WarpZone's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Guard Of The Kingdom]

A Tower Defense game pretty much built from the ground up for casual audiences on mobile devices, Guard Of The Kingdom appears quite deep at first, a trick it achieves by telling you *nothing* about the units other than their prices, but once you've tested every unit out, the game ends up being literally one-dimensional.

Every enemy will walk past every tower you build. Some enemies are slow and others are fast, but none are immune to any particular type of tower. This means that Acid Acid Acid Ice is pretty much the only combination worth building, although I've achieved interesting results in Survival by building Acid Stone Acid Stone all along the bottom row to cluster enemies together.

Honestly, I can't hold this against the game TOO much, since this was kind of an "Aha!" moment for me. Sometimes Tower Defense games can get *too* well-balanced, to the point where the only reason to build one combination of towers over another boils down to semi-random idiosyncrasies of the pathing, movement speeds, and AI. If we assume the creators of the game are non-native english speakers, I'd rather play a simple game with an obvious right answer than a complex game with poor explanations of how units work.

What's really strange is, about halfway through the game, they start pitching puzzle levels at you where you only get to choose between three specific units. Unfortunately, there's only two of these, and one of them has acid included as one of the options, so you really don't get very far from your comfort zone. The entire game could have been like this. Instead, they give you all the units, do a couple of these restricted levels, then give you all the units back again. Maybe in playtesting, people weren't figuring out that you need to go acid in order to beat the later stages? I dunno. I felt like more could have been done with this mechanic, since it was the only time I was forced to actually think after solving a game which, with only one lane one damage type, and one best unit, seems predisposed to be very much solvable.

Overall, it's a tactically dull TD with slick polish and some incredibly solid coding. At first I couldn't believe it was powered by Flash, until I remembered that they probably developed it using CS5, targeting Mobile. The graphics have that look to them when you zoom in, like they were rasterized long ago, before the game was even compiled. These sprites have NEVER seen a MovieClip. And while that's generally a good thing in Flash, it betrays this game's DNA. It was built for casual gamers, and it shows. If you take that into account, it's not too bad.

xewelus responds:

Thanks for respond, but threre is a mistake/ This game always prerenders an art on start using screen resolution. Only Flash MovieClips.

[Cosmic Clicks]

Now THIS is how you make a cookie clicker clone on Newgrounds! Back in my Planet Clicker review, we saw how NOT to do it. Fortunately, Cosmic Clicks delivers the goods. Why would anyone make a free game that rips off another free game? I say why the hell not! The gameplay is every bit as good as Cookie Clicker, and the characters and humor are fresh. I personally worked the tech tree from back to front and didn't particularly regret what that did to the story. X3

Everyone even remotely interested in game design should play Cookie Clicker, Planet Clicker, and Cosmic Clicks, in that order, for a textbook example of the DOs and DON'Ts of firing off a Me-Too entry into a popular new genre. New Theme = Good. New IP = good. Missing Features = Bad. Shit Programming = Very bad. Increased wait time in a game based on waiting = deal-breaker. Cosmic Clicks succeeded in every way that Planet Clicker failed.

Best of luck to DarqTimmy. Now I need to go check out Boss 101, see what these guys were up to back in the day...

DarkTimmy responds:

Thanks so much and really glad you like the game. I will be frank and say I didn't know how this would be received. I mean, I liked it and enjoyed making it. haha. It was very nice to see others enjoyed it too! I heard about some clicker games but in many ways I just made Cosmic Clicks and didn't check too hard on what else was out there. I do admit to loving the click games though!

Thanks again for the nice review and the comments, Really made my day to read it along with all the other nice reviews. More to come for sure so look for info on Boss 101 sequels as well as a possible Cosmic Clicks sequel!

Best, -Tim

[Space Flash Arena]

I'm amazed that this only has a 3-star average. Sure, 40 kills is way too long to spend flying around the same map fighting the same two enemies over and over again, but the controls and presentation are both rock-solid! Is there a better 3D dogfighting game in Flash out there that I don't know about?

My one complaint is that when you get the reticule on an enemy ship's lead indicator, it turns white, making it HARDER to maintain the lock, not easier. :( Five stars for sheer ambition and solid follow-through.

