WarpZone's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[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.

[Don't Escape]

How to beat the game:

METHOD 1:
- Tie rope to cellar door.
- Climb into cellar.
- Chain leg to Boulder.
- Pull rope to pull cellar door shut.
- Untie rope.
>> The werewolf clawed at the cellar walls for 8 hours (0% stamina)

METHOD 2:
- Travel to Witch's hut.
- Chain self to Witch.
- Demand multiple wolfsbane potions.
- Wait for nightfall.
>> You felt yourself starting to transform. (1%)
>> You drank a potion. (0%)
>> You felt yourself starting to transform. (1%)
>> You drank a potion. (0%)
>> You felt yourself starting to transform. (1%)
>> You drank a potion. (0%)
>> You felt yourself starting to transform. (1%)
>> You drank a potion. (0%)
>> The witch said "This is stupid," and just cast a spell to kill you already.

METHOD 5:
- Click around the cottage until you find the load-bearing support beam.
- Use chain on beam.
- Use chain on self.
>> The building immediately collapsed on the werewolf. The werewolf struggled against the weight of the rubble for 8 hours. Afterward, I wriggled out through a gap too small for the wolf to fit through.

METHOD 6:
- Remove cauldron of water from fireplace.
- Place "it's empty" pot on head.
- Get into fireplace and stand upright.
- Use rope on self.
- Use chain on self.
>> The transformation took place, but the werewolf was trapped on all sides by stone masonry.
>> The wereworlf was unable to move, see, or move against the chains. After 5 minutes of impotent rage, it spend the whole night whimpering and pissing itself.

METHOD 7:
- Use rope on meat.
- Look up.
- Use rope-and-meat on ceiling.
>> The werewolf spend the night lunching at the ceiling, snapping its jaws, trying to get that bloody piece of meat that was just hanging there... dripping...

METHOD 8:
- Realize the game is a pixel hunt with a random noise filter over the pixels.
- Read how to beat the game on Gamefaqz.
- Post a lengthy diatribe on Reddit about how and why the Adventure Game genre killed itself.
- Get hired by Kotaku for hating on western games sufficiently.

METHOD 9:
- Play Maniac Mansion.
- Play Submachine Series.
- Play Monkey Island.
- Close web browser. Game = beat.

METHOD 10:
- Use axe on chest.
- Continue carrying axe rather than discarding it randomly after one use.
- Win at life.

METHOD 11:
- Use axe on self.
>> The world is now safe from the werewolf.

[Giggi's Quest (Prototype)]

Basically a top-down shooter with a painfully obtuse attack mechanic. Imagine if you had to go pick up all your arrows in Gauntlet before you could attack again and you've got the general idea. It's not just that the game is slow (you could fix this by using CopyPixels to draw your 2 freaking frames of animation to the screen instead of using movieclips. This isn't hard,) but that the rhythm of combat itself is slow. Your bullets travel slowly, collecting them is slow, retreat is slow, everything is slow. Why do I have to run up to them and collect them AFTER I click R? They retreat so slowly, I might as well just let them die and then go pick them up-- I have to kite the enemy out of the way for 2 minutes either way to go collect them! Nothing happens in a snappy or responsive fashion. WORST OF ALL, the stun mechanic is complete bullshit. You attack once and then Retreat and the stun lasts for EXACTLY how long it takes you to click retreat. There's no timing or tactics to it, no way you can swoop in and hit R and escape while the enemy's still stunned. It's NOTHING LIKE when someone gets knocked out in real life, is what I'm saying, so it FEELS like bullshit even if it's mechanically balanced.

The "take over the world" story is meaningless because the gameplay is very obviously not about taking over the world, it's just a parenthood story. Bad guys kidnapped your kids. Go save them. There's your fucking story. You know, a story that actually MOTIVATES the player to go DO what the game is FORCING you to do ANYWAY? That's how you marry mechanics to gameplay. Sheesh. This isn't hard stuff, guys. This is like game design 101.

