WarpZone's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[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.

[Defense of Mochiads]

Not a defense game. No ads. Otherwise fine.

This is a solid effort from an up-and-coming flash developer. It's not really a defense game. It's more of a side-scrolling shooter with advancement elements taken from MMORPGs. The gameplay works well, mechanically, though there is still room for improvement.

The only real glitch I could see was with the health bar. It was larger than the frame for it and I couldn't die. I assume the health is expressed as an integer, game tried to subtract a higher number from the health than was there, it went lower than zero, and as a result the integer value wrapped around to the highest possible value and now I can't be killed. Try expressing the health as an integer that can include negative numbers, and instead of

if (health==0){ gameOver();)

use

if(health <= 0){ health = 0; gameOver(); }

That should prevent that kind of problem from re-occurring, if it's caused by what I think it is.

Overall, this is a solid early effort. I'd like to see enemies that do different things based on their appearance, difficulty that advances automatically, more stuff going on at once (good things to collect, not just bad things to avoid,) more levels, bosses, and generally more content. Also, it's a good idea not to split up the control between the keyboard and mouse if the keyboard already uses two hands.

This is great for an early game, though. We all start with tutorials. I look forward to seeing what Sparkplug90 brings us in the future as he hones his craft.

Sparkplug90 responds:

thx for the help i found the issue and i fixed it please try the game now

[Grey-Matter]

An incredible game, but ill-suited to this format.

This game wants to be on Xbox Live. Unfortunately, I'm accessing it from a mac, so not even FlashJoystick can help me. (My Nyko airflow was a bust, too.) I tried playing it a bit with the arrow keys, but even with judicious use of the shift key, it's just not happening for me. You absolutely *need* an analogue stick to make these kinds of precision turns.

That aside, this game is incredible. Surprisingly evocative techno music (Is this techno? Is it even legal for techno to BE evocative...?) heightens the mood in the void left by grey geometric visuals. Enemies are diverse and plentiful. Advancement happens at a breakneck pace, sometimes to a fault.

The most obvious thing this game brings to the table is the "ram the enemies" play mechanics. I don't know if I'd call it an anti-shooter. In my mind, an anti-shooter would involve collecting all the bullets, or perhaps managing an armada of weak enemies as they try to wipe out one powerful attacking ship. Maybe a better term would be a-shooter? A ram-'em up? I dunno. But anyway, your objective is simple, to ram the enemies before they can fire at you, or sometimes to dodge around their always-engaged natural defenses in order to hit them. There's probably a fine art to using boosts and slows that I was unable to master with the 4-direction movement offered by my keyboard. As far as I was able to progress, I found the game constantly dishing out new enemy types with new hazards.

And let's talk about progression. When you die, you cook off every enemy and bullet on the screen, an interesting choice, but due to the amount of skill involved in this game, it seems fair, almost compensating for your loss of a precious life by letting you skip to the next wave.

The star of the show has got to be the innovative "Trinity attack." Like everything else, I always had trouble zeroing in on an enemy using only the arrow keys. I'd often miss the enemy I was trying to tag, or else blast through two enemies at once, making a really narrow triangle for myself. But when it did work, it was incredibly satisfying, and I could see enjoying it very much with an analog stick.

I can't speak to the length, difficulty curve, character progression, or endgame, because I didn't make it that far. But this game has all the earmarks of being an instant classic. If only there were a way to release this game on XBLA. Oh, hey, there's that Wii console. That has an analog stick, doesn't it? Maybe you could look into that.

It's awesome to see a game this fresh on Newgrounds, but at the same time, it really doesn't play to the strengths of Flash (and the web) as a platform. This game desperately wants to live on a console, where EVERYONE has an analog stick and EVERYONE uses the same hardware and operating system.

Thanks for bringing us this gem, Bluebaby. I wasn't able to enjoy it as it was intended to be, but I know quality when I see it. I have a sneaking suspicion that I am missing out on a damn good game.

[Warzone Tower Defense]

Very interesting, solid, deep TDG. Needs an end.

I liked this game a lot. It's still not my favorite turret defense game, but it's among my top 5. What I liked most was probably the combination of small tile size, generous unit ranges, and large, diverse maps. I had to restart a few times because the game DOESN'T LET YOU READ THE UNIT DESCRIPTIONS before you build your defenses for the first time, but the units themselves are very simple and straightforward.

Once you notice the similarities to Xeno Tactic, you'll figure out that five seconds is plenty of time to throw down some walls and a couple of machine guns and start building the winding intestinal path-of-most-resistance from the last ground unit's spawn point to your base.

The difficulty curve here is impeccable. Early stages are hard if you just build a few isolated turrets, but become very easy once you get a strategic maze up and running. Each unit has its own tactical advantages, and upgrading is costly, but efficient enough to be worthwhile. (Twice the damage for less than twice the price!) Enemy units get stronger with each wave, including some very powerful bosses, but the increase is so gradual and steady that you never actually experience a "that's not fair!" moment until somewhere around level 120 (my, time flies!) when the gradually-growing armored column finally starts making progress through your maze faster than your defenses can dish out punishment.

And that's the ultimate flaw in this game. You're fighting the tide. You can't win, ever, no matter how long you play. Worse, it's raw statistics, not skill, that dictates how far along any player can get before eventually being overtaken. Pretty much anyone can get to wave 100, and literally no one can make it much further than that. The tools you have to work with simply do not provide for that possibility.

At least Xeno Tactic (and, for that matter, Desktop Tower Defense) gave you a goal, even if that goal was completely unreachable except through the most fiddly borderline-cheating maze-manipulation and the one specific build order that would net you enough profit to afford enough air defenses to wipe out that final wave of super-fighters. In this game, there's no bullshit final wave weeding out all but the most anal-retentive defenders, but there's also no goal, period. I would have liked to see an endgame. "See how far you can get" is best reserved as a personal, optional goal for players who have achieved everything else the game has to offer. It should not be the game's only goal.