[Joe X]

On the surface, this is just another flash game, high on style and attitude, low on mechanics and replayability. But once you've been playing it for a bit, you start to realize just how hard the developer is trying to force Flash to be something that it isn't... to deliver an aesthetic experience that the platform just can't manage. At least not on my system, and not with this level of optimization.

The controls are responsive, but you're almost never in a position to fire your gun. There's always something too close, especially when you're first dropping into a mosh pit fulla enemies. You can't press down and jump at the same time to drop down to another level, so it makes you wonder why they didn't just make Up an alternate jump. No in-game explanation of the controls. Yeah, I see it up there now, but when I was playing the game and forming my first impressions, I had no idea all those other buttons existed. I found the arrow keys and A and S and assumed that was the whole game.

The camera absolutely hates you. It's slow to react to your movements, and there's always blurry crap in the foreground. When are retro side-scrollers going to stop doing this? We had the technology in 8-bit Nintendo to layer crap in front of the playing field, guys. There's a reason we didn't use it. Tiny things in the foreground giving an illusion of depth = more immersion. Giant things in the way that make you think "god dammit why do the game developers hate me so much" = LESS immersion. All you had to do was not make your stupid "I wish I was directing a movie instead of making a video game" cinematic bullshit not fuck up the gameplay. Shakey-cam might have been okay if it had a purpose, but here it just felt abstract and floaty, with no real purpose other than to remind you that the developers figured out how to implement shakey-cam. It's not reserved for footsteps and earthquakes, and it's not used intelligently to simulate the feel of a handheld camera, it just shakes the fuck out of the camera at all times. Maybe there was a race condition happening between Flash's update speed and the code that accounts for camera movement, I don't know. It probably didn't help when the frame rate started to drop.

Which brings me to performance. Generally the bane of all Flash games, but particularly nasty when a developer tests their game on a next-gen rig without giving any thought whatsoever to optimization. In this age of Adobe trying to sabotage Flash's own legacy with increasingly buggy Flash Player releases, of developers abandoning the web as we know it in favor of mobile platforms that just don't want to run non-native code, and newbies pouring into both the developer space and userbase, you absolutely NEED to test your flash game on a shitty rig. I did not play this game long enough for it to really chug, but I could tell the unfinished garbage collection was starting to pile up. It didn't feel like a MovieClip game. There was too much stuff going on at once. Scrolling. Hordes of enemies. Frame rates would have started off in the crapper if they were relying on MovieClips for everything. But whatever they were doing for optimization purposes, they weren't doing enough of it. Maybe they needed to cache those blurred objects instead of applying a blur filter every frame. Maybe they just needed to lower the update rate in the Flash IDE so it has time to breathe and run Garbage Collection. Maybe they should have used dirty variables and Object Pooling to avoid creating and destroying objects at runtime. I couldn't speculate. But whatever they were doing for optimization, they needed to do better. This is not sufficient to allow the game to run at reasonable frame rates on my computers, and I've seen better Flash games get away with more in the past. I do appreciate the obvious use of delta-timing and the responsiveness of inputs.

So. More levels? More variety? Bosses? Upgrades? Collectibles? Sure, any or all of that stuff, if well-implemented, would have been nice to have. But I didn't even get to the point where I had time to realize how shallow the game was like other reviewers have said. I was too busy being put off by obnoxious foreground objects and enemy swarms that give me no real opportunity to slip in there and lay down some lead. Full points for style and a good-faith attempt at optimization. But I wouldn't go so far as to call it playable.

Lower the attempted frame rate to something like 20 and get rid of the foreground objects, show me all the controls when the game starts, or better still put in a MegamanX style first level where you need to use the moves to get through, and I could see playing this for another 5 or 10 minutes. If it's really just the one level as some reviews have said, I probably wouldn't have given it a much higher score, but I would have at least felt like the game wasn't talking over my head (system requirements) while saying nothing of interest (gameplay).

[Zos]

I'm sorry, but this game just put me to sleep. I must not be the right audience for it, because I could tell everything about the game was incredibly well-done, and it all contributes to a cohesive whole. But that whole is so painfully DULL.