Perhaps worst of all, I can't figure out who this game is FOR. The aesthetics scream iphone, but there's no way these controls are going to map gracefully to a touchscreen. There's just too much going on. You want to make these controls work on mobile devices? Touch an enemy or object ONCE to send ALL your kids after it. Touch again to retreat ALL your kids-- they always arrive back at you in 2 seconds at the most-- dampen their position, not an actual linear movement. Also that would, you know, just in general make the game PLAYABLE, instead of this circle-strafing and sitting around waiting for the enemy to get off your damned kids already so you can circle around and pick them up. It's just BORING. You've made a game about WAITING. FIX IT!

To fix:
- Make the plot of the game about saving your damn kids. It doesn't need to be any more complicated than that.

- Simplify the core combat mechanics. This stun nonsense is stupid. Simpler gameplay is NECCESSARY on iphone, but even on PC this is a lot of controls-wrangling for very little gameplay. You want it to be the other way around, with simple controls giving the player lots of experiencially different outcomes.

- Attack and retreat should both be VERY fast. Challenge should come from prioritizing enemies and maybe hitting some sort of powerup that changes what your kids do before and after attacking.

- Your kids should never get stuck, or if they do, collecting them should feel different than collecting them when you hit R. As it is now, both R and kids dead feel like exactly the same type and duration of time penalty. I feel like the game is wasting my time whether my kids die or not! This leads to BOREDOM!

- Enemies who are stunned should get stunned for an amount of TIME. If your kids MUST get stunned for attacking, their stun should ALSO be based on time. NOT ON WHETHER OR NOT YOU'VE RETREATED! Right now the whole stun mechanic feels like a solution in search of a problem. In fact, most of the play mechanics feel this way.

- If the theme of the game is, in fact, supposed to be parenthood, then make the kids look and feel different. Give me a fast one and a slow one, a fat one and a smart one and one that doesn't pay any intention to instructions. Give me the tools to make this motley collection attack and retreat as a group, and send me running around to collect them when one or two of them get seperated. Don't waste my time with the basic gameplay. When a kid gets knocked down, they should scream and cry. When I collect them, they should do something cute to where I feel like I made it all better for them. Make me FEEL something.

- If the theme of the game is NOT meant to be parenthood, but in fact world domination, then actually give me some sort of evil plan to work towards. I should be collecting parts to build a Death Ray, and if I happen to encounter my minions along the way, good, they can be useful. But make up your mind. The tonal whiplash as the game can't make up its mind what it is about is KILLING engagement right now. It's as bad as Uncharted or Prototype, where you're all "boo hoo I'm a tragic heroic character in the cutscenes, whelp, time to go commit mass murder over treasures." GAMEPLAY AND STORY SHOULD SUPPORT EACH OTHER, NOT CONTRADICT EACH OTHER!

- Graphics are okay. No one cares. Fix the broken gameplay and broken story and maybe we can get something out of this.

OmarShehata responds:

Wow, first of all, thank you so much for the huge and in-depth review!

I'm aware of all the issues you presented. The "story" for example, was made in 5 minutes before submitting it, so it's obviously just thrown in there for the sake of being in there.

And since the whole game itself was made under a pretty strict deadline, we focused more on experimenting with different ideas and prototyping than polishing.

While I appreciate your feedback, I would like to offer some of mine own: being condescending really doesn't make people want to take your advice.

[Mars Colonies Demo]

Whew, this was a slog for me to wade through. When I first started to play, I was frustrated. I despised the seemingly endless delay between me issuing an order and seeing it actually carried out. I questioned the decision to give buildings fixed directional power and water inputs. And I cried foul when, after seemingly achieving all of Mission 3's objectives within the first year, the counter froze at 99/100 and my colonists started dying off. I wondered why everyone was praising this thing in reviews. I IM'ed the author, basically asking dubbya tea eff.

I eventually found the game everyone else was playing, but it took some unwrapping.

Part of the problem, I think was that I am used to playing strategy games with much more clear-cut dynamics. Civ III. Total Annihilation. Heck, even Plants VS Zombies. The mechanics were pretty clear up-front, but you need to parse them before you really "know" what the tutorial was actually teaching you. Players who've played Tropico might be right at home, but I struggled. Oh, how I struggled.

