WarpZone's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Gemstone Hunter]

Nice concept. Too bad it's an arcade game.

The graphics, sound, and gameplay mechanics are all excellent. Unfortunately, the arcade paradigm ruins the game. You can only play for a minute or two before dying, and then all your progress is lost. The only long-term goal is to get a higher score than everybody else, and the sheer number of other gamers competing with you online means that even this goal is impossible.

I played it once, then I quit forever after I died. Maybe if the game had some sort of story mode where you do this snake-eating stuff in several different arenas, interacting with new elements, leveling up your snake, acquiring new skills, winning persistent awards for accomplishing certain meta-goals (I.E. Achievements,) and building up towards some sort of climactic final goal (even if it is just a local high score for each stage, like in GemCraft,) if the game had these things, it would be worth playing more than once, and for longer periods of time.

As it is, it's pointless unless you only have like 30 seconds or a minute in which to game. Which might make it suitable for a cell phone game, except that the screen is so frigging big. The concept is good, the surface is good, but the backbone of the gameplay is flawed. A throwaway arcade game submitted to the wrong portal.

[Castle Run]

Easy, but surprisingly fun to work through...

I really enjoyed this game for some reason, even though the risk/reward schedules made the game pitifully easy. I think the reason is because you're always learning a new trick.

Each room is unique, and presents a unique challenge. It doesn't matter that each individual challenge is fairly easy, and all the threats are obvious. You just need to pause and look at the new room for a couple of seconds, and that simple moment of evaluation is all it takes for the magic to happen. Each room demands a different approach, and that novelty alone goes a long way.

This game exposes something that toddlers playing with plastic rings know automatically, but it's taken the video game industry over ten years to actually put into words: simple problem-solving based on pattern recognition is what makes video games fun, and unlockable content is a potent reward.

As long as your game has those two things, nobody will care if the challenge is trivial, the game takes all of ten minutes to play, and the control is obnoxiously floaty. They'll still play it once, and have fun doing it. Add Achievements and some semblance of challenge, and you could rule the unverse.

[mission to Saturn]

Awkward control + sudden, deadly threats = no fun.

I'm all right with dodging incoming fire, or taking out enemies before they have a chance to unload their deadly payloads, or collecting some things while dodging others, but these cliffs are just bullshit, okay? By the time you know there's a cliff coming, it's already too late. You got hit.

There are many ways to make a game challenging. This way was just cheap.

[Blueshift]

Sloppy, rough, and shoddy, like a used tank.

I think I get what the author was going for, here. First of all, ignore the fast, light-armored fighter. She's a waste of skin. What you want is the big honkin' tank.

This isn't a curtain-fire game about weaving between enemy shots. It's not even a game like Einhander where your ability to grab, wield, and maintain the right weapons loadout is key to success. This is just a balls-to-the-wall merc run. Your objective is to dish out more damage than you receive, so you can auger your pock-marked, smoking gunship into a health powerup just before your hull comes apart at the seams.

Unfortunately, it's very difficult to get into that mindset, although the rough & gritty graphics and sounds are a hint. The risk/reward schedules here are quite different from the shooters you may be used to. Getting shot all to hell isn't a risk so much as a fact of life.

I suppose if you can master the fiddly little split-second shield, you could block a lot of shots, but if you don't have great timing skills, you'll need to develop them. I'm not a DDR or Guitar Hero player, myself, so I couldn't hack it, and this game *really* put me in the mood for a standard sh'mup.

I might come back to this later if I'm bored and take another crack at it. But really, it's just a totally different game than the genre conventions would suggest. This is not a traditional Sh'mup. This is a damage-soaking sh'mup. You're flying a tank in every respect. Try to keep that in mind.

[Pandemic II]

Lacks sufficient feedback mechanisms.

This is a really cool sim and all, and as an Edutainment title, it sure teaches the player a lot of symptom terminology. But it's not very much fun to play as a game.

The main problem is, the game lacks proper feedback mechanisms to inform the player as to what's going on. This stuff could be happening at random, and a lot of it probably is, but if I don't have any way of knowing it. I have no clue why I earn evolution points at a given rate or how a low visibility rating helps me.

Is low visibility only good at preventing the initial detection? Infection seems straightforward enough, but does "the government started killing rats" mean rats no longer work as a vector in that country? Or do one or two rats still slip through, as in real-life, and bite someone, regardless of the government's best efforts?