You play as Browny McTangrey, a dull protagonist on the planet Brownplace IV. One day he literally walks down the block and gets told by an old man to save the universe. You see, there once was an ancient lovecraftian horror, then some people destroyed its brain by shooting it with magical space laser swords or something, then it ate the entire universe, and now it's back and you have to kill it. Don't ask me why they didn't just kill it themselves when they, you know, destroyed its brain and all. It's a good thing sentient life couldn't possibly have evolved on any of those other planets in the Universe. No, no. Just these seven. Whoopsie!

The controls are functional, clean and precise, but good lord the dynamics are awkward. I had flashbacks to 8-bit Castlevania, but not in the good way, since we're looking at like 3 animals per planet, at least in the part I played. Your primary attack is to throw flasks of fire potion that you created an infinite supply of by combining three small plants and no glass.

In dialogue, where everyone looks the same and you never choose what to say, you have two options for text display speed. You can either read the text slow by tapping the button once, or hold down the button so it goes as fast as it can with no pauses, but since it's limited to one character per EnterFrame, it's still almost exactly as slow. Heaven forbid it should just show you the whole paragraph at once or something. Clearly a little "blippity beep" sound effect while the letters appear that was already stale in 1986 and doesn't have any real reason for existing when the text isn't in kana is clearly worth wasting my time.

Then you travel to a jungle planet full of tribal sterotypes and you keep dying and needing to climb this mountian and OH GOD the music somebody give me some forks so I can stab myself in the legs just to get sensation flowing again. I could honestly put up with all of it, the bull backgrounds, the dull premise, the flat characters that are barely one-dimmensional archetypes, the slow text, the slow walking, the slow, slow, slow combat against slow enemies using slow, awkward weapons that involve hitting a parabolic arc with another parabolic arc... I could power through all of that shit and give the story one last chance to wow me on planets 3 and 4, if the music weren't SO FUCKING DULL.

The music in this game just puts you to sleep. It's this painful, tedious funeral dirge that just sucks all the life out of your body and leaves you a listless corpse, one cold, dead hand on the keyboard, tapping out an epitaph composed of left, right, up and space. When I finally died on top of the mountain and had to re-collect all the ingredients in the village, I wasn't even mad. I couldn't be. Anger is an emotion, and the music had rendered me dead inside. I just went "oh," and quietly closed the window to write this review. When you first get to the jungle planet, it actually sounds upbeat, until you get used to it. 20 or 30 iterations later, you're dead inside again. It's just... BLUH..... BLUH BLUH BLUH..... BLUH BLUH BLUH..... for 3 hours. I want to slap my own face just to wake up!

After a review that negative, you might wonder why the rating is so high. Well, it's because a lot of effort went into this, and it shows. They were clearly going for a certain vibe here, and to an extent they succeeded. I respect this game as art. But Jesus Christ don't ever PLAY it.

It is a dead, cold, lifeless husk of a game. Do not be fooled by the retro graphics and Castlevania-inspired combat mechanics. This is not an exciting action-RPG sidescroller. More like it got all the recessive genes of Castlevania II... the story, the dialogue, the imprecise control mixed with a health bar that removes all sense of challenge... and then swiped the rest of its DNA from Flashback. Or more like that new "spiritual successor" to Flashback whose name escaped me at the moment. No, not Gunpoint. Gunpoint was awesome. The one that didn't work.

It's like. Move. Wait. Move. Wait. Inane Dialogue. Wait Wait Wait Novel Jumping Puzzle You Died. Wait.

And the worst part is they are TRYING SO FUCKING HARD to make this WORK! It just doesn't. I can't. Take my four stars. Just take them. Use them to build a better life! I just. The game sucks I can't handle it! Just take the stars!

Asvegren responds:

ahahahahaha jesus

[Planet clicker]

Okay so we've all played Cookie Clicker. We know what makes it fun, right? Watching the numbers go up. Watching our elaborate collection of eldritch cookie generators pile up. Selling our Grandma. Planet Clicker enjoys none of those benefits. So what does it offer instead? Not a whole hell of a lot.

