WarpZone's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Kingdom of Machines]

Complex, fast game engine; weak gameplay.

Problem: Scrounging for ammo is annoying, mostly because you need a lot of it and the easiest enemy to kill (the blade-swingers) is also the most tedious because it takes 3 hits.

Solution: Make the blade-swingers weaker or make ammo more plentiful.

Problem: The special weapons use so much ammo, you're basically penalized for any experimentation at all. What could have been a fun and novel collections of gadgets ends up being one gun and three keys.

Solution: Make the special weapons cost less to fire. Double or even quadrupe the max ammo meter. Don't worry, we'll still want to keep finding extenders for it.

Problem: In theory, the infinite maps mean infinite replayability. In practice, they're just big confusing collections of rooms with no rhyme or reason.

Solution: Use a more advanced map generating algorithym. Many exist online. A mini-map would have done wonders for navigability. And if the different squares on the mini-map lit up as you explored them, it would be an extra incentive, especially if the game kept track of your progress.

Problem: General lack of human interest. Plot, characters, and setting are all extremely bland.

Solution: Add Music! More than one townsperson! Have grandma say things other than "Go," and "Stop." Maybe granny's a tinkerer and you need to take the boss cores to her in order to make a new gun attachment. Maybe the bad guy didn't kill everybody, but kidnapped them for some neferious purpose. Clearing dungeons could mean extra NPCs show up in town, and thank you with powerups. At least the boss talked to you, but even this could have been more made interesting by adding a few twists and turns to the dialogue.

Problem: Combat is BORING.

Solution: Maybe enemies that actually aim at you? And attempt to dodge your attacks somehow?

Problem: Player's tactical options are extremely limited.

Solution: Diagonal movement, the basic attack could slash in an arc instead of just hitting what's directly in front of the player. Combined with enemies that actually track and shoot at you, and a gun with plentiful enough ammo to actually be a formidible weapon, you could have had all kinds of nuaunced realtime combat going on here. You know how, in Halo, there are different "best guns" for different situations? There's no reason you couldn't do something like that, just because it's a 2D game.

Problem: You didn't realize it's not fun. =(

Solution: That hurts. I been there before. I made that terrible witch game. You should have done a nice long beta test on NG Alphas and gotten some feedback while you were still in the early prototype stages. People could have told you stuff to add, and complained about what they didn't like. If you had a deadline, or you were under NDA, then you can disregard this comment. But if you were making this game by yourself, for yourself, there's no excuse for a lack of beta testing! NG,MAG (at the top of this page, on the right side of the orange menu) makes it SO EASY!

[Defend Your Temple 2]

Good fun. Add golems! :D

Any game that could have had golems in it, would be greatly improved by the addition of golems, IMHO.

[Alienware Hyperblast]

Looks great but it's hard to steer

I was never really into drift racers, the closest I've come was Mario kart, but even there you at least had some choice over your handling characteristics. Basically I found this game frustrating because I was always stuck with my nose in the wall. You can't see the track unfolding in front of you into the distance, so there's really no way of telling how long a turn is gonna last or how sharp it will be unless you pay more attention to the map than the road. I liked how the weapons get more powerful the more you collect, but I never got close enough to the leaders for it to matter.

The graphics were nice, especially flashy bloom effect in the intro, but the more I played the less fun I had. Not for novice racers.

[(outdated) Trevors Quest]

Uhhh! Uhhh! Uhhh! Uhhh!

I guess you ripped some great sprites and commadeered a great franchise, but the game quickly became too annoying to play. The control is stiff, which I suppose is typical for Castlevania games, but it could still use a little more freedom of movement.

It's the sound that kills this game and makes me not want to bother playing it ever again. I'm talking about the constant, rythmic, extremely loud Zombie groans. They compeltely ruin the ambiance and it makes no sense to have them in there.

The game seemed slow even after I set the quality to Low. If you're using Flash CS3, learn how to use AS3 and Bitmaps instead of Movieclips, it'll make your sprite-based game run MUCH faster. If you're using an older version of flash, you can at least force the quality to LOW in the code so the player doesn't have to do it.

There was some good here. I always did like SOTN. I think the spinning blades are a cool addition. I think the MP3 of the song Tragic Prince would have been more apropriate, though.

Spawn777 responds:

Thanks for the long review lol, I made Trevor move kinda slow, and jump not extremely high, if thats what you mean. I have removed the zombie sounds, since you and someone else have said to have it removed. And, im gonna see if I can fix that lag problem, and I dont know how to reduce quality automatically, thats why I informed people to lower it. And yeah, I love tragic prince. Im gonna check it out, and see how the song is with the game, and ill change it if I find tragic prince more fitting. And thanks for the review.

[Hero RPG]

Nice RPG, but please simplify the interface!

The game's not as approachable as it could be. I need to move my hands all over the place like an octopus just to engage in combat. It's like hit space, grab the mouse, attack, let go of the mouse. Move in, hit space, grab the mouse... it involves too much taking your focus off of the game and looking at your controls. It breaks immersion.

If you didn't need to aim (I.E. Attack button just attacks whatever's in front of you, like Zelda) )or if there was no need to hit space (I.E. if you were ALWAYS aiming and strafing at the same time while in the field, ) it would make simple combat much more immediate and intuitive. There's no need for a Shift key whatsoever, just make it so that walking over the loot collects it.

In town the shop menus are relatively well done, but dialogue feels a tad clunky. If a press space and a guy says "Hi there!" and that's it, I expect to be able to quickly tap space again to end the conversation. There should be no need for me to take my finger off the space bar and reach for the mouse. Again, if clicking was the ONLY way to talk to people, and the space bar never entered into it, then I could easily move around town with the arrow keys, click to start and end conversations, and go through the entire game with one hand on the arrows or WASD keys and the other hand on the mouse.

