WarpZone's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[G.N. ARCADE vol2]

Bad control = GAME SUCKS

Graphics: Stick figure fights alien spaceships on stylish op-art backgrounds. Good color, adequate spaceship, crappy stick figure. Title screen looks great for a 2001 X-box ad.

Style: I think the author was going for some sort of vague amaricana sci-fi feel. Various elements feel like they came from the 60s through 80s of european and american pulp and low-budget sci-fi. The result is a glimpse of what is either an elaborate and inspired fictional world mirroring the grittiest and cheesiest of our extraterrestrial fantasies, or a poor attempt to slap a bunch of random photographs and visual elements together and get something vaguely sci-fi. I can't tell which. All I know is, my gut is telling me Jazz + sunset + photograph of an ugly guy = artistic. Too bad the execution was so shoddy.

Sound: Nice Jazz music. Tired, crappy BEE-DOOW laser sound effects we've all heard before.

Violence: Stuff blows up other stuff. Individual hits are shown only by a shrinking life meter. No blood or gore, just abstract guns that make a laser sound but fire little black bullets.

Interactivty: NO! WRONG! DAMMIT! The noob platformer physics, I can live with. The slowdown, I can live with. He's probabaly new to ActionScript, okay? Over time, he'll get better. But you do NOT put platforms at the apex of your player's jumpaing ability. You do NOT make ammo that the player desperately needs appear at the top of the god damn screen where he couldn't possibly reach it if his life depended on it. These two things were INTENTIONAL GAMEPLAY CHOICES, and the author ought to be shot for introducing them to his already buggy game. Forget the controls, all right? The GAMEPLAY sucks. Even the carrots have sticks.

Humor: It's. Not. FUNNY.

Overall: ZEROED. You know those people who say that "Gameplay is everything?" Well I'm one of them. The gameplay here is crap. Even though the art and the style do have some merit, it is a HORRIBLE game.

After this gets blammed, I suggest re-releasing it with the ammo appearing on the ground, and all the platforms lowered by about the player's height. You might find it survives for a few seconds.

MahonenNiko responds:

ooookayyy :P. You surely took your time wroteing that didn't you. Wise words, but strike missed targed ones in a while. It sounded that the game was too hard for you, and you got angry whit the game play just bacause your computer is too slow to work it right. I didn't notice anything when I test played it during and after the process (about 50 times). Some wined about game play too saying that some of the platforms couldn't be reached, I am telling you now, you have to jump from the lower to higher, I designed the scenes carefully and I personally think that the gameplay is the best thing in the whole game. You have to dodge the attacs and survive when you jump around the scene hunting ammo, the places that ammo appears were also carefullu thought that it wouldn't be just walkeing on one level and hideing under one platform allthetime, that obiously was what you were looking for. I continue working on whit this to get it work right whit your lazy computer too. Maby this time I make a big sign that the dude moves more slowly backwards than forwards, just for them that are stupid enouh not noticeing it right away, don't worry I don't mean you whit this. Correct me if I'm wrong whit anything here, let's make an angry discussion, it always makes my day.

[Stench Of Blood]

"eYe CaN tHeNtHe ThEm!" :P

...too bad you can't "hit them."

Graphics: Nicely drawn characters with some attempt at flair. Unfortunately, the attempt at realism works against the author cuz they're not perfect, and the more relaistic you try to make them, the more every flaw shows. Next time, try to find a way of stylizing things. Seriously, you can stylize cartoons without making them any less serious.

Style: Attempts were made at evoking a dark, somber mood. Unfortunately, execution fell short enough for it to be unintentionally funny. Like that SNL sketch with the goth guy in the cape walking around in broad daylight at the park while people are playing frissbee in the background.

Sound: WHAT? I CAN'T HEAR YA! SPEAK UP! OH! YOU SAY YOU CAN SENSE THEM? THAT'S GOOD TO KNOW! YEOW! THAT GUN'S REALLY LOUD, HUH? OKAY, I'M TURNING THE VOLUME BAck down now.

Violence: If you empty a clip into an insect, it might bleed. Might.

Interactivity: Ahh, there's nothing like fighting invincible enemies. Oh wait, they're not invincible! They just seem that way because they disappear before you can empty an entire clip into them. huh. Oh well, at least they always get to hurt you and there's no way to avoid their attacks. Remember, kiddies! The key to good gameplay is making a game impossible to succeed at!

Humor: The whispering whatever-hunter had me rolling in the asiles, but I have a feeling they were trying for drama.

