WarpZone's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[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 ^^" ).

[CookieClickerJam2014]

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.

[noOS]

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.

Kouboooo responds:

You can left-clic in the scene to skip the dialogs... :(

[Highgrounds]

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!?

spryfox responds:

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/