Basically the problem is, users have two hands, and your control scheme involves 4 different controls that are pretty far apart. You could easily simplify this to just arrow keys + mouse, and I think the game would get a lot more approachable and more fun to play. Less tedious. That's just my 2 cents.

Basically, the gameplay is simple action like Zelda, but you're trying to give it an elaborate interface like Ultima. It's really overkill. Please try to pare the controls down some to make the game faster and simpler to play. And don't say it would make the game too easy. I don't consider reaching all over the place for my controls to be a meaningful source of challenge. It's just noise that prevents me from telling the game to do what I want it to do.

LonLonRanch responds:

I think you have some silly probelms with the controls, first of all make sure you are using WASD instead of the arrow keys. It says so in the instructions. There is never a need to take your hand of the mouse. Hitting the spacebar is a very easy task, use your thumb. The controls will also come more comfortable with a little bit of time. Thanks for the review :)

[Feudalism]

Great Game, except for one thing...

There's this thing some games have nowadays so good players know when to stop playing. It's called an "ending." I tried going on misc. bandit quests after taking over the world, but it just wasn't the same.

[Via Sol 2]

Impossible or too easy, depending on how you play.

Less of a pure strategy game, and more of a constant "putting out fires" sim. I loves me some robot overlords! They really do a lot to help you balance the economy, by allowing you to focus (primarily) on housing and food production.

The storyline and scenarios are funny, but the gameplay is a little hit-or-miss. Basically it pulls you in too many different directions at once, with inefficient tools to address the problems. I felt like there were too many different types of resources for me to have any hope of reconcilling them. Tier 3 structures help because they're more efficient, but you need to acquire them FAST or you're fucked. Basically a society built on tier 1 or tier 2 units is doomed to failure because so many resources get burned to make other types of reosurces.

If you even stop to think about your strtategy for a split second, you'll lose precious weeks, and pausing hides the build menus you need in front of you to even make informed decisions. I guess I'm saying it might have worked better as a turn-based strategy game.

As in Sim City, you can sometimes paint yourself into a corner, such as running out of ore with no way to acquire more. I'm sure with enough practice and experience (or a carefully lopsided government, such my beloved robocracy,) it probably becomes easier to keep this many plates spinning. But having beaten it with an easy combo, I don't feel very motivated to play it again for a greater challenge. That is, I find this type of challenge more difficult and annoying than fun to play.

In the end, I guess the gameplay just wasn't for me. I'm more into the millitary RTS games, like Supreme Commander and... uh... was there ever another one? (TA doesn't count since it's basically the same game as SC.) Well, even though the genre wasn't for me, the presentation was top-notch. The great graphics, maps, music, and humor were enough to carry me through to an honest victory. (For certian values of "honest," that is. I used a cheap government, teh robots, and continued once or twice with a puppet sucessor. I did not resort to the chip-in-da-head because I figured it would render the game pointless.) Now that I've reached the end, though, I can't immagine subjecting myself to the middle again, under harsher circumstances.

Still, it's a great game, and just approachable enough to allow pleebs like me to claw my way through it once. Good job! :)

Or as we like to say in Robotopia, "11101110 10001010 00101010 00010010 10100100 0000101 11010010 10101111!"

[Link Chat Attack!]

Simply baffling.

So, let me get this straight... The premise of this game is that cell phones... excuse me, "mobiles," are a tremendous waste of money... but it's also part of a massive contest/advertising campaign sponsored by major mobile networks?

In what dimmension does that even begin to make sense? Either the man is bad, or you're working for the man. You don't make both statements in the same breath like this. Not if you expect to have any credibility as na artist. (And if you don't have that, why would they continue to hire you to produce their flash adverts?)

Premise aside, the gameplay was okay. There aren't enough cross-streets to effectively evade the credit-crunchers in most cases... often there's one between you and the way forward, and there's nothing you can do but run through them. The automatic scroll is slightly faster than one might think feisible, but with pactice, that mgiht become less of an issue. In any case, this seems to have been designed as a simple, short throw-away game for the masses to spend a couple few minutes on and then get bored with, not an epic marathon of hardcore action and adventure intended for serious gamers.

So while, in my humble opinion, this fails as both a game and as an advertisement, I'm sure there are plenty of vampant consumers out there who will happily lap it up. Let's face it, if pop music, reality TV, and ringtones can take the world by storm, there's no end to what some people will swallow.

[Spectrum bubbles]

Low challenge, decent execution.

The fundamental problem with the gameplay is, touching the wrong color bubble doesn't penalize the player in any way. As a result, it's easy to line your fingers up on the ASDF keys and tap them rapidly in sequence over ANY bubble. Then no bubbles can escape, until they get faster than the player's movement, whereupon ALL bubbles escape. In either case, skill has no effect on the player's success.

Yes, I realize I'm playing it wrong, but by adding even a small penalty (such as touching a wrong-colored bubble counts as one bubble escaping the screen, or even just the bubble disappearing so you don't get points for matching it,) it would make accuracy more important, and higher scores would be based on skill.

Also, if you saved the player's top score in some way, even just a personal best saved to the player's hard drive, it would improve replayability.

The graphics were kinda hard on the eyes and the music was kinda dull, but nothing too horrible.

You've showcased some competency in working with ActionScript. I look forward to your future releases.

[Lemon Smash]

Hey, that was actually fun!

The controls weren't that difficult. You said they would be, and in most Flash side-scroller games, they are, but you managed to make this game playable. Good job!

Also, I see the highscore table hasn't been destroyed by spoofers yet, so that's kinda cool, too.

Good job! :)

Coaly responds:

Yea that was a little joke, you caught me.