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
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.
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 ^^" ).
The game doesn't tell you what you need in order to buy an upgrade. It says c50, I have 150 cookies, I click 2, nothing happens. Tell your players what they need when they need it. That's just basic game design 101.
So we have a sub-par clone of cookie clicker, no ability to deviate from the per-ordained build order and no explanation of what that required build order actually is. The author didn't even bother to name it something original.
romdtb needs to learn a thing or two from Cosmic Clicks, Don't Move, or even Idle Farmer. There have been much better games in the genre featured here on Newgrounds in the past month, and this game isn't even as good as Cookie Clicker despite ripping off everything in it.
And finally, saying "it's for a game jam, guys" is no excuse. Stop saying it like it's some kind of justification. A game made for a game jam still needs to be fun, and a game made for a game jam still needs to be novel. This game is neither. It makes Stencyl look bad in comparison to HTML5, a free language, because that's what ACTUAL Cookie Clicker runs on.
I award you no points. And I can't imagine the judges reacting any differently.
Sorry, dude. I just can't do it. 12 seconds per sentence is just too damn long to wait for pointless exposition. Either get to the bloody point or, ideally, give me a button I can press to advance the dialogue. I wanted to get into this game but the conversation with the Quantum Field Harvester just made me feel like my time was being wasted. Did not finish. 2 stars for ambiance and originality.
You can left-clic in the scene to skip the dialogs... :(
Pay-to-win is a cancer on the face of gaming, okay? Let's just get that rant out of the way up front. The day pay-to-win gambling games like Magic: The Gathering become a more reliable source of income than other genres of game is the day we lose everything we as gamers hold dear, handing over the keys of the kingdom to (slightly more) cynical marketeers who only care about sucking dry the 1% of human beings who live to spend money on conspicuous bullshit like booster packs and food spiked with inedible flavorless flakes of gold foil.
Having said that, this one actually has some gameplay in it, I guess. You can use that in an ad if you want to. " '- Actually has some gameplay in it, I guess,' - a core gamer." From building your deck to managing your income to choosing what to buy this turn, the game is constantly presenting the player with strategic, tactical, and immediate choices.
Unfortunately, after building up this strategic element, the game procedes to sabotage itself by making it impossible to actually use units you have fielded to solve problems. I got as far as the Wizards before I figured out that there's no actual way to counter anything what needs countering. The game "helpfully" advises me that I need to Wound units that can Bolt, but this advice is meaningless because the enemy gets to move its units after I have moved mine but before combat resolves. It doesn't matter if I own a unit that can Wound in the right place or not because the enemy will always move its bolters away from that unit and counter with a defensive unit.
Extrapolate this out to every other strategic scenario, and you'll see that nothing can ever reliably counter anything, unless you field an army that's all the same type of unit. (So it's like every other deck-building game in that regard.) Combine this with a two-tiered premium currency system, unreasonably slow server response times even if you're playing single-player with no login, and apparent lack of a Trainer, and you've got a nasty, spiky moneypit that doesn't even pretend to value the player's time or skill.
Is it a sad testament to the state of the games industry that this is not the most cynical wallet-emptying game I've seen this year. It's not even within the top ten. There's another quote for you. " '...not even within the top ten (most cynical wallet-emptying games I've seen this year) - a consumer' " Man, that's a great quote! It should play well on Gamasutra. I'm handing you gold, here. Just think of all the whales you could gut with a hook like that. I'm not surprised that deck-builders get critical acclaim these days, I'm just surprised that they have the gaul to market it on a free browser game portal like Newgrounds.
I could maybe see it if it was something like ROBOKILL or Creeper World that actually offers the player a legitimate gameplay experience, then I could see it. But this 'freemium' pay-to-win shit? That shit needs to go back to dying a slow death on mobile devices. PC gamers don't want it or need it. Broke gamers can't afford it. And no amount of box quotes from AAA reviewers is going to help you get blood out of a stone.
Three stars for graphics, stability, and obvious polish. But why the hell does this need to be on Newgrounds, of all places!?
With all due respect, we are practically killing ourselves trying to make a CCG that is *not* pay-to-win. We get crapped on by publishers who tell us this game will never succeed because uncommon units are just as powerful and useful as rare units. You saw booster packs in the game and got defeated by a single player mission and immediately assumed the worst. Please understand that this sort of thing is incredibly discouraging to the few indie developers like us who are trying to find a way to make the games we love, still give them away for free, and somehow eke out a modest living. Highgrounds is by no means a moneymaker. It doesn't even pay our bills.
Please don't take any of this the wrong way. We understand why people get so enraged by free-to-play games. Many f2p games are awful. But some of us are trying to do better.
Highgrounds is a very challenging game that requires a lot of skill and practice. The computer will kick your butt until you really internalize how to play. Veteran human players will kick your butt WAY worse. A large percentage of those veterans have not spent a dime and never will. And we're totally cool with that. (Pro-tip: if you want to succeed in multiplayer without spending money, make sure you complete the single player campaign. You get many free powerful units as reward for doing so.)
For anyone who is willing not to immediately jump to conclusions, please know that we're doing our best to be more like League of Legends and Team Fortress than the mountain of skeezy CCGs out there. We are trying to make a game of skill in which you pay for variety, not for an unfair advantage. And we have a pretty solid track record, having worked on two games, Triple Town and Realm of the Mad God, that have been widely praised for NOT being obnoxious pay-to-win games. (Note, we stopped working on Realm of the Mad God back in 2012, when Kabam took it over, and we've had nothing to do with how it has changed since then.)
