WarpZone's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[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.

[Deeper Sleep]

I feel bad for not rating this game higher. You can tell there's an incredible amount of work that went into crafting not only the art assets, but the tone and the mood of the game as a whole. Unfortunately, Deeper Sleep suffers from the worst Adventure Game disease: Pixel Hunting. Twice, I got stuck, wandering around the area I've already explored for twenty minutes, hopelessly clicking on random background objects, getting bored, giving up, and consulting the walkthrough. Both times, it turned out there was some damned door hidden behind the sepia tone. I'd sure like to see what monitor this game was tested on, because even with brightness turned all the way up and my laptop's screen tilted at a weird angle, these fuckers were just BARELY visible.

Once you account for that, the game is only like 7 minutes long. This despite lots of long pointless hallways that don't contain any items or locks. You just click, click, click your way through the forest and then click, click, click your way back. It's filler. Filler that, ironically, seems like it would have taken a lot longer to produce than, say, adding one more key/item combination.

As with the sepia tone, the pixel noise "static" effect is also way too pronounced. Isn't a pixel hunt bad enough without further obscuring the pixels? A note to scriptwelder: These things should be SUBTLE! They should add atmosphere to the game without completely obscuring it. Take a look at the Submachine series for a good example of sepia tone done right. As for the static, you want it about 25% as harsh as it is right now. Maybe make it "flare up" in times of great panic or something.

There were a few great setpieces here, like when the library room dissolved or the lone encounter with the "monster" where you fumble the key. That was clever. I also liked how the "notes" were just a single page of backstory with pieces missing, rather than page after page of rambling lore.

All of this said, and technical issues aside, I feel like more could have been done with the premise. I'm playing a guy who has "always wanted" to experience the unrestricted freedom of a lucid dream, right? And one of the VERY first things that happens is a whole wall of the library dissolves into sand. So why the hell isn't he flying around the library shooting rainbows out of his ass at the monsters? That's what I would do in a lucid dream. I once threw a BOOK at a T-REX in a dream! But using a battery to power the elevator is somehow "too crazy" after I just saw the wall melt and the traffic outside disappear?

I realize that maybe he just isn't "deep" enough yet to be lucid dreaming, but that implies he's completely safe from the monsters we're seeing throughout the game. People in horror movies faced with a monster often start desperately trying to convince themselves it's all a dream, even when it isn't! I'm just saying, past a certian point (literally the first area,) the PLAYER assumes he's lucid dreaming. That's what makes it SCARY. So I was half-expecting dream-like solutions to puzzles, and was disappointed when everything ended up being so "grounded" in the real world.

I know that's a weird thing to ask for, crazy nonsense puzzles. It's one of the most common complaints about the Adventure Game genre. But if any game could justify such puzzles, it's a game about dreams, right? Maybe I'm just bitter because I couldn't find the flashlight for a long time, thanks to that first invisible door.

Overall this is a mostly-competent game that trips over its own feet. If possible, I recommend reducing the Sepia Tone by 50% and reducing the pixel noise to 1/4 IMMEDIATELY. Like, make the changes right now and re-reupload the game. It'll give you less crap from guys like me. And for the third game, hopefully try to do something with the theme of Lucid Dreaming that sets this series apart from all the other horror games where "OMG that poster's face is DIFFERENT now!" Not that scriptwelder hasn't done a good job with the tropes and atmosphere, but it's good where it could be great. It needs a little more pacing and timing to really build up that slow-burn psychological tension.

And above all it needs to not yank you out of the experience by forcing you to consult the walkthrough just to progress. A game where a person tells you exactly where to go and what to do IN THE GAME would literally be scarier than a game where you have to stop and look up the answer outside of the game. But I don't think that level of hand-holding is necessary here. Just make the obvious exits obvious, and you should be good.

I look forward to the next game in this series, because subtlety is King in good horror, I know that subtlety is the kind of thing that only comes with time and experience. Maybe next dream.

scriptwelder responds:

Wow, thanks for this incredibly throughout review/feedback!
I will take under consideration some of your points as I find them really interesting.

