for the boulder XD, I'll try to refrain from hidden traps, as for sound, I had planned it, but I'm no good with sound in flash, it's always too big and I don't know how to make it less quality. Thanks, and I plan to learn sound and put it in Trigger 2 =D