Overall: Ugh. Painful. Look, here's what you do. You give us some indication that an enemy is coming. Maybe the ground starts to crack before a worm comes out. Maybe a wasp glides onto the screen and hovers for a moment before attacking. Next, let us take them out with one shot, since they're hard to hit in the first place and they keep coming out so fast. even if an enemy has multiple hit points, give us a little splash of blood or a sound or something to let us know we didn't miss. Let gamers feel like they have a fighting chance. I know it's supposed to be all dark and spooky, but this isn't the right way to play up the "hopelessness" aspect. If a gamer has no hope, he quits the damn game, fool.

[Chief's Customs V.1]

Broken menu + lame music = *yawn*

Graphics: Nice vector warthog. Decent menu. Some interesting mods.

Style: Ehh, nothing spectacular. Music drags it down a notch. Hiding the menu doesn't actually hade the menu options, just the frame, so what's the point of hiding it? It's not like you get to look at your warthog all by itself, or anything.

Sound: I thought the music was lame. I'll admit it was thematically apropriate for a modding game, though, so I gave it a 5 instead of a 0. THANK GOD he put in a button to make it stop.

Violence: none.

Interactivity: Well if the menus made more sense, and if you could tell what clicking somewhere was actually gonna do before you clicked it, and if painting the car different colors made more sense instead of making it look like the whole car's gonna be red and then, all of a sudden, just the hood turns red when you confirm the color change, I wouldn't have any complaints about the controls. As it is, I guess my only complaint about the menu is that it is a broken piece of crap and desperately needs to be fixed. Other that that minor detail, the controls are great.

Humor: OMG the song is so FUNNY! He's trying to sound bad-ass by singing HIP-HOP! LOL!!! Hillarious!

Overall: This is the best broken mod game I've ever started to play and then realized it was broken.

the-disturbed responds:

HAHAHA! REading this just made me crack up!

Anyhow, thanks for pointing out the bugs to me. I'll fix em, and add more music into the game thats not rap (because flash was being a prick and wouldnt let me import any other fitting song).

Thanks,

~JC

[RaidenX]

Classic 2D action! Yay!

I was expecting to be disapointed, because most of the time on newgrounds 2D shooters end up being a ship on a boring star background while random enemies appear, and remakes of sprite games usually end up with borked control or leave out crucial elements. Not so with your game! :D You did in the loading screen what most flash authors barely do in an actual game, and I was delighted to discover a REAL 2D shoot 'em up here. YAY! Do Layer Section next! XD No, fuck that, DO GUNSTAR HEROES!

Graphics: A little lackluster, but they get the job done. Player ship looks nice. Backgrounds are kinda cheesey, but they load better I guess than if they'ed been sprite graphics. The visuals don't seem as refined as in the sprite game it's based off of, but they get the job done with vectors. Animated sequences look kinda cheesey. Explosions are the best I've ever seen using only gradient balls. Enemy shots are very nicely differentiated from other types of graphics, which was a problem I always had with the sprite games. Well, that and the flickery giant fireball explosions. You will never see a more awe-inspiring sight than the fully charged purple laser ricoheting between three targets while a small star shimmers at the nose of your ship.

Style: Full points. Everything design decision in this game tickles my fancy... Well, except for that tree on the title screen. If you're flying a plane that close to a tree, I'm sorry, you're already dead. But you've sucessfully captured everything that mad the 2D shooters of the 80's great. fleets of enemy ships, streams of enemy shots (thank God Flash slows down instead of skipping frames!) Shiny, happy anime music, clunky mechanical bosses and lots of meaty explosions. Again, props to the purple laser. There is nothing more stylish than the purple laser. :P

Sound: Perky 80's j-pop tunage, nice explosions. Were they ripped from the coin-op? Music cuts out halfway through the first level in space... is tyhat a bug? Incidental sound effects (player shots, enemy shots, explosions) are PERFECT, everything is nice and subtle except for an explosion. I wish more modern game designer could figure out that we don't want a loud BE-DOOW! BE-DOOW! playign throughout 90% of our game just because it happens to be the noise our phasers make.

Violence: Big go boom. Many, many big go boom. Happy.

Interactivity: 10 out of 10. Perfect, crisp, precise movement. Enemy shots travel slow enough that you actually feel like you have a fighting chance of weaving between them. This is something so many flash game authors scew up when making a top-down shooter, and I know you were imitating an old arcade game but still, good job pulling off the imitation. This is control that WORKS, plain and simple. Pure 2D gaming. Gotta love it.

Humor: None. It's a serious, if upbeat, 80's 2D shoot 'em up. Now go blow up some planes, dammit.

Overall: 10. This is not an objective rating. This is not a sum of its parts. This is Good gameplay + stuff I miss most in modern games = TEH PWNZED. Yes, it's a copy. No, there's no real innovation here. I'm not complaining. Seriously.