I hate to admit it but I've probably failed as a designer if people say there is pixel-hunting present in my game. After what I've learnt from previous games, I decided this one will only have pixel-hunting as something completely optional and not required to complete the main plot. So I've made those scraps of papers that were meant to be really small and difficult to get, while other things are big and clear - I've spent few hours just making that damn needle shine in the flashlight beam :D But now I see I might have missed the obvious while paying attention to details: Yes, light in some areas is definitely too dim. I know exactly where you couldn't find the doorway. It won't be hard to adjust the light there, so I think I'll just do it in next update :)
As for pixel noise - originally it was going be be fluctuating up and down, depending on what happens on the screen. For various reasons I abandoned this idea and left the noise on a fixed level. Because of blending method, the noise is more visible when it's dark... so I think it connects with the previous problem you've mentioned.
As for empty spaces, corridor and forest - well first of all forest isn't really that empty, you know :D and dark corridor is a very special place from part one - its sole purpose here is to bring back memories.
I completely understand what do you have in mind while saying there is no lucid dreaming in this game. Remember this is a _failed_ lucid dreaming attempt. I guess the fact that player's character has no control over the dream, will be further explained in the next installment of the game.
I'm going to write a blog post about making of Deeper Sleep, something like 'post mortem' post soon, trying to pinpoint where did I failed and where did I succeed, so keep your eye on my blog.
Cheers!

[Zombo Buster]

You'd think Plants vs Zombies meets Resident Evil would be more exciting than this. It's a nice concept and the lane-based TD gameplay is really solid. The elevator is an interesting twist, albeit one that you will go out of your way to avoid once you figure out how to populate all the floors at once. The characters have a lot of VISUAL personality, but as characters they have zero personality or motivation, and lack even proper names. I will admit that they put an introduction and a proper ending into the game, it just didn't feel meaningful.

Mechanically, the gameplay is interesting, with a wide variety of enemy types added throughout the course of the game. The bosses each introduce new mechanics (including one that will get your guys killed if you don't react to it fast enough-- try reducing Quality to Low so flash will register all of your mouse clicks!) Once you figure out who the most powerful unit is, you won't want to build anything else, but even then the game becomes a nonstop race to upgrade your units while also clicking the "Next Wave" button as fast as possible.

I'm giving this 4 stars because, even after I figured out how to break the game by building all of one particular unit, I kept wanting to play. Technically I probably should have lost interest, but the pacing and reward schedules kept me going even though I had basically "solved" the game. The developers deserve some credit for that, and this is probably a textbook example of how to leverage RPG elements to make a boring game somewhat interesting.

Here's hoping they make an even better game in the future that uses these systems!

[D2C 200 subscriber thanks]

Having developed with Unity before, I feel like its security sandbox is no more or less prone to developer abuse than Flash has been throughout the years. Details here: http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/Manual/SecuritySandbox.html

Unfortunately, some antivirus manufacturers currently report a false positive when the Unity Web Player tries to load, and browser penetration is currently much lower than Flash.

Having said that, how did you even get Newgrounds to host a .unity file? Some sort of flash frontend around an HTML wrapper around the Unity Webplayer? While I feel that Unity is a superior plugin for web-based 3D games, circumventing Tom's decision not to host Unity files here feels vaguely subversive. Whatever Tom's reasoning, he's chosen not to host unity files while a bunch of other web game portals choose to allow them. Circumventing that policy feels like a dick move.

In any case, I couldn't get the Unity webplayer to load in Firefox with NoScript, because I don't know what domain name is hosting the Unity webplayer file. It's not exposed in the HTML, so NoScript doesn't offer me the option to whitelist it.

Bottom line: Content did not load. Zero stars.

