WarpZone's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[ShellCore: Skirmish]

Totally different than Ep1... but in a good way.

I had mixed feelings about ShellCore: Skirmish the first time I played it. It's a huge departure from the epic ridiculousness of ShellCore Command: Episode 1. But that version was buggy and got removed from the portal. Then I found an old version on another website and played it to the end, just to see if it would ever go back to it sroots and unlock the magic of the first game.

It does not.

But like reviewers of Herzog Zwei for the Sega Geneis (a game which apparently served as the inspiration for ShellCore Command,) I would be doing gamers a tremendous disservice if I judged this game based solely on the basis of its predecessors.

ShellCore: Skirmish is not an open world game like Episode 1. Instead, it plays out more like a real-time tactical game. I say tactical and not strategy because the winning strategy is based entirely on the level design. (Generally, it boils down to "drop a tank on the enemy's base," but it's not always that simple.) It's the tactics of implementing that strategy which form the juicy core of the gameplay experience.

If you loved the mindless fun of building a giant ungodly brick of level 1 lasers and parking it directly on top of the enemy's base, you may be in for a disappointment. Skirmish keeps the player on a much tighter leash than Episode 1. Everything from the number of parts to the value of each part to the ratio of weapons to regens is carefully and purposefully regulated by the game itself to keep whatever you build balanced against the enemy. I'm hoping the different naming convention implies what I think it does, that Command and Skirmish are two separate branches for the series, and that both will be allowed sequels in the future.

Or even better, just slap the black and red zones of Episode 1 around the green zones of Skirmish and call it one big game. Let the player cruise around the overworld in an insanely powerful craft if he wants to, grinding enemies for parts. Then have him to whittle that monstrosity back down to something reasonable and balanced for the missions.

After the insane freedoms and excesses of the first game, all this structure can chafe a bit. But if you stick with it, you may find it grows on you. Certainly this one offers deeper gameplay than the first. Whether that increased strategic depth results in increased fun or not is a matter of taste.

ShellCoreCommand responds:

Thanks for the excellent review!
You're right, Skirmish is a spin-off that focuses more on tactics and single battles. Episode 2 on the other hand will be an open world again, continuing the storyline. I hope players will like both despite the differences ^^

[Troll's Rage]

Completely accurate Troll sim.

...in the sense that trolls are stupid, have no control, and never do what you tell them, this game succeeds in being the ultimate troll brawler. Basically it suffers from the same design problems that plague every 2.5d beat 'em up-- vertical movement and attack collision are stacked against the player.

Presumably this is because when they tried testing the game with reasonably wide player attacks, it was "too easy," so they artificially increased the difficulty level by making your attacks never hit when it looks like they should, adding a delay to all your attacks, and giving the AI ranged attacks. The result is a constant struggle, not against intriguing tactical combinations of enemies (though it has those,) but against the game's own internal stupid bullshit.

Maybe I'm being too hard on the big blue Trogg. After all, he has plenty of health, an omnipresent healing mechanic, a variety of attack moves which fill different roles, gorgeous (if delightfully brutish) graphics, a hilarious special attack, plenty of variety as you make your way from left to right, an unobtrusive built-in tutorial, and a perfectly consistent look & feel.

Despite all these good points, though, the muscles in the back of my neck tightened up from the constant frustration of my attacks missing, being too far from the enemy when my attack when off, being too CLOSE to the enemy when my attack went off, having my attack animations canceled by enemy attacks, archers and shamans harassing me with their CHEAP TRICKS while I was trying to EAT...

...

Huh. Maybe the poor control really IS an attempt to make the player feel like a brutish, enraged troll. Frustrating control for artistic reasons? I'm not sure I buy it. Even if that's the case, though, it detracted from my enjoyment of the game, didn't add to it, so I'm not going to reward the developer for it.

Intentional attempt at immersion or not, it just doesn't do it for me. There are better ways to achieve Troll Immersion than by tying one arm behind my back and forcing me to fumble in the dirt, trying to crush fire ants with my awkward, clublike fingers.

