WarpZone's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[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.

[GemCraft]

Finally, a tower defense game with some finesse!

Every now and then, someone makes a game that's actually deep and well-balanced. It doesn't happen often. Entire genres can rise and be fun and sell a million copies without such a game occurring.

This is easily the best tower defense game I have ever played. I'm not sure it will ever be this good again. The reason is the incredible ammount of depth packed into the game. I don't know where to begin describing the ridiculous number of reward schedules built into the game and the different the ways they fit together, but you can't just breeze through the game oing one thing.

I thought gem-matching was critical until I discovered that it was cheaper to just spawn them whole. Then I couldn't progress, until I noticed how powerful gem-bombs could be when you put some skill points into it. Then I went back and got glowing frames in the first few stages, only to discover that that shelling the enemy into oblivion is too costly in the later stages. The first epic stage Boss kicked my ass over and over again until I learned the foresight to max my Mana Pool early and the patience not to build anything during the last few waves. And when you finally start maxing those top-teir skills, everything else fades into the background as you focus on building a ludicrous arsenal of grade 7 gems. From that point on, it's pure Tower Defense, but the route there is delightfully diverse.

My one complaint was that the most interesting play mechanic (matching gems) goes under-used, since you can buy gems cheaper than you can make them. Don't think of this game as a hybrid between gem-matching Puzzle Game and Tower Defense. Instead, think of the gem combos as a way of optimizing your inventory. It's a means of buffering and condensing your offensive power into a few key towers.

There's also some Amulets, which are pretty much like achievements, except they boost your score, which helps you level up, which means that if you want to learn the techniques you'll need to survive some of the tougher stages in the middle, you'll need to spend a few rounds doing stupid bullshit like building towers you have no intention of using, or using the hotkeys to create and combine a bunch of low-grade gems and gem-bomb them all in the corner, once you're confident your REAL defenses can handle the mobs. So, it's kinda stupid, but it's a layer of the complexity. Remove it and the whole game might fail.

Basically what this game does is give you plenty of options, and then force you to experiment with them, since the optimal technique changes as you level up. I happily invite sequals and rip-offs, because I think there's so much diversity here, further experimentation couldn't dammage the overall quality.

I've played a lot of defense games. Some were fun right off the bat, but got boring once you discovered the "best tower." Others used gimicks to impose challenge artifically. There's none of that here. Oh, sure, there's a few annoyances. Lime looks almost exactly the same as Green. All your best gems might be Red, and then you get a wave of Red enemies. Ctrl+Combine Gems is pretty much pointless unless you're going for an Amulet, in which case it takes all the effort out of it. But the game a whole is so great, I'll gladly work around these problems as I continue to play.

I'm only about 2/3 of the way through, but I can't immagine there being any way for them to screw up the endgame. I mean, the final level could turn out to be some kinda Xeno Tactic bullshit where you need to pick the exact best combination in order to win, but even if they pull that, I'd forgive 'em. The middle of the game is just that good.

(And long!)

[Fanta Dash]

"No fun!" Heh. No, seriously...

'Lo Weeb. Great cartoon. If you're gonna shill, shill sarcastically. I loved everything about the cartoon. The humor, characters designs and voices were all excellent, and the art was great by flash standards. And of course the timing was excellent. But the game at the end is no fun for a couple of reasons:

First of all, the shake-up seems a lot harder than it should be. It's difficult for me to shake it up because the flash window only occupies like 1/12th of my screen and any vigorous mouse movement puts my cursor outside the window. I suppose that's beyond your control, but I don't see why snapping the cursor from one end of the screen to the other in the space of a single screen refresh doesn't shake it up more than... err, none at all. (I have a sneaking suspicion that the countdown timer is based on milliseconds while the shake-up is directly tied to the flash game's refresh rate, which would mean that if Flash starts dropping frames, you lose shake-up time faster than Flash acknowleges mouse cursor position updates. But that's conjecture.) I have pretty good reflexes and the way I've got my mouse set up lets me move the cursor really quickly, but I can never get the meter above 2/3 or so. Every time Flash acknowleges a mouse movement, the bar goes up, then it slowly goes down and then shoots up again, despite the fact that I NEVER stop shaking. In other words, I'm shaking as fast as I can, but Flash is only picking up the shakes occasionally. Seems really bugged. Let's move on.

The other thing is that I can't seem to figure out the gameplay. Once I'm launched, going for raw distance is boring, and the close-to-the-ground game is hard to pick up. The problem is, I can't really EXPERIMENT close to the ground because every time I lose, I need to wait like ten seconds for the stupid "game over" music to play, which if you're trying to experiment with the close-to-the-ground handling, is often longer than it takes to play the actual game. PLEASE, let the player click to skip the game over music.

there should be none of this waiting for a button to appear or lining the cursor up with the button, just a quick lauch, die, restart, launch, die, restart. What it adds in style it more than takes away from gameplay. I realize it may seem really petty for me to bitch and moan about ten seconds of wasted time, and it IS really petty, but since the ammount of gameplay offered here is equally petty I feel I'm entitled to restart at my own pace while grappling with the learning curve. The controls seem quicky and unfamiliar compared to other games of this genre, and I'm finding picking them up more tedious than fun.

