WarpZone's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Space Guardian two]

A simple twinstick shooter not really doing anything different. I've played this game before. Hell, I've *made* this game before. (It flopped. Probably because it wasn't doing anything different.)

So. I'll just list some random features that don't exactly distinguish Space Guardian, so much as tell you what bucket of twinstick shmups you've played before this fits into.

Mouse control. Smooth movement. Colliding with enemies doesn't hurt you, just their shots. Abstract pixel spaceship. TONS of screen shake. Scrolling, but confined to a small arena. You can't shoot down the enemy's slow homing missiles. Wave-based enemy spawning, but no real cutoff between "boss fights" and regular fights.

I just realized I could have said "Geometry Wars" and you'd probably have gotten the gist of it.

Recommended if the things I said made you happy.

Oh, and there's a TON of powerups that spawn at the same time, but you can only use one at a time and the player movement is floaty enough that you'll probably collect some without meaning to. It definitely does NOT stack the powerups you collect into a ridiculous arsenal of extra guns all firing at the same time like some sort of absurd bullet katamari, which would have been the awesome thing to do with that many extra powerups. I'm really not sure what the author intended, so it's possible there's a layer of gameplay I didn't understand, here.

[WrongKynd]

I'm not the best judge of PICO-8 games, but this felt hard to control and hard to look at. I kept getting stuck on tents that I felt like I should have been able to walk around, and I couldn't figure out how to handle the dogs or what the difference was between "press x to eat" and just walking over the (cultists? skeletons? townsfolk?) and killing them that way. Awful nice of the humans to try and save me with that heart monitor at the end, though. Would not recommend over a randomly selected Wario Ware stage.

[Newgrounds in 2019]

Literally the tutorial nobody asked for, the music still gave me shivers though. It says Newgrounds in 2019, but I have a feeling it will appeal the most to ancient relics like me that remember when this website always played sounds by default.

Useless, meaningless, ultimately pointless, somehow it still made me smile.

What the hell... for old time's sake. FIVEN!!

Little-Rena responds:

Vote 5 without watching.

[DED GUY]

Extremely charming initial presentation with the graphics, but it quickly wore out its welcome. Couldn't make it past FIRST_STEPS because the game just WANTS every single gun-jump to send me into the pit, I guess. I wouldn't have made it that far based on intuition alone, which is why all that text in the Author's Comments needs to be moved into the game ASAP. But also shooting the gun almost straight down should make you only move to the side a little bit. It shouldn't send you straight up a wall and then arc you over the wall into the pit as if you'd pointed the gun at 45 degrees or something. I feel like I keep playing these game jam gimmick platformers and they keep getting worse and worse.

Don't innovate unless the new thing is actually better than the old thing! This could have been Hollow Knight But With Guns! Instead, we got this nearly unplayable mess. Steam reached Peak Ultra-Hard Platformer years ago! Just make a normal game, ConnorGrail! You're clearly good for it!

[The Wizard of elemental magic]

The Wizard of elemental magic is a pretty strong effort, overall, and it owes a lot to its graphics and music. Some of the background elements weren't always clear what they were supposed to be (lookin' at you, ceiling spikes,) but for the most part, you'll learn by doing, with only a few button prompts to let you know the controls, which is always the best way to teach novel gameplay.

But If there's one thing every puzzle-platformer needs, it's tight, precise, responsive controls, and this is one area in which The Wizard of elemental magic's is good, but not great.

The enemies never stop moving, which means you need to quickly get into position and then nail your jumps perfectly. Which might be okay if you could stop on a dime, but you kind of slide into and out of your movement speed, which makes the timing just a little bit awkward when a red blob is relentlessly barrelling down the hallway towards you.

The biggest problem, though, is the lack of coyote time. Every platform game should have coyote time in 2019. Hell, every platformer game on the NES *had* it in 1989. If I run off the edge of a platform and press jump and nothing happens, *that's the game's fault* for not implementing coyote time. The original Super Mario Bros had it. Is this game better than Super Mario? I think not!

Add coyote time! If you don't know what that means, Google coyote time! Then add it to your jumps!

[Pucamuc]

I'm not a big fan of gimmick platformers to begin with, but this one shows potential. The aesthetic is retro, but it can't seem to figure out what decade it's paying homage to. The music is 80's synth played on 90's hardware, the screen filters apparently want me to think this is a 90's VHS played back on a CRT monitor that degausses every time you die, and the vaguely postmodern writing style peppered with 1337-5p33k feels like it's squarely mid-2000's. After cell phones but before respecting your elders as a form of rebellion.