This isn't a game for creative builders. You can't just build whatever you like and react to the enemy when you discover them. No, sir. Instead, you need to know what you're doing weeks before you do it. Because your plans are just going to sit there in the inbox while four or eight or twelve little space dudes draw straws to see who goes where and does what.

What I thought was a harsh and unforgiving main game-- building resources and engaging the enemy-- are actually just a prolonged base-building phase at the beginning of the level. If you're having trouble, do the first two missions again and write down the order in which they had you build stuff.

Constantly keep an eye on your Oxygen and Food-- these can creep up on you and lead to a failed game state where it doesn't say Game Over until 20 minutes *after* you made your fatal mistake. Metal and Components are next, although you won't kill off your entire colony if you redline them, you'll just need to waste time building up enough Science to sell.

Minimal use of pipes and wires is a must, because you are charged science the moment you *place* them. Each mistake you make costs you 5 science. This would be fine if the mouse collision wasn't all wonky-- the click spot is the center of the arrowhead, not the tip, and there seems to be a delay between you moving the mouse and the game's understanding of where the mouse is catching up.

The obligatory Annoying Tutorial NPC who begs you not to skip the tutorial is a terrible lens through which to view this world, but through his ham-fisted dialogue, you get glimpses at a Silver Age vision of the World of Tomorrow.

If you can overcome the flaws, what you get is a short but engaging game with a few hidden depths and a cargo bay full of weird quirks. Every decision you make is extremely slow-burn, but in the end, you're left with pure Strategy. No action, no tactics. Your guys scramble around with no sense of cohesion and go out of their way to avoid mission objectives if there's an enemy within a 2 mile radius. The best you can do is tell them what broad categories of moves NOT to make, and maybe drop them one by one on the enemy's doorstep (or the general Hospital back at your base) with the Tractor Beam.

I would not have designed a strategy game this way at all, but after spending the better part of the day trying to actually understand what it was trying to do, I really can't call it a bad.

[Legend of the Void]

So bored... why can't I stop playing it? @_@;

Stop for a moment and imagine the ultimate RPG experience. Maybe you'd take the storytelling of Planescape Torment, the scope of WoW, the combat of Diablo and the music of Final Fantasy. Well, Legend of the Void seems like a love letter to the RPGs of the past, borrowing elements from all of these games. Unfortunately, it got the storytelling of WoW, the music of Diablo, the combat of Final Fantasy, and the loot of Planescape Torment. The result is a game that underwhelms RPG fans on virtually every possible level, despite solid construction, tons of obvious effort, and (marginally) successful Skinner Box methodologies.

Potions feel like a solution in search of a problem. Almost like they said "Well, it's an RPG, it has to have potions in it." But it doesn't force the player to chug 50 of them after every fight like final fantasy does. It's turn-based, not real-time, so unlike Diablo or WoW, there's no timing involved in using them to best advantage. And cooldown plays such a drastic role in limiting the use of your best abilities that, far from being the lifeblood of combat, they are a band-aid you only turn to when you're out of other options, or perhaps very rarely to free up your mage to take another, more important action on his turn.

Let's talk about builds. I went mage on a whim, and then min-maxxed the hell out of this thing after taking one look at the skill trees. I only put points into Magic. For skills I went fireball - sub zero - earthquake, (though truth be told I could have stopped at Lightning Storm, earthquake sucks!) then Heal - Forcefield. Mass Heal on a whim even though Forcefield prevents it from ever being necessary. I saved Vision for the last skill I take since I don't know if the 25% happens once when you level up or if it gets constantly updated over the top of your other stats as you level up.

The point is, if I could do this, anyone could, because that's what gamers DO. They look for the shortcuts. The entire philosophy behind the skill trees is broken. You can get your first capstone ability by level 4, and a second one by level 9 if you want it that badly. Worse, though, the tier 3-4 abilities are often stronger and more versatile than the higher level stuff.

That said, I am NOT saying you should nerf the build I used, or any build. Why not? Because min-maxing my character was the most FUN I had with this game. I felt like I was actually learning something.