Overall, good game, with great production values, but slightly frustrating when it comes to the core mechanics. It gives you a troll's blunted tools, and then asks you to engage in a dance which rewards finesse and fine control. You just don't have what you need to manage the game's environment. I'm sure it's probably beatable, I just don't feel like getting constantly webbed and pelted in the back of the head with arrows for the next five levels to find out.

[One Dimensional Quest]

2D game, 1D graphics.

Very intriguing experimental game. However, I would argue that the "jumping" constitutes a simulation of a second axis of movement, just at a very low resolution. I've pondered something like this before, but it turned out better than I ever had any reason to expect it would. Nice job!

[The Impossible Magic Tric]

That was AMAZING!

Holy shit! I couldn't believe my eyes when the movie finished loading and it knew I was logged in as WarpZone! That was incredible! I've never seen anything like it. I know a magician doesn't reveal his secrets, but I'd really love to see the code for this. Simply incredible. Easily the best trick I've ever seen on Newgrounds!

Oh, and there was some card stuff after it...

[Bullet Chaos]

Casual aesthetics. Hardcore sensibilities. Why? :/

Start with another permutation of simple geometrical vector graphics, add some nice bloom effects and quirky techno muzzak, and a shop full of viable upgrades, and you've got the next great casual defense game, right?

Well, not *quite.*

Spend some time with Bullet Chaos, and you'll see that under the surface, it's got hardcore arcade-style roots, and not in the good way. A good action game rewards skillful gameplay. *THIS* game instead *punishes* certian upgrade combinations.

For example, you could buy different weapons and switch between them, *or* you could install homing auto-turrets in those slots which stack with your current weapon. Sounds like a good idea, right?

Well, not really. Lots of levels have targets you're not supposed to hit. The best auto-turret releases shrapnel when they hit an enemy, which you had better believe cooks off every friendly target on the screen. Then when you blast through the enemy ships spawned DOOM-style from the friendly fire kills, you get a 5 star rating for that level. What? Was I supposed to not shoot them or was that really what you expected me to do all along?

I'm not saying the game is impossible to beat with this strategy, but it *is* impossible to get a good score in some levels with this loadout. And since the penalty for selling weapons is 25% of the price, and it takes about five levels before you really have enough money to buy anything interesting, experimentation is a long, slow, frustrating process.

And if that weren't bad enough, Bullet Chaos likes to hold out on you until the last wave, meaning the first wave in a level is something that all weapon combinations will take out without much trouble, but the final wave reveals that you're not doing enough damage fast enough. It's just one more way Bullet Chaos lets you think you're doing fine, then comes out of nowhere with something you didn't see coming, couldn't prepare for, and now you have to start all the way over from the beginning so you can buy a different weapons loadout. Strategy is developed incrementally over the course of the whole game, but challenges are presented only at the last moment.

It's a time-sink combined with on-the-job training and plenty of failure. I consider this the worst possible way to artificially extend gameplay.

The sad part is, this game has a ton of quality and nuanced gameplay. It's a great engine, with interesting variety to the levels and a ton of unique weapons. The final boss is awesome (once you figure out how to spawn it,) and not too hard. But the bullshit "Nintendo-Hard" difficulty curve ruins it. It could have been much more fun.

I'd like to see this game, same gameplay, only with *casual* scoring rules and failure states. Make it possible to sell weapons at no penalty; at least the un-upgraded ones, so the player can experiment freely. Make it possible to re-play earlier stages for a better score. Put a progress bar at the top so players can see how much longer the current stage is, and spread the difficulty out a bit more over the course of the stage. (Climactic endings are good, but not when they ending is so hard that my success in the beginning is misleading.) Counting down green dots to a true Game Over is pointless, because if you fail once level once, you probably need to start over from the beginning anyway and buy different weapons.