That aside, this game had a lot to offer. I loved the quick gameplay, long unit ranges, and incredibly diverse number of possible build combinations. I would have liked to see some more upgrade options, but more than anything this game needs some Achievements. Victory at level 100 on the first map unlocks the second map. Maybe tack on a story mode.

To the author: even if it's just a little "Congratulations, you won!" pop-up when you hit level 100, that still goes a long way towards making the game as a whole feel more satisfying.

See also: Bloons Tower Defense 3 for a case study in adding level-specific win states to an otherwise simple TDG, or Gemcraft for a great example of how meta-gaming goals such as Achievements and Player-Managed Risk can make score-maximization much more rewarding than just mere survival.

Thanks for a well-designed Turret Defense game. If only I had a reason to keep playing it!

[Aether]

Totally worth the obscure learning curve.

A game was submitted
where nothing quite fitted,
into the game industry mold.

And although the logo
did boast pixel mojo,
I was kind of dropped into it cold.

For even though these
mouse-gestures and keys
were familiar and easily used,

By degrees and fractions,
the game's interactions
left this newbie player confused.

My only invectives
involved quest objectives
which at times did seem quite obscure

Although this game's sleek,
Excessive mystique
can cause a game's focus to blur.

Or such was my thinking
my heart sadly sinking
as I questioned each NPC.

My mouse set to clicking,
My monster, clouds licking--
I thought that I needed a key!

For I had been trained
by previous games
to care for them more than I aught.

And though it was boring,
I kept on exploring,
with my gastro-cosmonaut,

I needn't have troubled
with all those text bubbles,
because at the height of my swearing,

I learned there's no worries
about rock backstories--
They are nothing more than red herrings!

Each talkative rock,
whether happy or sad,
is just part of the backdrop!
When I learned, I was glad.

Like most button-hunts,
this puzzle's mechanical.
Once you learn all the stunts,
it's much less tyrannical.

I started to sneer
and soon swelled with pride,
for I'd learned to steer
My Lovecraftian ride.

It's about licking, mostly:
Moons, crystals, and blobs.
A Cthulhu-esque Yoshi
meets Calvin and Hobbes.

This game's quirky fun,
novel and mind-bending.
And nothing and no one
prepared me for that ending!

So this game earns my ten.
'Tis a romp without equal!
Now I lay down my pen...
to dream of a sequel.

Bluebaby responds:

Best review Evar!
Gold star!

[My new room 2]

Scene creators are dull... why not make it a game?

I was impressed by the sheer amount of content and customizability, but I would have liked to see more interactivity. How about pets that move around on their own? And interact with stuff in their environment?

All you really need to do is add some goals, and this could become a game. You know, something like Viva Piñata.

Basically, once you add something to the room, it should do something. I liked how the dogs barked if you clicked on them, but it could have gone much deeper than that. I'm not saying it has to go as far as a tamagotchi, where the pet poops all the time and can die if you don't feed him, but some semblance of autonomy would be nice. Inanimate objects such as furniture could have stats you could do stuff when you click on them, or maybe give you some kinda "style bonus" if you coordinate the room well. Or have objects that, when combined, interact with each other. Maybe when you combine a TV with a VCR, they level up into a home entertainment system.

I dunno, I'm just tossing out ideas, here. My point is, I like my games to have a goal, even if there's no direct impetus to achieve that goal. A game doesn't need to contain violence to be entertaining, but I do expect some form of interactivity.

It's great that you've taken a paper doll and ported it to the computer. But why stop there? Interactivity is much less difficult to add to a game than additional content. Just a few click events... a few checks when dropping an item to see if a corresponding item already exists... some booleans to track flags long-term, and maybe an integer to display a score or money or some other metric of player progress.

I realize it was never your intention to create a game, but this is SO CLOSE. Seriously. You've got tons of content here. Take the extra step and make it interactive. Or at least add a chat client (much harder to do!) so other players can see your creations.

[Shadez: Black Operations]

Airstrikes are a pain in the ass to control.

Another war game where units advance from left to right across a 2D field. This version features modern military units, which means that among other things, almost everyone has a ranged attack and moves slower than they can shoot. This actually leads to a strategically deep game... or it would, if the interface didn't get in the way of airstrikes.

You see, every time you launch an airstrike (something you will need to do constantly at the start of all later levels in order to protect your troops,) it switches back to the unit build menu for no apparent reason. This means you need four clicks to launch your next missile (airstrike menu, build missile, fire missile, select target.) when really one or two clicks would suffice if it locked on to the nearest target, started building your next missile automatically, and it stayed on the airstrike menu until the player decided to change it.

Apaches seem to serve no purpose except to attract enemy AA gun fire, unless you have a fortune to spend on ground bombardment. I guess the developer expects me to just keep spamming troops as my old ones die, but that's always felt wrong to me. This game gives you a slim fighting chance of protecting your units, but then immediately takes it away again with an interface that, for some reason, really wants me to distract me from micromanaging my anti-air missiles so I can build tanks in the middle of a fight.

The graphics and ambiance are good, and the gameplay has potential, but the menu glitch really ruins it for me. Maybe I'm doing it wrong. Maybe I was expected to build apaches to take care of the kamikaze planes for me, and maybe you're supposed to drop a hundred g's for a Shock & Awe bombardment at the start of every mission. (Which my gut tells me is a good way to run out of money over time.) I honestly don't feel like starting all over again just to find out.

Fix the menu glitch so I feel like I'm in charge of deciding when it's time to build units and when it's time to call in airstrikes. Then we can talk.