Where Cookie Clicker was silly, Planet Clicker takes itself seriously. Where took a simple premise and cracked it up to 11, Planet Clicker takes an elaborate premise (seeding planetary life) and dials the interest back down to near zero. (Seriously, this makes Spore look epic.) Where Cookie Clicker does what it can to be fast and responsive, despite the limitations of being implemented in JavaScript, Planet Clicker is so bad at leveraging the pros and cons of Flash that A ONE SECOND UPDATE LITERALLY TAKES FIVE SECONDS.

For a shameless knock-off, this game sure loves to reinvent the wheel. Remember how in Cookie Clicker, most of the actual play game from trying to guess which was faster? Taking a series of small boosts now, or saving up for a big one later? Well that's all gone here. Instead, you NEED to buy so many of the less desirable upgrades before you're ALLOWED to buy a better one like Human or City. Sure, it makes thematic sense, but it absolutely destroys the gamplay in the process. Seriously, agonizing over the decision of when to go for the next tier literally WAS THE GAME in Cookie Clicker.

And while technically, you can see your upgrades, and they look fine, they're not as spectacular as they were in Cookie Clicker. You never see explosions of life or particle effects or amusing news headlines about how your planet is doing. I guess you can see your cows from space. So there's that. But it's too little, too late. It's nothing compared to the showers of cookies and armies of Grandmas you've already seen in Cookie Clicker. I could personally make this game in Flash and have entire herds of cows swarming around on the surface, and even if that was too hard, I damned sure would have implemented a delta-timer rather than just trusting EnterFrame to run at a fixed speed.

Bottom line, Planet Clicker does almost nothing its spiritual ancestor did right. It's excruciatingly slow, mind-numbingly tedious, completely devoid of humor, and ultimately it's the one thing a god-game about seeding life on a planet has absolutely no excuse for being:

Lifeless.

[Tesla: War Of Currents]

I'm frustrated because I really wanted to like this game. It's great fun until you start trying to use your brain, then you realize that the game's mechanics are stacked against you.

Try this: Build two medics and three long-range units, and march your team around a loop with another row of towers parallel to them. You'd think the medics would heal each other, and the long range attackers would take out the row of towers that can't shoot back because you're not in range, right?

And actually, that's exactly what happens for a little bit! But then your medics just straight-up STOP WORKING, and the long-range units stop attacking, even though they killed two other enemy guns the same distance away.

There is a hard limit on how useful your choices can be. This limit is not encoded into the game's explicitly explained mechanics. Rather, the limit is hidden in the background, encoded into mechanics the developer understands but the player is not allowed to see.

You are not allowed to understand how the game works. You are not allowed to outsmart the game. You are only allowed to build the same boring, ineffective unit combinations as everybody else and use your special powers to make up the difference in healing and damage output.

END RESULT: the entire game is bullshit. Thinking will not help you win. The harder you think about how to do better, the stupider you feel when it doesn't work. This is "modern" game design at its most insipid and annoying. Everything is limited by cooldown rates and hard limits on how effective any one choice can be. They might as well have just put a mobile phone game's "energy system" in there while they were at it. And what was the benefit? I could see this kinda bullshit being the result of greed if the developer was somehow getting paid for making the game less fun, but here the anti-fun serves no purpose.

Why do you care if I build something clever, NSBrotherhood? Why do you want me to do the same mediocre job at beating your game as every other player? Why are you so invested in preventing me from spanking your game with a really well-designed team that exploits the hell out of core principles? Why are you hiding rules from me? Why are you using anti-fun game design techniques we usually only see on mobile games? How does this benefit you, the developer?

This is not a strategy game. It's a cow-clicker with a very elaborate interface.

[Chicken Chaser]

Reasonably decent Dad 'N' Me knockoff with some frustrating difficulty spikes near the end. Why do I compare it to Dad 'n' Me rather than Castle Crashers? Simple. No upgrades. It would have collectible coins when you kill enemies and then something to spend them on, but I can respect an oldschool brawler that doesn't feel the need to shoehorn in RPG elements. So how does it stack up against classic Brawlers? Well... not perfectly.