Bottom line: Replace the pass-or-fail surprises with stages that are easy to beat, but challenging to master. Encourage players to re-play earlier levels to suck more points out of them, perhaps with increasing difficulty levels (and score values) every time they beat the stage. Make experimentation easier and reward long-term progress, rather than punishing rookie mistakes.

This is a great game engine, but with poor meta-game planning choices on the part of the developer. By meta-game I mean menus, shops, and everything but the levels. I recommend gamezhero take some lessons from GemCraft and The Space Game, which had great meta-game rules and scoring systems.

Good game... Coulda been great. :/

[Splitty Adventures 1]

Insert coin not to die.

This is basically not a game, but a very elaborate donation button. You'll get as far as stage 3, then you need to get an account and convert your real money into some kinda fake money in order to buy the *entirely necessary* double-split power-up in order to advance. You can't turn 180 degrees with 8 splits. You just can't.

I guess everyone wants to invent the next new business model that looks free but secretly wrings money out of you. I don't think this approach is the next big thing, though. It basically combines all the "surprise you don't actually have the whole game" annoyingess of shareware with the nickel-and-dime-you-to-death annoyingness of MMORPGs, without the positive value-to-the-consumer of either business model. (Making a one-time payment to own the whole game, and being able to show off your lewt to other players, respectively.)

Anyway, there's an actual game lurking underneath the horrible business model. It seems like a novel, but simple casual game with adequate vector graphics, inspired design, and a single innovative and elegant core mechanic. Basically everything a good Flash game could aspire to... and basically what you get for free constantly every day here on Newgrounds anyway. It's just too bad the gamersafe bullshit killed it for me.

I get that the author needs to make money somehow. I can appreciate that it's a balancing act of trying to wring fifty bucks out of a Mochi ad here and there. I get that a combined business model of click-throughs, donations, ads, and optional extras makes sense. I just don't appreciate a game that pretends it's free and then asks for my credit card info part way through.

No, I take that back. Even shareware is fine, as long as it says on the title screen, "this is shareware." What I have a problem with is throwing an impossible challenge at the player, and then burying a menu with the power-up in it, as if to say "Oh by the way if you want to not fail, you'll need 100 GamerGold." I don't even know how much 100 GamerGold costs, and frankly, I don't want to know. This business model frustrates and infuriates me to the point where I'd rather spend $20 on a game whose creators have the guts to just TELL me up front that it's for sale, than to spend fifty cents worth of GamerGold and risk encouraging more of this crap in the future.

You buy into this crap now, a year from now every single game on Newgrounds is gonna have some impossible bullshit level you can't get past without spending money. Think about that.

Based on graphics, gameplay, and length, this game actually is worth a lot more than the 2/10 I gave it. How much more? In order to find out, the author of this game needs to send me 100 GamerGold, 500 GamerPoints, and an apology for wasting my time. Then we can talk real scores for a real game.

Badim responds:

you can beat all game without buying anything. just try harder =)

[Crop Circles]

Y'all can whup them piddlin' varmits, sho' nuff...

Well, last year was a tough one. I get set to plow the fields, n' here comes this big ol' flyin' saucer out of the sky. Chock full a' gen-u-wine extraterrestrials. Little green men. Ugly as you like, and dumber than a sack of hammers. Come down right on top of me. Well, I like t' high-tailed it back to the house as fast as Mr. John Deer could carry me. But I got turned around. Left a big ol' zig-zag path through the fields. I call up the army and the national guard, and they sent out some trucks. Asked me where I wanted 'em. I told 'em to just put 'em anywhere, and we held out for a while. Lost a whole heap of money when they asked me if I wanted to buy a stealth bomber between waves. I said, sure. Told 'em to build it between waves. Come t' find out, their idea of building a stealth bomber is to fly it overhead and just drop a whole bunch of bombs. Lost the whole crop that year.

So, this year, it looked like we was fixin' to do better. Soybeans came in early. Sent the boy out to plow th' fields. All of a sudden, he comes runnin' in the back door, yellin' about aliens. Shit, I thought, they're back again? They about wiped me out last year!