[Self-Aware]

[Game] / [Art]
[0] / [5]
[Confusion] / [Simplicity]
[Honest] / [Purpose]
[Nostalgia] / [Troll]
[Random] / [Random]
[Meaningless] / [Empty]
[Repeat] / [Distraction]
[Feedback] / [Motivation]
[Goal] / [Motivation]
[Quit] / [Time]
[Feedback] / [Reenforcement]
[Feedback] / [Analytics]
[Feedback] / [Secret]
[Gameplay] / [Asleep]
[Pretentiousness] / [Minimal]
[Expectations] / [Tedium]
[Reality] / [Pointless]
[Five] / [Fiven]
[Purpose] / [Why]
[Statement] / [Obscure]
[Statement] / [None]
[Audience] / [Confused]
[Confusion] / [Indifference]
[Art Game] / [Meaningless]
[Brevity] / [Complete]
[Art Game] / [Harmless]
[Review] / [Rebuttal]
[Newgrounds] / [Just make a regular game goddammit well at least you had the common decency to label it an Art Game so we more or less knew what we were getting ourselves into so thanks for that but jesus christ the longer you play the stupider you feel for ever thinking there was a point to it in the first place. See how I'm just spelling out what all that previous nonsense in this review meant? Instead of making you guess? That's actually pretty generous of me, when you think about it. I mean, sure, there's a CHANCE you were randomly guessing what I meant by all those word pairs but this way you actually have some fucking idea what I thought of your game. Chances are you were way off-track. You can't just throw random shit at a human brain and expect the subject to make their own fun. There has to actually BE something of meaning or value underneath all the smoke and mirrors for the person to catch glimpses of. Otherwise the whole experience is pointless, and it quickly becomes obvious just how pointless it is. Sad thing is, add a little number that goes up every time you choose one of two things, and a bar that slowly fills until you beat a level, and you could leverage Skinner Box bullshit to keep players doing this for hours. Assuming you actually have something to say at the end or throughout the experience as a whole, this would make more people stick with it long enough to have a chance at discovering it. But, no. If the actual message was "OMG IS THERE A MESSAGE OR ISN'T THERE," then I'm bored even interpreting the art to look for a question. From what I can tell this Art Game has exactly the same message as most other Art Games, and that message is "ASK ME WHAT IT MEANS ASK ME WHAT IT MEANS!" Fuck art games. This is bullshit. But you got us in and out quickly, my friend, and were up front about how hollow and pointless the experience was going to be. You labeled this an Art Game, and thus I don't feel like I wasted any more of my time than I chose to. For that simple act of human decency to your players, you get 5 stars. I don't care if I didn't get it. I'm an audience, you didn't reach me, that's your fault, not mine. Oh and if you were going to claim this was some sort of parody of Art Games, meh. It's not funny at all. Hardly seems self-aware at all. Whatever. I think I covered all the bases, I'm done thinking about this. Friggin' Art Games. *rolls eyes, shakes head*]

PoshRaven responds:

It looks like you've already decided your opinion on art games before you clicked on my game.

and i get it. you don't trust that there is a meaning to the game (and why would you), so you shut down and play it with a mindset geared towards how objectively fun it is and then disappointed with what you get (or at least that is what most people do) and really i don't blame you. if you did that with most things on the internet then you just end up with a whole lot of noise.

But the thing is that honestly, it is really hard to convince people on newgrounds that my games has meaning, and i have worked on projects that try to do that as well. But with this game i just said "fuck it, i don't care anymore, i'm going to put no effort into getting trust from the player because it doesn't seem to matter to most people anyway, wasted energy on my part and takes away from what i like to do"

Anyway there was a point / message to the game. i'm not going to throw you bone though, because what's the fun in that.

[Captain Robert]

Captain Robert, come in! This is Central Command. Over.

Central command, this is Captain Robert, over.

We read you loud and clear, Captain, can you state your position? Over.

Command, I appear to be outside the ship, standing on empty space beneath the vessel. Please advise.

...

Come in, Command.

Command here. Please clarify... did you just say you put on your space suit, went through an airlock, and went outside the ship?

Negative, command. Negative. I just jumped up through one of those black tiles in the ceiling that look like part of the background, but aren't actually solid. I appear to be accessing a part of physical space that shouldn't actually exist in this universe. Also, all of the clues are pointing at me with all the subtlety of Uncle Sam, lord Lord Kitchener and Babe Ruth riding an English Short-Haired Pointer while programming in COBOL. Tentatively suggest you scrub the mission and arrest me for murder, until we know more. Over.