Do gunstar Heroes next!!! XD

Go0gley responds:

First of all, thanks for your nice and detailed review. Don't see a lot of these nowadays. :D

The backgrounds are kinda optimised because they'll slow down the game a lot - but I guess you're right about the animations. I should have spent more time on them, instead of just one week! Sorry for that tree on the title screen. I ran out of ideas of what to put there... =P

The background music will cut in 1 out of 15 chance during the space levels (due to intensive action - Flash disables some sounds to reduce demand on CPU). And maybe 1 in 30 chance on levels 3-5 but it only happened once during my alpha testing. All methods I used to stop this had failed, so it's something we have to put up with. :(

Once again, thanks for your lovely review! It's unbelievably hard to get these on Newgrounds and I appreciate every single one of them! ^ ^

[World Domination]

OK Strategy game. Worth playing, I guess.

I was kinda lukewarm on this game. Propaganda is too unpredictable to be much use (unless of course you're the underdog.) It's realistic how the game pretty much ends with 95% of the world's population dead, but other than that it's not a very realistic war game. Spies are pretty much a waste of turns. There wasn't a whole lot of flavor. I would have liked to see maybe a little news feed along the bottom of the screen detailing public reaction, policies explaining my moves, etc.

As it is it's just a rock/paper/scissors game. Once you get down to one arch nemesis, it get pretty tedious. You just defend yourself and let all the weaker countries kill each other off, then it's pretty much a slugfest between you and whichever country's left, so as long as you have a stronger populous than him by the endgame, you're pretty much guarunteed to win. Just counter everything he sends at you and build faster than he can and hopefully you'll build subs and GIs faster than he can, since they're the only EFFECTIVE weapons in a 1 vs 1 war.

I wish you could choose which weapons you build instead of randomly getting them. A also wish things were a little more realistic, though I'm not sure what I mean by that. Instead of a turn-based system, maybe something with money or something. I guess the full version with tech trees probabaly improves the strategic options a bit, but I doubt this would help MUCH. Nice try.

[Hunga Hatch]

Ehh, better than StripDown, I guess.

Graphics: Cute dino stickers fall. CG'ed neanderthal.

Style: Look & Feel? No big deal.

Sound: Click click click. No music.

Violence: No real killin'. Suitible for children.

Interactivity: No gaps between spaces, which beats Stripdown's interfaces.

Humor: I guess they look kinda goofy. (If you been hittin' the roofie.)

Overall: Kept me busy clicking stuff. By level ten I'd had enough.

[Family Guy test1]

Glitches make this nice-looking quiz unplayable.

I messed up on round 1 a couple of times, and the music starts again and again each time you are dropped on the title screen. Too bad, because I like Family Guy and this has a nice, simple, clean style to it. Author needs to fix that overlapping music glitch, and maybe also add like a buzzer noise or a "WRONG!" screen just to let us know when we screwed up.

xXMEOWXx responds:

Sorry bout that i will get right on it

[Hypothetical Death]

All the fun of GTA, with no "mission" crap!

Done: Stress-test Flash's OOP using an insane number of instances of the same object.

Pointless killfests. Gotta love 'em. This one is fairly well done, except for all the lag. The problem is, huge numbers of people running around don't actually make the game "harder" because the ship itself takes up 1/10th of the screen. You can scrape along the walls once and then spin in a figure 8 most levels and take out 90% of your targets within 10% of the time limit, but this takes 3 minutes in real life beyond level 20 because the computer is lagging so bad. I don't care WHAT you've got under the hood, this game will tax it eventually. Yes, I set it on low res. Didn't help past level 20 or 30 or so.

Levels 33, 37, 40, 42 and 43 gave me small numbers of opponents, for some reason. I think maybe an array didn't have time to clear all the way between levels, or something. I like how if you slam into a wall, you can gun it into reverse and maintain some of your speed, but it takes a little skill.

For some reason, I had to give this game an 8 overall. It's just better than the sum of its parts. Easily the most fun you've had playing god since that one with the magnifying glass. Not quite as good as Defend your castle, but that one was pretty hard to top in terms of sheer wrongness. :)

Suggestions for the developers: Next time, avoid the lag. In this case, it didn't actually make the later levels harder, though it did make them a bit funnier. Also, I don't know why, but the game froze up completely after the first collision detection on level 50. If you could make a remake of this game with a max of like 50 trekkies per level, and maybe make them faster or something, the scores would improve quite a bit because lag wouldn't make the gameplay so tedious.

Overall, though, good work. Well done for a game of its type. I hope you make more games.