But my boy says, naw, it's okay, pop. On account o' some p'thag'rian theorm. I tole him, this ain't no time fer book learnin', I gotta call for the cavalry, and you git in the cellar. When he finally went down there, I grabbed my shotgun and went out back, ready to face those ornery bastards again.

Well, I get out there, and it's just this big line, like a Z, cut clear across my parcel and leaving a straight path to my house. Just two crop circles in all. There was something strange goin' on, but I couldn't put my finger on it. Then I saw that he boy had already bought a missile launcher and put it right in the middle. I sighed. Them missile launchers, see, they fire slow, so I knew there was no way it could take out all them aliens. But the money was already spent. So I just had to make do. I hunkered down and waited for the first wave.

Sho' nuff, here the martians come, walkin' in a straight line down the path. Make a right turn and cut across the field the long way. And the rocket launcher lays into 'em, but a lot of 'em get through. So then they get to the end of the long zigzag, and all they need to do is make one more right turn, and they can come get me and my family and eat my damn brains again, just like last year.

Then, and I swear to you, this is god's honest truth, the lead alien turns around and marches right back to the first bend of the path! The rocket launcher tore 'em up. The next wave came, and they went back and forth a couple of times, that one piddly rocket launcher lighting into them over and over again as they keep goin' back and forth.

My boy was at my side by this time, jumpin' up and down and tellin' me to build more rocket launchers! I looked real close and I saw now what my boy had done. There wasn't two crop circles, there was the usual number, it's just the boy had stacked 'em on top of each other so it looked like they was all in the same place. This here was a path eight times as long as my entire field from one corner to th' other, and it led the aliens back and forth in front of that same turret over and over again.

We built more rocket launchers. We upgraded 'em all the way. We called in as many stealth bombers as we liked, not that they ever did much. Eventually we come to find out there ain't no end to this game, so after cleaning up on government bounties for a while, we sold the farm and moved down to Florida. Can't say much for the view or the neighbors, but at least there's no goddamned aliens comin' down out of the sky at all hours, interferin' with a man's livelihood.

Oh, and my boy? He's drawin' triangles or some such for NORAD now. Never been more proud to have an egghead in the family.

[Final Defense: Last Stand]

Ambitious design, marred by poor balancing.

Okay, so Matthew did the thing with the map screen and the long-term character advancement. And he created a lot of different unit types to attack you. And he even created a whole bunch of different tactical upgrades you can use in the middle of a stage. So what went wrong? Why isn't this game as popular as, say, GameInABottle's Balloon Invasion, which boasted many of the same gameplay elements?

In a word: execution.

These different gameplay systems worked well together in Balloon Invasion (and later, GemCraft,) because they played off of each other to make the game more fun and more interesting. In Final Defense: Last Stand, most of the gameplay systems are completely useless (unless the level objective requires you to use them.)

GAMEPLAY:
The towers shoot wherever you point and click. Unfortunately, it takes a long time for the shots to reach the enemy. I suspect he is using a Movieclip for each shot (expensive!) and simple HitTests for collision (klunky, and limits the speed of shots!) For better performance, I recommend using good old-fashioned geometry math to do collisions, and BitmapData and CopyPixels or Draw to render graphics to the screen.

Most games, there's a certain amount of flexibility in how the player goes about his job. You can take a certain number of hits, and skilled playing means you can avoid damage. In this game, you ALWAYS take the hits. Always. You're a stationary target, and even if you fire the INSTANT the enemy comes on-screen, they will always get a shot off at you because your bullets are so slow.

This means the player has very little room for error, and no chance to play creatively. There is only one way to win. Superior numbers. There is only one way to get these numbers. Grinding. To buy the first Auto-Repair powerup, you must beat the first stage over and over again.