Abstracting complex real-world events down to numbers is fine, all computer games need to do that. But further abstracting the numbers into colorful textual descriptions just makes the interface too nebulous. I understand how to click all the buttons, that part of the interface is super. It's just that I have no clue what clicking any particular button will DO. I mean, what they REALLY do, in terms of gameplay.

What does "Almost undetectable mean?" Is "Spotted in America" different from "Comes to America?" How deadly is "Very deadly?" I chose every deadly-sounding teir III and IV attribute I could afford, but it still only filled the meter 1/3 of the way up. If they would just show me the XP cost and the ammount of Visibility and Lethality, as *raw numbers,* maybe I'd have a chance as a gamer. But as things are, there's not enough feedback to develop a successful strategy.

Even with zero visible symptoms, they still notice me on the third day. Even with zero deaths, they still seal up their borders and pour their GNP into developing a vaccine for me. WTF?

I tried being highly infectious and resistant and spreading only through obscure vectors like rats and air. I was able to turn the whole world red in this manner, and I even developed immunity to the vaccine, but then I stopped getting evolution points, so I couldn't evolve any deadly symptoms. After watching my 1ep sit there motionless for a few weeks, I quit the game and tried again.

I tried being as deadly as possible and as stealthy as possible, but that led to what seemed like slower evolution (or maybe it just felt slower because the other build path was cheaper, I dunno,) and I did mannage to kill some people, but then the vaccine worked and I couldn't spread any further. They don't say Game Over or anything, they just tell you that you're pwned and the game keeps running.

(Madagascar is fucking cheap, BTW. They close their borders at the drop of a hat, and even Moisture Resistance IV + Waterborne isn't enough to get you across the ocean.)

As intriguing as this concept is, I just don't feel motivated to play the game, because I have no idea what I'm doing. Some kinda particles or other effect would be nice to show how exactly our virus is spreading from nation to nation. This would make it easier to see at a glance which tactics work better than others.

I also don't understand why the tutorial had to be on YouTube, which means it's "No Longer Availible" for some reason. Which is odd, because you can still play it and you get sound, but the screen is too dark to really see what's going on. Would it kill Blips to type all that up and put it on a website? Or better yet, directly into the swf?

Ultimately, playing the game feels pointless. Much like the original Sim City, you'll think you are doing well, but then all of a sudden, player growth drops off with no real visible cause, so you can't see your glorious plan through to completion. Maybe the "realistic" mode is better, but I've seen the "fast" version of the game lock itself up into unwinnable states, so why would I want to try playing the game even slower?

Great concept. But the gameplay just isn't fun. It needs better feedback to the player.

[Space Wing]

A great, if short, curtian-fire/collecting shmup.

I'm not sure what is meant by "90's sensibilities." The graphics and music all feel reminiscient of the 80's, except for the fact that it's all vector and not pixelly. Perhaps it refers to shmups that came out in the 90's and weren't availible to American audiences right away.

In any case, this flash sucessfully marries curtian-fire gameplay with cheesy retro ambiance, with the ever-popular "level-up your weapons systems between levels by spending experience points" dynamic that's become so popular with the Flash format.

Collecting the little score chips that drop when enemies die is important because that's how you level-up. It took me a while to figure out that multipliers come from collecting so many chips in a row with no misses. Levelling up automatically funnels all nearby chips into your ship, but this doesn't happen often enough for you to really plan to make strategic use of it. It might be a good reason to max speed first, though, since this makes it easier to collect chips.

I managed to get through the game upgrading vulcans, speed, missiles, bombs, and HP in roughly that order. I'm not sure if a bomb-centric levelup strategy is viable or not. Playing the game is great fun, tactically, with waves of enemies that require different tactics. Some foes require you to pull back so your spread vulcans get maximum coverage. Some work best if you pull in close to maximize dammage to a single large target. And some simply require you to stop firing and concentrate on dodging.

The bosses are also great, and every bit worthy of the moniker "curtian-fire." The generous health meter gives you plenty of wiggle room, especially if you choose to level it up. Hardcore shooter fans, of course, will try to get through the game without ever taking a hit, and from what I could tell, that is in fact possible. Just not easy.