The gameplay is a weird blend of polish and jank. I died constantly, and it felt like how long I held down the key had only a random degree of control over how long I would stay in the air. The lightest tap on a keyboard key might move me one character or it might launch me into the next pit. Maybe it only works properly on specific types of keyboard or something.

I'm not sure to what extent my bad experience was caused by my hardware, so try it for yourself and see if it's playable.

(I only made it as far as the first baby, so my rating assumes it works perfectly for other people, it's at least a good 30 screens or so long, and the writing doesn't get any better as the story progresses.)

Good luck with the game jam, guys!

[INTO THE ABYSS: REBORN]

The content is really good, but the jumping needs just a liiiiiiitttle bit more polish. Google Coyote Time and integrate it into whatever platforming engine you've got under the hood here. (You'd think with all the money people spend on the Asset Store, they'd include basic features that games have had since the 80s.)

I also noticed some other minor glitches... jumping while going through a door results in strange behavior during the fade-to-black, and sometimes when I'd drop into a shallow pit and try to jump back out again, I'd either hit my head on a nonexistent ceiling at floor-level and fall back down, or else I'd sort of clip into the corner so I'm standing slightly beneath the ground. (Can't walk, but can jump out of it.)

Frankly, the lack of Coyote Time is the biggest problem. If I die ONE TIME and it feels like it's the game's fault, that makes me want to go play something else. That's why developers invented Coyote Time and other "corrective" mechanics in the first place.

Fortunately, Coyote Time is easy to implement. Just look it up. I believe in you! Make this a great game that even Miyamoto would be proud of!

[Dwarvania]

The movement feels slidey. The ladders are awkward. The spacebar move is unresponsive. (It's seriously <1 second after I press the button to turn into a box sometimes.) Even though the developer put this much obvious TLC into the enemies' animations, they don't telegraph their next move at all. They just suddenly flip directions and you're caught. In short, the controls are complete jank, which is the last thing you want in a stealth game. Ambitious concept, but Mark of the Ninja it ain't.

[GemCraft Chasing Shadows]

The core mechanic is just as good as you remember from this classic game frachise, but unfortunately the gameplay experience this time around has been carefully balanced to be deliberately anti-fun, all in service of the monetization model.

- Every video game review in 2019

[GE Catgirls Demo]

The concept is pretty standard, to be honest, but the UX definitely needs some work. New player experience is confusing. Back button looks like a > forward button (when the menu is on the right.) Clicking on a shopkeep doesn't give you the option to buy things, not even in a menu the way every RPG ever has done it. (I eventually figured out you can just click on groceries but this wasn't intuitive.) Every building should have a back button (that looks the same as the other back buttons) because clicking on the door feels weird and unnatural. Camera perspective says "god-game" but the way you want players to click on things feels "first-person game."

In short, please stop fighting years of muscle memory other video games have baked into me and other players. The "shared language" of video game UX we already have should be used as often as possible, and innovative new UX solutions should only be attempted when you have no other choice or you REALLY figured out a way to make the gameplay better.

I feel like the gameplay could be improved if you made the player master the basics (earning more money, feeding the catgirls, etc) before the more obscure buildings open up. Otherwise the player is likely to make early mistakes that render the game unplayable. Teach through gameplay. Not through walls of text.

Also... how the hell do you earn money? I only have one catgirl, she's fully happy and fully fed and only halfway tired, but the old lady still won't let her work at the grocery store. Zero explaination of what's preventing it. The wall of text tutorial didn't help. The old lady should just tell you "That catgirl needs more X to work here, try training her at the Y."

But even that shouldn't be necessary for the MOST BASIC job, because the whole point of a minimum wage job should be playing your way out of a dead end whenever you accidentally spent all your money.

Once you've fixed the UX and the early gameplay, I think it'll improve the new user experience by a lot. Which you, the developer, desperately need if you want people to support development.

Message me if you'd like more extensive feedback on menus and UX design.

FunToCreate responds:

Hey thank you for your feedback, I'll try to change things you mentioned :)

You send cat-girls to work by talking to the Old Lady or other and then choosing "Send Cat-Girls" (I guess I should change it too ^^" ).