MAP SCREEN:
In Balloon Invasion, you could pick any level you wanted, but you had to unlock them in order first. In FD:LS, all the levels are available for you right at the start, but trying to play most of them is suicide. Imagine if you started playing a Mega Man game, you picked a stage, and then you immediately died, every time, because you didn't already have the platform item from another stage. To misquote Yahtzee misquoting Winston Churchill: Those who implement open-world gameplay while maintaining a linear difficulty curve deserve neither.

CHARACTER PROGRESSION:
It's neat to be able to buy stuff off a menu. And it's awesome to gradually build up your character's abilities during the course of a game so that you can take on the harder stages. Unfortunately, the only shop items that are persistent from one stage to another are Economy and Auto-Repair. These are both basically buffers-- multipliers that increase a number. They don't drastically alter gameplay or give you the option of combining them in different ways to sneakily achieve gameplay goals. They just make a number go up; arguably the least interesting gameplay change possible.

BUGS:
- Currently, Economy costs 18,000, and no matter how many times I click on it, it doesn't increase the cost or disappear the way Auto-repair did.
- If the level ends while trucks are unloading their troops, all the troops will disembark and stand frozen until you close the buy menu. Could have been worse. At least you don't have enemies firing a million shots if this happens while they're shooting, or something else game-breaking like that.

These kinds of bugs pop up a lot when you insist on using Movieclips for everything. Do yourself a favor, and learn how to use math to keep track of collisions and bitmap programming to draw graphics to the screen. If using AS3, I recommend boning up on the BitmapData class. Your games will become a little more complex to program, but a LOT more stable.

OVERALL:
This is an ambitious attempt, but it falls flat in terms of gameplay. Don't feel too bad. I've been there. Learn from your mistakes and move on! Good luck with your next game. Keep trying. This had potential.

[W & B : Deadly Strategies]

"It's the economy, stupid!"

War & Beyond:Deadly Strategies is a strange little beast. It's perhaps the most "pure" Real-Time Strategy game ever created. Of course, it achieves this by completely removing tactics from the equation. While I realize this was probably done to make the game easier to program, the result is a surprisingly novel gameplay experience.

Basically, you *can not* micro-manage your armies. You can't tell them where to go or which unit to attack. Instead, units on both sides roam about randomly, completely uncoordinated. (And you thought the units in TA were dumb.)

Fortunately, you can give each class of unit a generalized objective, such as to attack enemy units, attack enemy buildings, rush the enemy base, etc. But generally what you'll end up doing is defending your buildings until you can build up an overwhelming force, then launch your attack.

Sustainability is almost impossible to achieve, but if you keep building economics structures packed together as closely as possible, you'll eventually reach a point where you're literally earning money faster than you can spend it. Then you can build 5 or so offensive structures and start mass-producing whichever unit you feel gives you the most bang for your buck. (For me it was probably the Kuburai. Apparently, cutting tanks in half with a sword is not only extremely badass; it's also quite economical.)

*Ignore* the mission briefings when your C.O. tells you to build some big expensive new unit. Most of the time, these new units are too expensive, fire too slowly, or just can't survive very long. Instead, keep churning out cheap units such as the Podas Defense, Rocketmen, or Kuburai.

There's an intriguing "demand surrender" button. It makes sense that if the player can surrender a losing battle, the AI might be willing to do so as well. But since the endgame is the most fun part of any RTS (arguably the explosive payoff for all that tedious base-building,) I hardly ever used it.

Sometimes you'll start a map with forces stacked overwhelmingly against you. That's where the complete lack of discretionary targeting works to the player's advantage. Oh, sure, their forces may overrun your base *initially.* But instead of grinding your base into the dust , half the time they'll drive off again and go back to defending, so you can safely ignore the early skirmishes. The one exception is airstrikes. Air units move fast enough that even random attacks add up, so build cheap anti-air units if you see planes.