The only things I could possibly ask for would be more stages, perhaps some sort of Achivements (especially clearing stages without taking a hit,) better graphics, or some sort of story. All of these things are unneccessary, though. I had more fun with this romp than with Drakojian Skies and Star Serpent Sigma put together. This is pure shooter bliss. CLOUND knows his genre well, (he had me at "Touhou",) and I can't wait for his next game! :)

[Star Serpent Sigma]

I would have prefered keyboard controls.

I loves me a good sh'mup. :) And this game has a lot of the neccessary ingredients to make a great classic shooter. It features great, epic music, sleek CG spaceships, and collectible power-ups. Unfortunately, it makes some compromises between classic shmup gameplay and Flash expectations, and this ends up spoiling the experience.

It starts off very nicely. You choose your ship's weapons loadout from a menu that reminds me of one of my favorite shooters of all time, Axelay. After that, it's a single very classy pane of backstory in the form of a mission briefing, including the most epic description of a black hole I've ever encountered. One click from there, and you're into battle.

And throughout most of the stage, the gameplay stays good. A few sweeping mouse gestures are sufficient to dodge enemy fire, then dart back into position to fire at the enemy drones. Ships come at you in waves and feature various movement patterns. A few enemies fire back (from off-screen, even!) but I'm happy to report that enemy shots travel slower than your ship, and enemy ships travel slower than your shots, so there's no "that's not fair" drama.

In fact, this game smartly avoids most of the mistakes you will often see with sh'mups implemented in Flash. Collision seemed perfect, the first stage was easy but not too easy, and the handfull of overlapping risk/reward schedules (powerups, enemies, and bullets) were intuitive and responsive, with the sheilds giving you *just* enough leeway to make a few mistakes without having to start over. I'm not sure how comfortable I am with the invisible line you can't cross in the middle of the screen, but it wasn't a deal-breaker. (And I know from expeirence that proper collision detection with a full-screen boss is be a non-trivial problem to tackle in Actionscript, so I can see how a half-screen approach like this would be a tempting shortcut.)

Unfortunately, Star Serpent Sigma drops the ball when it comes to the first boss, for a couple of reasons.

First of all, when the boss kills you, all your powerups disappear. So one hit pretty much wipes out your chances. I would have liked to see the powerups scatter from your ship so you can re-collect them, or perhaps a "memory" system that keeps track of your maximum power level accumulated during the stage, and when you take hits, it reduces your weaponry, but when you die, you would respawn with the ship fully powered-up again to the level you were at. This is a matter of taste and varies from shmup to shmup, and it wasn't the main issue here so I won't say much more about it.

Another minor quibble was that the boss's charge-up effect for the beam weapon was very subtle. I didn't notice it until it hit me the first time, and after I did notice it, it was hard to tell just by looking at it how close to full-charged the beam was. Some other games have had very explicit visual cues for this, in the past... but I was able to get the hang of it, after a while.

The most urgent issue I had with the boss was, when dodging the cross-fire from those mini-turrets, I would usually move the mouse off the edge of the flash window and click on the web page. :( I quit playing then, because it kept happening, and I realized the game would probably be full of places where my instinct would be to dodge quickly, and the delayed-reaction mouse interface would cause the same thing to happen again and again.

Ultimately, I think it was a bad idea to use the mouse at all. I realize menus in Flash are much easier to do with a mouse, and that going froma mouse-menu to a WASD game is awkward. However, a more graceful solution would be to make everything, even the menu, keyboard-driven. It's hard to do, but I've done it before in a game, and the cohesion and classic feel to the control was worth it IMHO.

Also, the boss would have been AWESOME, if instead of the invincible arms over the core, it had lots of parts you could break one by one.

It's probably too late to implement all of this NOW, but consider it for future games. :)

[The Big Fat Musical Box]

Woot! It works now!

I don't have iTunes and I was viewing this from a Windoze PC, but this version seems to perform as-advertized as long as you have Flash Player installed. Awesome stuff. :)

For an encore, why not leverage this new technology into some sort of web-based media empire? :P

FatKidWitAJetPak responds:

Hmmm.... A web based media empire... interesting.

[Elite Forces:Conquest]

Arbitrary build paths muddle the gameplay a bit.

"Ambitious" is a good word to describe Elite Forces: Conquest. It's a hybrid of turret defense and tower defense, with a slight twist: your hero character aims and shoots on his own. This takes aiming out of the equation, but still allows you to target individual mobs who slipped past the towers.