The rest of the game is just marching through identical forests and lava-caves for a couple hours, clicking through some completely functional text that does nothing to engage the player either mechanically or emotionally. Fighting basically the same battle over and over again, progressing when you run out of stuff to kill. Then you're locked out of the earlier levels of the game (why, I have no idea,) so that if you missed some optional battles, you might get to the end game and find out that your saved game is borked, you screwed yourself around level 3 and didn't realize it.

The difficulty curve is a strange one. As you progress, battles get easier rather than harder. This is because your new abilities buy you breathing room disproportionate to the rate at which the enemies increase in power. Again, all of this is a side-effect of the asymmetries introduced by the skill tree.

Also, your low level spells don't scale with your character's power as he levels up, to the point where basic attacks soon do much more damage than a fireball spell. All skill trees have SOME baggage you take just to unlock other skills, but actually using a skill and then watching it become useless is just plain sad.

I have to commend the designer for the amount of effort he's putting into supporting it. In an age when Flash games are pushed out the door as quickly as possible to generate ad revenue, this guy is actually trying to build a community and a fanbase around the game. I wish him the best of luck. Somewhere under the surface of this, there's a great game struggling to get out.

Bah, running out of space. Lose the cooldowns! Add female heroes!

violatorgames responds:

I feel your pain! I'd love to do a Diablo ARPG but its just not something that translates well to the tiny FLash game screen area :( I always enjoyed the Sonny style turn based combat in Flash so that's what I went with here :P

And yeah, women/skin color options coming in Ch2 :)

[Bloom Defender]

A polished TD game with hidden complexities

I've played a lot of Tower Defense over the years here on Newgrounds. And while the Gemcraft series is still my hands-down favorite, along comes Juicy Beast with a surprisingly compelling contender for second place. While appearing to be a standard by-the-numbers TD on the surface, Bloom Defender combines subtly deep elemental spellcasting with a cheerful aesthetic into one solid, professional-looking package.

The first thing you'll notice after the JuicyBeast logo (which lasts way too long for a logo, BTW, and is probably the lion's share of why this didn't get a 10...) is the story sequence. While the story itself is perfunctory, it gives you a close-up look at the elemental creeps you'll be fighting in this game. They're cartoony, they're stylish, and each and every one of them is well-designed with a ton of personality.

Once you start playing, you'll notice how streamlined the clicking is. The action is seperated into a build phase and a combat phase, with player input required to start the next wave. While this does remove one element of risk from the game, it means that a single-click is context-sensitive. You never need to tell the game WHAT you're trying to do... never need to open a menu or toggle between build and spell modes, it's just always point and click, and the right thing happens. This simplicity of interface is so welcome and refreshing, especially on a platform where there is no right-click, that it more than makes up for my one criticism about the game.

And that's that the core gameplay is almost too busy. I generally like my TD games to be largely hands-off once I get my combo set up, and Bloom Defender is very much a spell-centric game. You need to constantly cast spells, all the time, in every level. So why do I rate the game so highly if that's not my cup of tea?

Because Bloom Defender does it *just right.* There's no rock-paper-scissors, just two sets of two elements that cancel each other. The game throws two sets of elemental mobs at you at a time, along with non-elemental mobs that are weak against ice de-facto because of its effects on movement. Elemental Mobs have shortcuts they can take through most levels, which both influences your positioning of towers and results in unusual shifting overlaps between enemies. Later levels challenge you to make the best possible use of the plants it gives you. You'll find yourself building whole strategies around unlikely combinations, simply because those are the only tools the game gives you. And because it was well-planned and carefully balanced, it works.

It's not perfect. The blue flower almost always does the most damage, and will figure prominently in most of your strategies. It's very tricky to get the pink flowers to pay off. Ice enemies tend to spread apart for no apparent reason. Although all enemies take damage from all elements, it's sometimes hard to shake the feeling that you're being penalized for using any spell other than the one you're "supposed to." The fact that it hides the raw numbers from you means you can't prove it's not leading the player around by the nose. And it quickly becomes obvious that "Elemental Weaknesses" is actually code for "Immune to everything but that one spell."