This is Command. Negative, Captain. You have your orders. Wander around in space clicking on white blobs until the game lets you know what the fuck is going on. Over

Come back, Command. Are you serious? I just told you I'm obviously the murderer. I don't think I'm even in the ship at all, I think maybe I'm stuck inside this escape-pod looking room I saw along the way? It's like a metaphor for how I escaped into my own mind or some bullshit? OH, COME ON! Now I just saw a giant sign that says "Hi!" Command, get me down from here. This is stupid. Over.

... We are not reading a giant "HI," Captain. Over.

I am sending you readings of the HI right now, gentlemen. It is composed of pure Blue Pixel Alloy. It is locked in parallel orbit with the ship. It does not move when I push off from it. I am scared. Over.

Your fear is duly noted Capitan, but I'm afraid we need you to examine your own preconceptions about the media of 2D platformers and arrive at the epiphany that the people who made this game are the greatest fucking geniuses of all time. Over.

I'm sorry, Command. We must have been getting a burst of electromagnetic radiation because it sounds like you said this was a good game. It's not even *A* game. As far as I can tell it's like Super Metroid but minus all the stuff that made Super Metroid fun.

ASK ME WHAT IT MEANS ASK ME WHAT IT MEANS

Command? You're breaking up.

AAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRTTTTTT!

Yup. Gonna just quit now, Command. Don't care how it ends. I was the killer. Whatever. Gonna shoot myself, then I'm gonna go play Super Metroid again.

*static*

*END OF TRANSMISSION*

[Carrot Fantasy]

Game doesn't load. It just slowly creeps up from 0 to 85 and says "FOG Carrot freeonlinegames.com Fantasy" at you. Stars when the game actually works. Bonus points if you can get the title and the loading screen to both be readable at the same time. By, you know, slightly moving one of them.

[The Peacekeeper]

The Peacekeepr may look like an AXEion game, but it AXE more like a rhythm game. You'll need careful positioning and timing to avoid enemy attAXE, while taking care to prioritize enemies who can lock down one of your lanes. The mandatory upgrade system which all flash and mobile games are now required to include by law is AXEually surprisingly well-implemented. Just when you think you've mAXEd out everything useful, the game ups the level caps, and you never feel like a new weapon makes your previous upgrades worthless.

Aesthetically, the game is typical Newgrounds fare, with more blood than a mAXEie pad, but it makes me wonder if this will hurt the game on mobile. I never felt pressured or threatened into buying additional gold, thanks to upgraded backPAX, though I always felt like my damage output was a little lAXE. It's possible that the backpack upgrades are priced such that mAXEing them out first is a tAXEtixal mistake. Okay I admit that one was pretty bad.

The saved game system is pretty seamless in the way it silently bAXE up your progress, and slowdown due to garbage collection (which is something of a problem on this computer) was minimal enough that I didn't mind it. The timing-based nature of gameplay may have AXEually made a little slowdown welcome.

Final Verdict: The Peacekeeper is a game you've all played before, but with such a polished AXEecution, you won't mind playing it again. If it had AXEtra levels or a more punishing difficulty curve, and way less gory graphics, I could see it working on mobile. But AXE it stands, I have to AXE myself who this game is AXEually for. The gameplay won't tAXE your mousing skills, but would play worse without a mouse. So if the PC version is just an advertisement for the mobile version, and the mobile version lAXE soft paywalls the way the PC version does, I find myself wondering where the huge sAXE of money are supposed to be coming from.

What's that? Maybe they decided that, after making a bunch of painfully money-hungry games like Battle Cry, they decided to just make a fun game for once? Maybe it's only on mobile as a nod to the community there, not as a blatant cash-grab? Maybe extra gold from the moneyshop really is just there as an optional convenience this time, not an implied requirement to actually finish the so-called free game?

Man, if I believed that were even possible for even one second, maybe I could just relAXE.