On the plus side, the controls were decent and responsive. I liked how you slid in the ink puddles, though I could never tell if double-tapping made me faster or not. Core combat was just deep enough that you'd think you don't even need Strong Attack at all until you try it and realize it's your throw. Most big bruiser enemies are dealt with in the same way, by moving vertically and occasionally chipping away at them, but I LOVED the octopus boss, whose attacks were juuuuuust the right difficulty to dodge, and looked great besides.

I lost my patience and quit during the star planet. Too bad because those guys were cute. But there was literally nothing I could do to improve my performance. There is literally no rhyme or reason for when that orbiting star fucker appears. Sometimes it's 5 seconds after you see him zoom by in the background, sometimes it's one second. Sometimes he attacks where you are, sometimes he attacks where you're going to be. Every single time I got hit, it was because I didn't understand where the hit was going to come from until it was too late. Left and right side I was able to deal with, but not all the other randomness, and doing it during a fight was just plain unfair. Timing didn't help, reflexes didn't help. The only way to fix it would be to make that "swoop" sound like when it comes in from the left, every time, even when it's coming from the right. Would that make it too easy? Probably, but I don't care. When a suspicious number of enemies in a row mysteriously don't have hearts, you start to feel like the game is just cheating.

Garbage Collection didn't seem to be a show-stopping issue on my MacBook Pro, which is rare for a Flash game this action-oriented, and one that uses large scrolling backgrounds, even. That said, there was still some consistent chugging throughout the game. Things which seemed like they would be super-smooth and cyclical on a console game instead stuttered along at about 5-10 frames per second. There might have been no way around this without rasterizing the graphics.

The theme was cute and absurd when it worked, unfortunately it didn't always work. 90% of all the best jokes, I felt like I'd already laughed harder when Dr. Zoidberg did them. Why are there sea monster aliens in the desert? Is that the joke? Each level has its own setpieces, but many of them reuse their one gimmick over and over again (puddles, ink, TNT,) to the point where you'll start to wonder why there isn't something novel in the middle of the stage to break it up. A treehouse or a mine cart or something. Basically more gimmicks per level. Brawlers as far back as Ninja Turtles have been training us to expect more. I realize how unfair that is, and maybe it's not a valid criticism. This game does more than a lot of Flash Brawlers, and I had time to appreciate how responsive and intuitive the controls were in the first few stages. I was having a great time up through the end of the Octopus battle. But then the desert stage felt phoned-in and the Star level was keyboard-throwingly difficult for reasons that seem to have nothing to do with your ability to play the game well. Points for effort. But Castle Crashers, it ain't.

[Underdeep]

Here's my gameplay experience from start to finish:

"Oh, wow, another Unity game on Newgrounds. You don't see very many of these. Okay so you can break blocks with your sword. That's pretty cool. Okay, I guess I'll start gradually exploring the introductory area..."

"Wait... why did I teleport? HOLY SHIT enemies! Wait. You only get one life? FUCK! I FORGOT THIS WAS A LUDUMDARE GAME! OH MY GOD WHY AM I PLAYING A ONE-LIFE GAME? EVER!? How do I close the window? AAAAAHHH WHere is my mouse cursor!? WTF Why can't I click outside the window!? What's going on!? ALT-TAB doesn't work! Alt+Shift+Esc? OH THANK GOD. *close browser window* God. I HATE those fucking shitty pretentious games where you can only play the game once and then YOUR computer is locked out forever with the game over screen unless you delete whatever bullshit files it saved on your computer without asking you to."

"Guess I need to make my opinions known in the comments section. Otherwise pretentious indie bullshit like the one-chance-per-device mechanic will NEVER give way to actually good gameplay. I'm okay with losing my one game life forever for the sake of loading the comments page. I was panicking before but now I'm at peace with this decision. Let's do this thing. YOLO!" *click*

"Wait, why is it back at the start? It should have dropped me into the middle of the group of enemies who were kicking my ass before, right? Wait. Does "you only get one life" mean the game hacks your computer so you can only play one time ever, or does it just mean you get infinite lives but you need to start from the first room every time you die? Fuck this. I'm gonna die on purpose just so I know what bullshit gimmick mechanic I'm supposed to be angry about. Because that's the point, right? Of these games? To make your audience hate you? We know the point isn't fun. 'Fun' is so gouche, man. You don't want 'fun' in video games! You want STATEMENTS! And those statements always have to consist entirely of 'this game wasted your time.' Because that's what 'art' means as of the 1970s, and we all know that only art theory invented after 1970 is a valid part of the human experience. Anyway. Time to figure this shit out, empirically. YOLO!"