That said, this game was clearly never meant to be intricate or crunchy. Instead, it focuses on doing one thing, and doing it extremely well. Bloom Defender is pure and simple TD gameplay with hidden complexities and a clean aftertaste. It is well-paced, methodical, and a pleasure to grind through. You remain engaged in the process of attacking your enemies at all times, and that's before we even mention the bosses, which are a joy to fight and totally carry both the gameplay and the character design through to their logical conclusions.

Definitely a must-play, especially for TD fans.

JuicyBeast responds:

Wow, awesome review! Thanks :D

[Feed Us 2]

Feels buggier than it is.

After writing to PopBrain twice I finally got the hang of it. At first I thought you needed to be moving at a certain speed in order to bite somebody, but it turns out it's a little more nuanced than that. In order to bite someone, all of the following must be true:

- The piranha must be in motion.
- The piranha must be facing the direction it is moving.
- The piranha's mouth must be overlapping a part of the swimmer.

It's that second one that's the problem. You see, when you change direction, your piranha does a little "turn around" animation. While this animation is playing, the piranha's mouth is theoretically facing towards the camera, not towards the front of the fish. (The fact that the turn animation is just a "squash & stretch" further confuses the issue.)

Buying seeds helps a lot more than almost any other powerup. Boats always go left, so even though it may seem unfair at first, almost all of your problems can be solved by waiting patiently near the start of the stage. Gameplay quickly becomes about identifying the objectives, then picking the right moment to attack.

Killing Alligators is laughably easy-- you just need to be patient. These will be your primary source of blood. I never once saw a shark, even though there are pictures of it in the tips at the start of the level.

Quality should be manually set to low in the Options menu on the title screen. Even if you have a great computer, it'll start to chug once you get enough seeds.

The diversity of objectives is just enough for the length of the game, which feels shorter than it is thanks to the unusual pace of progress. Each stage has a time limit, and succeed or fail, that stage will ALWAYS take you that long to play. This means you'll only spend 40 seconds in some levels, and hours in others, as you try in vain to locate an objective you've never seen before. (Did I collect 10 fish or just 9? Did I miss one of the boats? What the hell is a Sea Doo anyway? (Google it!) )

You only get one shot at some objectives-- when boats are gone, they're gone. If swimmers or especially fish go behind an island, sometimes you're fucked even though you didn't do anything wrong. Once you accept these parameters, the game is neither difficult nor bad.

There's a lot of room for improvement here. The powerups are pretty much bland numerical increases, except for seeds. The controls could be a lot tighter and the reactions more predictable (boo physics engine!) Correctly biting a swimmer is a much more involved process than it needs to be. Objectives frequently become unobtainable, often for reasons completely beyond the player's direct control.

But the package is stylish, the theme is well-explored, and at the end of the day, it's addictive, fun, and not too frustrating, once you get past the hump of that initial learning curve.

[Mega Miner]

Lots of digging, but it's no Motherload...

Mega Miner feels like an attempt to take Motherload, smooth all the sharp edges off, and present it to casual gamers in a friendly, warm & fuzzy package. Unfortunately, in the process they removed most of the traps and hazards and replaced them with existential environmental threats.

On top of that, Motherload's flight system has been replaced with a completely binary grid-based movement system. There is no gravity, and you are never in a position to change your trajectory while you are "in between" two blocks. In some ways, this could be seen as an advantage, since it makes choosing which block you're going to dig next much more precise.

The problem is, this makes basic movement *extremely* slow. Your robot absolutely *crawls* in every direction at the same uniform speed. There's no sense of traction, momentum, or impacts, which made Motherload a lot of fun. You have no ability to fly, jump, or dash in order to go faster. And worst of all, no dropping down elevator shafts at terminal velocity to reach the bottom of the map quicker. I can see wanting to remove the damage on impacts, but why remove physics altogether? (Well, probably because it was easier to program, let's be honest.)