There are several characters to choose from, an arsenal of man-portable weapons, and a nice skill tree for character advancement. Despite all those features, however, the main character doesn't have much impact on gameplay.

You'll mostly end up moving him to a good ambush spot and leaving him there as a turret. Every once in a while, you might suicide-bomb a cluster of enemies, but for the most part, there's very little your hero can do if you don't play the turret game well.

It takes longer than usual to figure out which turrets are useful in which situations, mostly because each upgrade of each tower has different, almost random stats. You'll put a long-range turret in between two paths and upgrade it, only to discover that the range shrinks and it's suddenly a point-defense turret. Rapid-fire turrets suddenly become one-hit wonders that take ages to reload. This robs the player of agency and makes tactical gameplay almost impossible.

A good game is easy to learn but challenging to master. This game is just difficult to understand. Badim, if you're reading this, the sheer amount of cool stuff you've packed into this game is awesome, but you need to arrange it more carefully to create a cohesive whole. The player needs to understand which upgrades are good and which upgrades are a waste of time BEFORE he buys them. Here are my suggestions on how to better balance the game:

- An upgrade should only ever INCREASE one or more of the attributes. (Range should NEVER shrink. An upgrade should NEVER be slower than the previous model.)

- Each gun should have a general theme, and stick with that theme across all the upgrades. (For example, one type of gun starts off long-range, and continually gets longer. One gun starts out short-range but with splash, and this keeps increasing.)

- If you want specialized guns for specific roles, that's fine, but make them OPTIONAL alternative build paths. (For example, the fire tower could be short range and splash, but with an alternate branch that increases range more than power.)

- When balancing the guns, consider dammage-per-second. Also consider how many enemies are likely to overlap at once, when deciding how important Splash is. (You could run some test cases in Flash. For instance, run 100 of each type of enemy past each turret and have an extra meter that totals up the dammage.)

- I like the fact that some turrets increase the hero's stats and other towers' stats, but I feel like this aspect is over-emphasized. (The only way I could succeed in the later levels was to build an obscene ammount of stat-boosting towers. The game slowed down because I had like 100 towers, but I was able to kill 100% of enemies with machinegun and frost aura.)

In general, you have a lot of great ideas here, but they don't combine well to make up a cohesive whole. You need to give the player a sense of "agency"-- a feeling that he is in control over his own fate. Part of that means making sure he can understand what he's doing before he does it. Otherwise it's just lots of failure and experimentation until he stumbles across the one uber tower combination.

Your game is difficult, but it is not challengeing. A challenging game gives the player just enough knowlege and resources that he knows what he has to do and a little bit of how to pull it off, and he will learn more as he practices. A difficult game just kicks you in the balls over and over again until you stumble across the most optimal playstyle. Challenging games are fun. Difficult games are just frustrating.

I do admire the ambition that went into this. It just needs balancing, and a little bit more structure.

Badim responds:

tnx man! hard to add more, but next games, i hope, will be without any of this mistakes above.
My most big mistake was messing with Upgrades and Specialties =( And in order to clean up that mess, i will do mass re-balancing of all towers, but that is only for enxt chapter, witch ones i hope will be in next month.
again, tnx for writing your feedback!

[Xeno Tactic 2]

More constant failure.

Xeno Tactic 1 was frustrating because there was only one way to win. You literally *needed* to kill every enemy, *and* build the optimal pattern of anti-air guns in order to beat the last level. Was it challenging? You bet. Was it fun? Fuck no.

So now we have a sequal. XT2 abandons the "sandbox" model of gameplay in favor of a more traditional path-based game. Unfortunately, the same design philosophy once again rears its ugly head: There is only one correct answer. And the game doesn't give you anything to work with.

There is one specific combination of turrets that will get you through each level. There is no skill involved. Just dying over and over again until you can work out the magic combo.

People keep saying "XT1 was more fun." I don't believe that. I think people *remember* XT1 as being fun, but everyone bitched about the gameplay back then, too.

The sad truth is, antebios is just fucking hardcore. He demands perfection from his players. He will punish you over and over again for not reading his mind. If that sounds fun to you, enjoy Xeno Tactic 2.

Me? I'm gonna go play GemCraft again.