"Okay I'm not sure if the map is different this time or if I just exited a different direction the first time, but this map seems different. I guess there's red bottles? Oh, there's the ladder."

"WOW it's taking forever for the enemies to kill me. I wouldn't have panicked if I'd realized how durable my character was. Normally it's all one-hit-kills with these things. Hurry up, laserbats.... Space to Continue. WOW. Just wow, man. You took the theme "you only get one," decided to interpret that as "you only get one life..." and then it turned out to be a lie. You actually get an infinite number of ones. That's not getting one. That's getting an infinite number of ones. That's unlimited lives. You know what we used to call it in the 80s when a video game made you start over from the very beginning? We called it VIDEO GAMES!"

Fuck this fucking contest! I can't take this anymore! Fuck! Just make a normal game already you guys!

Would have been One Star if it had actually had anything to do with the theme of Ludum Dare's bullshit contest.

[Robo Juicestice]

Oh god it's so bad. And that's FRUSTRATING, because the component parts are so GOOD. It's basically Sonic meets Megaman, and then they get drunk and fool around a little and it ends with rings all over the ground and megaman crushed into a tiny sphere after absorbing Sonic's powers.

Main problem is the levels are too damned big. You've got these TINY sprites and blocks. Gorgeous backgrounds, but tiny foreground components. You might think, "Oh, that's great, it means you could have tons of enemies on-screen at once." NOPE. "Elaborate jumping puzzles?" Sort of but not like you're thinking. Not like Mario 3 or Megaman 2 or any of the other games featuring jumping puzzles that were actually GOOD. Instead, you have tiny blocks you have to land on, stationed more than one screen apart over pools of insta-kill lava.

It's like Sonic's handling, but with Megaman's consequences. IdeaGuy, you realize that the reason Megaman worked is because you could observe the platforms for several seconds BEFORE making your jump, right? And that the reason Sonic's speed and level size worked is because you were mostly safe even if you went jumping off a cliff into the unknown, you'd likely land on a bottom layer and at most lose your rings to some spikes or something? Sonic was all about SPEED RUNS. You'd fumble through the first Zone on your first play-through and feel like a big-shot. Then LATER iterations were all about improving your performance, getting and keeping large amounts of rings, getting the Chaos Emeralds, all that good stuff that requires foreknowledge and precision. You just can't see what you're doing in this game. By the time the screen scrolls and you can see where you're headed, it's too late to correct your decision. Sure, you MIGHT be able to cling to a wall or dash before it's too late, but these feel sticky and clunky and not necessarily helpful. Using a special ability just pushes the problem of dying because of obstacles you couldn't anticipate a split-second further into the future.

I did not make it through the game enough times to lose my powerups. I didn't even make it through the first level. It was that frustrating. And the slippery acceleration and deceleration don't help either. This entire game feels spread thin, built too big, too sparsely populated. It wastes your time teaching you game verbs you don't really need and which hurt you as much as they help you.

Boobs were not enough to make me give this bad gameplay a chance. That is SAYING something. I used to think Ludum Dare was all the judges' faults. But after playing this, I now realize that a lot of these games are just plain *bad.* When your first five minutes are this painful, this frustrating, the empty and joyless, what could you possibly do in the next five minutes to make up for it?

I don't know what else to say. You took good mechanics, good themeing, and good presentation, and tied it all together with shit gameplay that doesn't work. What did you test this on? I am using a keyboard and mouse. You can't see shit. Seriously, how did you expect players to react to a game where you can't see what the fuck you're doing?

If this doesn't win the contest, at least you'll know why. YOU ONLY GET ONE chance to make a first impression.