All of these design decisions have the (unintended?) side-effect of slowing down the gameplay, to the point where you feel like you're playing a turn-based game. The choices you're required to make as part of the core gameplay are so simple and repetitive in a game like this (And Motherload, and Minecraft, and Terraria) that any delay in getting from the consequences of the last block you dug to the next opprotunity to choose a new block to dig needs to be instantaneous. (Minecraft handles this particularly well, with the delay of digging a block being paid up front *before* the reveal. This makes the consequences of every single dig a surprise. There's nothing like that here.)

There were actually a few improvements on the formula. I shot myself in the foot by not using the Teleporter early on... it turns out that by "one use" they mean "you can plant the teleporter once but use it an unlimited number of times." Oops. That's actually way better than Motherload's "Random position and velocity" bullshit teleporter. I also liked the visual style of the gauges and how the game gives you several different resources to manage. There's plenty of leeway between "Houston, we have a problem" and the actual fail state.

But even this seems to work at cross purposes. Once you have a teleporter set up, for example, you can safely ignore the low fuel alarm (which seems to measure the distance from the robot to the surface-- to the point where sometimes you will ascend a shaft and the fuel will not be low any more as you get closer to safety!) However, all the alarms sound the same, so you may die like I did because you were ignoring the low fuel alarm and therefore missed the "low armor" alarm.

Anyway, the best thing I can say about this game is it's compelling. It's long. There's exploration. You dig down and find ores. If that's all you want out of a game, and you've already beaten Motherload, this is a free game you can play to get your mining fix.

But if you were hoping for a mining game that improves upon the formula, well... I don't think this is it. It's cleaner. It's more orderly. But is that really what we want in a mining game? 70's slow jazz playing while we inch towards the bottom of the map? This is the absolutely most basic core implementation of a mining game, with only the most generic objectives and achievements implemented.

This game is to 2D mining games what Spore's space age was to space trading games. In the push to become "safe" and casual, it became something bland and uninteresting. And this blandness has much more to do with pacing and gameplay than it ever had to do with tone or art direction.

[The Resistance Tower Off.]

Strategy Defense meets Galactic 123 The Mission

I was vaguely insulted by this game, and it's hard for me to say why. On the surface everything looks awesome. You got the best tiny pre-rendered characters Daz Studio has to offer, your endlessly looping soundtrack is at least pretty damn epic, and the game has upgrades. Everybody likes upgrades, right? Well, like I said, it's hard to put into words just where this game dropped the ball.

So here it is in numbers:

2 * 80 = 160 / 100 = 1.6 ( +0.0 )
4 * 90 = 360 / 200 = 1.8 ( +0.2 )
6 * 100 = 600 / 300 = 2 (+0.2)
8 * 120 = 960 / 400 = 2.4 (+0.4)
10 * 120 = 1200 / 500 = 2.4 (+0.0)
12 * 135 = 1620 / 600 = 2.7 (+0.3)
14 * 140 = 1960 / 700 = 2.8 (+0.1)
16 * 145 = 2320 / 800 = 2.9 (+0.1)
18 * 100 = 1800 / 800 = 2.25 (-0.65)
20 * 100 = 2000 / 1000 = 2 (-0.25)
22 * 150 = 3300 / 1100 = 3 (+1)
24 * 160 = 3840 / 1200 = 3.2 (+0.2)
50 * 170 = 8500 / 1300 = 6.53846154 (+6.53846154)

What you're looking at is the health of each creep multiplied by its attack, which is then divided by the cost of the unit to show how much bang-for-your-buck each unit provides. I then listed in parenthesis the amount of improvement this was over the previous level in order to illustrate just how uneven the progression looks on paper.

This is all the information the game gives you. Unfortunately, as you'll find out when the Nosferatu-with-a-switchblade starts rapidly stabbing your fat guy with a sledgehammer who looks like Martha Stewart, there's a hidden "attack speed" variable that the game hides from you. Your first instinct is to spam the most expensive unit, and this is usually the way to go. But then you lose anyway.