I noticed a few maps start with 0$, the objective being to eliminate all the enemy units. Since the player can't build anything, and the player can't directly control his units, it stands to reason that the game designer would have given the player stronger units than the enemy, right? This was an easy intro mission, after all, probably intended to familiarize the player with that faction's units. On a whim, I clicked "demand surrender." Sure enough, the AI did the math and decided there was no way it could possibly win this one. GG, next map!

Later, some 0$ missions become annoying escort missions. In "samurai," I would instruct the titular target to hide at the base while everyone else would attack. (This is basically the only move you can make with $0.) I had to re-do this level 4 times because of random factors beyond my control, such as which units crossed paths first.

Other than that, it's a great experimental game that explores some new territory in terms of gameplay. Of course, no real army would fight like this. But it's a fun game with lots to discover.

I'm giving this game a 10 even though there's plenty of room for improvement, because I was impressed with the game as a whole. It does something unapologetically new, it does it with some degree of style, and it has that kick-ass intro animation. I can't comment on the exe version, but I get the impression these graphics look worse the closer zoomed in you are, because the inconsistancies in drawing style would become more pronounced.

It's a great game, though, and I recommend it!

[Cannon Defense]

Linear and easy, but fairly well-implemented.

What you've got here is a parabolic turret defense game with a single risk-reward schedule. That is, if you kill the enemies, you get points. If you don't, you die. Points can be spent in a shop to upgrade your gun or build defenses.

Rather than divide the game up into levels or waves of enemies, the action here is nonstop. At any moment, you may enter the shop to purchase upgrades. Which upgrade you buy first is a matter of taste, but you shouldn't have too much trouble cobbling together a winning combination.

Most upgrades have a significant impact upon gameplay, and upgrading a stat all the way makes a huge difference in performance. One caveat-- when you buy Max HP, it adds empty bar onto the end of your current health, so don't expect any benefit unless you can afford repairs, too.

The infantry collision bug in earlier versions of this game has been fixed... sort of. Shots still pass through the *body* of a soldier, but as long as they hit the ground modestly close to the target, the target will now die. No more crippling fear that putting more than one point into muzzle velocity will make it impossible to shoot basic foot soldiers.

There are still a few minor bugs floating around. The muzzleflash tends to get stuck on when you fire the gun too rapidly, for example. Sometimes a guy way in the back will die, seemingly at random, when you bomb a cluster of guys in the front. But for the most part, the worst, most crippling bugs seem to have been resolved. Clicking Upgrade while the Upgrade menu is already open, for example, now closes the menu. You no longer need huge splash damage in order to hit a close foot-soldier. I haven't been able to reproduce the bug where the turret build menu stops working, but I'm not sure what caused that one in the first place.

Strangely, I almost found the game more exciting back when it had bugs in it. Survival was harsh, back then, and you actually needed splash. It still leveled off to easy by the time you had all the upgrades, but at least there was a challenging bit in the middle there after the arial units started showing up where you wondered if you were going to make it to the next upgrade.

Now it's just static, linear, and very, very easy. By the time you've got even half of your stats maxed, even the strongest enemies in the game are no match for you. Mind you, I'd be *more* pissed off if the enemies quickly became impossibly powerful, and failure were the only option, but playing forever without losing is just trading frustration for boredom.

I'd recommend adding a definite end, for starters. Maybe the last enemy is a giant, slow mech-walker with tons of health, but he does a ton of damage if he gets close enough to fire. Then at least the game would have a point.

After that, maybe you could add some different scenarios, selectable from the map screen, in which different upgrade paths are secretly the most effective path to victory. That would extend the playtime of the game, but only if the player was likely to lose if they chose poorly.

Oh, also, if each upgrade cost more than the previous one, strategy while selecting upgrades would become more important. Just be careful. As with MMORPGs, the further apart each upgrade is, the more static the gameplay becomes, and therefore the more boring the game is.

Finally, if you do things that make the difficulty more challenging, please, *please* playtest it afterwards to make sure the game is beatable.

Thanks for giving the world another turret defense game. I love these. It still needs some improvement to make it a rich, complex game experience, but this is a good, solid basis for a game.