Of course everyone else is giving it tens so who am I to argue. Certianly I have no room to talk about form over function after that halloween thing I did. I'll just give this review a rating of 10 and hopefully the evil corporate drones who decide whether or not to invest in one of these virally-marketed flash game dealies won't bother to read all this fine print and will only see the unbroken string of perfect tens. Just between you and me, I figure it's worth about a eight. If I could play it with any degree of precision, or at least practice more than 50% of the time the game is running, it could easily become a nine or a ten. As it is, the cartoon is good enough and long enough that the game basically doesn't matter.

[Pickleman Begins Betatest]

LULZ!

This game neatly splits the NG userbase into two camps:

People who gave it a 10: Savvy (or ancient) gamers. These folks get the reference, or at least are smart enough to recognize a parody when they see one.

People who gave it a low score: Effing nubz.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying I expect the people who visit this website to have ever actually seen a working Atari 2600, but you'd have to be living under a rock not to have read any of those "Worst Games Evar" articles, blog posts, and podcasts that are all over the internet.

What's that? You say you came to NG for the toons, not the games? You're not some gaming geek who can be bothered to research tedious minutea of gaming history just in case it would help you get a joke someday? Okay, then. You're off the hook... that's what I'd say if this wasn't posted on Apirl 1st.

I guess I was able to get two Secret Collects before dying. In the glorious abscence of any sort of feedback or interface whatsoever, I'm going to pretend that means I won the game somehow.

Oooh! For your next game, do Custer's Revenge versus Manos: The Hands of Fate!

[Pico 2]

Heh.

You know, I just realized, PowerPuff Girls kinda works better as a straight superheroes show than Teen Titans.

Happy Liar's Day, everybody! :D

[Pervert Adventure]

Another typical so-called adult so-called game.

If there had been any thought or effort put into this at all, I might have been able to tell myself it was a deconstruction of the hentai genre. But the artist (bafflingly) seems to take this game seriously, and (even more incredibly) some company decided to sponsor this game.

I don't know whose pockets were deep enough to sponsor this garbage, because the ad that got served is in Asianese. That's right. The big company using fancy technology to sponsor this game using rotating ads isn't smart enough to at least serve relevant ads based on what part of the world the request comes from.

Clumsy attempts at commercialism aside, though, this is just a terrible game. The graphics are poor, which means the visual experience isn't titillating, which means it fails as an actual attempt at porn.

As a game, it fails, because it's not fun. Exactly ONE risk/reward schedule which other games have done far better, and the ugly graphics and annoying sound make it impossible to play for more than five seconds.

What bugs me the most about this game is, I can't fathom a motive. I don't mean a motive for the main character to follow as he goes about his para-ogling. I mean I can't figure out what motive the artist had for creating and releasing a game this crappy. Who thinks this game would be a good idea?

(Surely alcohol played a role, but in order to think this game would be a good idea, you'd need to be much too drunk to launch Flash, let alone program in ActionScript.)

The only thing I can think is, unless this was meant as a parody (and it was just such a joyless, bland, and generic parody that I missed this intent,) then it must be the product of an artist desperate to "create adult games" because "adult games are big moneymakers," but so jaded and burned-out that both video games and naked women no longer excite him. If such a man exists, he has my eternal pity.

I can only hope that this game started out as a good idea, but was then killed in committe by executive meddling. Maybe it's even the result of a wild frat party at FullSail, with everyone involved in its production was totally wasted at the time.

I'm pretty sure it's not a "look what shit I can make pass" experiment like the crap Kitty Krew churns out, because you can tell time and effort went into this. I just don't understand WHY time and effort went into it. It would be nice to get a response from the author, but I doubt the speak English. Or any language. Seriously, this is the kind of game a small lizard or frog would write, if they had only a vague understanding of what the human concepts of "porn" and "game" are.

[Strategy Defense 4]

The turn-based games were better.

3 paths is slightly better than 1 path, but this is not enough. It's too easy to win. Simply commit all soldiers to one path, and always use the most expensive unit. Automatic win.

Listen: The game-play is not too EASY. It's too SIMPLE. The player needs more choices. And the choices must be more meaningful.

Here's some ideas: Forget the grid completely. 360 degree movement. Let the player direct the movements the soldiers. Put power-up items on the map. Not treasure items. Items like an extra SPECIAL attack, or extra soldiers, or double the strength of the soldier who collects it.

This game is too linear. You must create non-linear, asymetrical game-play. There should be more objectives than just attacking the enemy castle. And winning these objectives should help you attack the enemy castle.

Keep trying. But please, add complexity!

[Second Wave]

Not bad.

I liked the graphics, music, and style. The gameplay was also pretty cool, kinda novel and unique. The control started to wear thin after a while, though. It felt too floatly, like I didn't really have full control over my movements.

Is there any particular reason why you couldn't snap the player position directly TO the mouse position as long as the mouse position is inside the bubble? I think that would make the game more playable and give the player more agency over his movements. Just a thought.

jacksey3k2 responds:

I was wondering if they might be a bit weird. I was torn between floaty, and fixed movment. Ill have to have a fiddle and see how it feels.