You can read more about Highgrounds, and how to succeed in it, here: http://spryfox.com/forums/topic/introduction-to-highgrounds-faq/
There's an art to making an upgrade game. You want the player to feel as though they have multiple viable paths to victory, but that their choices matter.
Ideally, this is achieved not by perfectly balancing all the different upgrades, but by making each upgrade situational. Whether it's Cookier Clicker, Burrito Bison, or ROBOKILL, you want the player to be constantly discovering new and clever ways of stretching their resources... of tweaking things so that they can draw juuuuuuust a little bit more power out of their arsenal, and occasionally discovering game-breakers that make them feel smart.
None of this ever happens in Free Fred, and it all stems from the decision to make it a 2D game in which the player is completely immobile.
You can't move left or right to dodge bombs. You can't jump or otherwise avoid damage. This means that it's basically a stationary player-controlled turret defense game... except that instead of surviving nights or beating levels, the game is structured as one long level. This means you need to fail and fail and fail over and over again in order to succeed. There is no progress, other than monetarily. You just start the level over again from the beginning.
In a sense, side-view perspective gives the combat in Free Fred slightly more variety than a typical top-down player-controlled turret game. The enemies approach by sea and sky, and your upgrade paths include dedicated "lane coverage" for one or both of these. In theory, you could upgrade either Torpedoes or Homing Missiles to lock down one of those lanes, allowing you to focus on the other with your turrets.
In practice, however, homing missiles are too slow to actually do anything when the screen starts to fill with fast-moving helicopters, and the sea is completely linear in a side-scroller, so it quickly becomes a huge mass of overlapping battleships and various flavors of sea mines. In other words, the homing missiles typically either don't hit anything, or else waste a lot of your time and then hit a random target, while the torpedoes just do extra damage to whatever's queued up in the sea lane.
A skilled player will take no damage at all, until he hits the point in the game where more upgrades are needed, and then he will start taking very heavy damage very quickly. Once you unlock the third ship, the medic helicopter provides a false sense of security. It won't last. You still recognize the wall when you hit it. The only way to make it through is to hammer the enemy with overwhelming firepower, and this is generally only possible once you have near max upgrades.
I was able to beat the game with all but one HP upgrades, zero homing missile upgrades, and everything else maxed. Then I maxed out the homing missiles, just to see what they do. They remain awkward, slow, and clumsy, frequently swerving to avoid new enemies and taking down enemies up to 30 seconds after I would have with the turret. Target prioritization also makes no sense-- they sure don't lock onto whatever heat signature's the closest, the way homing missiles would in real life.
And speaking of homing missiles, why can't I shoot these fuckers down? I wouldn't mind, except that some battleships and submarines fire homing missiles that you NEED to shoot down, and they're identical in shape and behavior to the ones you can't shoot down.
Coding is well-done, with no slow-downs, even when things got busy, and even after long gameplay sessions. Some gameplay design choices seem questionable, and the decision to inexplicably use the plot of Free Willy as a franking device feels exploitative, hackneyed, and out-of-date, all at the same time. Graphics are okay. I would say I appreciate the Dr. Strangelove reference, but upon closer inspection of the guy riding the bomb, I doubt it was intentional.
3 out of 5 about covers it. I would have given it a 2, but the last boss did something new and slightly more complex, and I appreciate the solid stability of the coding. I suppose you probably can't expect much from a game whose only reason for existing is to make you go to a different website, but other, better upgradable turret games have taught us to expect better.
An inferior knock-off of Death VS Monsters. Its biggest crimes are probably lousy sound design.
Aesthetics are a mess even though the individual art styles are all well-executed, because they made the thematic mistake of pairing C-64-era retro music with modern flash graphics. You can't hear it when you take a hit, can't hear enemies explode, can't hear anything at all really aside from the music and the most pitiful coin ding as3sfxr ever crapped out.
The story seems to be... uh... you're a bad person if you liked Avengers, I guess? That's all I could get out of the title screen. The lame theme spreads to the enemies, the power-ups, and the backgrounds, turning what could have been a fun romp into an abstract clash between two sides you don't care about.
Gameplay-wise, it's an okay Bullet Hell shooter with RPG grind. Mouse to move feels floating and imprecise, but the shots travel slow enough that I didn't usually feel unduly threatened. It was nice of them to point out the hitbox at the start of the game, though I would have prefered more precise keyboard controls. Also, if your Flash game uses the mouse, you ALWAYS store the previous frame's mouse position, check to see if the new mouse position is 0,0, and if it is, use the old mouse position. This prevents a common Flash bug where the player scrolls up and left if the mouse ever goes outside the fucking screen.
Progress feels slow and limited even though technically it probably isn't. I chalk this up to failure to telegraph progress. Overall the psychology of this game is very scattered and uninspired. It's almost as if somebody who doesn't speak English googled what was trending in America 6-12 months ago when this was in development and then built the game around that. I don't understand why they decided to take the piss out of the Avengers, though. It feels like a super-cynical move to include it in the first place, so why pick the side that you know 99% of gamers are going to be AGAINST? Unless they were talking about a typical (bad) superhero movie. But they don't specify that in the intro. They make it sound like a really great superhero movie. So I'm lost. Where did this creative decision come from.
Also, I have no idea what the phrase "Tin Foil Woman" actually means. Google Translate! For when native English sexism just isn't sexist enough! (tm)
Age 45, Male
Joined on 1/26/05
GemCraft Chasing Shadows 
GE Catgirls Demo 
CookieClickerJam2014 
noOS 
Highgrounds 
Free Fred 
ComicBookMovie 