When this happens, it's because the enemy upgraded before you could (unless you're on easy.) I don't know where the enemy's getting XP and money from. It's certainly not from killing my guys, because they've lost half the fights they've been in up to this point. You see you need to stockpile $2000 and some change to research better unit types, and you need to do this twice in order to actually unlock the final unit. And it stands to reason that if you don't do this as fast as possible, the enemy will do it before you get a chance to.

Unfortunately, this reduces the core gameplay down to a single action which you will only perform a couple of times: Deciding when to upgrade. Until it's the right moment to upgrade, you need to keep spamming the most powerful unit you have, even if you know they're going to fail against what's on the screen. There's no strategy or tactics, just two armies slowly meeting in the middle of the screen and then fighting each other one at a time.

And as far as I can tell, that's the whole game. I say that because I lost interest when a Pig Strongman from the enemy's side who had already been wounded in battle went up against my Pig Strongman fresh from my base on Normal difficulty, and he kicked my guy's ass. How is that even possible? Identical units, one side is already damaged, the undamaged unit should win, right? I guess the game's doing something else behind the scenes to make the game harder, like gradually increasing the stats of enemy units as time passes or something. Or maybe it was just luck and it had something to do with timing.

Either way, the point is, you can't plan in this game. And despite the epic soundtrack and blood-curdling character design, there's no action either. It's just a long, slow meat-grinder with no real incentive, challenge or reward.

A great game combines a planning challenge with an execution challenge. It gives you a few basic tools and leaves it up to you to combine them in new and interesting ways to squeeze a little extra power out of them.

There are many ways they could have done this in The Resistance Tower Offense. Overlapping fields of fire. Formations. Alternate paths to choose from. Buffs. More research options that are also cheaper, but which upgrade different things so you need to pick a good combo. That sort of thing. Instead, it's just a boring spam game where planning and reflexes are both equally useless.

[Arkandian Crusade]

40 hour grindquest; zero choices ever.

The way the developer bangs on about "choices" you'd swear he thinks he invented the JRPG or something. What you've got here is a fairly basic AdventureQuest knockoff with quite linear gameplay, which could have been extremely rich and nonlinear if the developer weren't constantly thwarting his own excellent core gameplay implementation with some arbitrary bullshit game rules.

- You can't visit areas you've already cleared. (Except for a repetitive sewer level that you can farm for free, and a single random dungeon that keeps refreshing itself when you leave.) This means that even though you can technically take the quests in any order you want, you are doomed to eventually complete them all. Worse, you'll be encouraged to do them in order of increasing travel cost (and, one assumes, difficulty.)

- It costs money to enter a dungeon. This means that once you enter a dungeon, you might as well clean it out completely. Otherwise you'd just have to pay again to come back and mop up the last of the treasure. This means that, like the quests, the contents of any particular quest are something you're doomed to consume. You can fight the enemies in any order you choose, but that doesn't matter either because:

- You can't see what enemy you're about to fight until after combat starts.

and

- You can never flee from a fight you're losing.

This means that for any given dunegon, you may as well fight the enemies in random order, or in alphabetical order, or in the order they're indexed in the array, for all the "choice" you have in the matter. There is no real tactical planning involved, no input skill required, and certainly no moral choices.

The entire supposedly nonlinear game can be played with the heuristic: Equip Best Loot; Goto Cheapest Dungeon; Fight Random Enemy; If Weak Use Potion; Repeat; And I couldn't think of any real reason to play the game in any other fashion.

Even the loot, normally an addictive greed-fueled source of longevity for dungeon crawlers of all stripes falls incredibly flat here. I'm not sure if the items you find are templates modified with stats like in Diablo or simply prefabs stored in memory as an integer like in Castlevania:SOTN, but either way the game sacrifices bonuses-per-item to ensure that you can store an enormous number of items in your vault. You won't be getting a +27 fire sword of Teleportation and Mana Regeneration in this game. I mean you might randomly find one, but it'll be Vlad the Immolator, one of 5 or 10 named weapons the designer invented. It won't be randomly generated and it certianly won't be upgraded by you from a weaker item.

There's a crafting system but I couldn't get into it. I couldn't even afford to buy my way up to 100% buy price, 50% sell price by buying and selling minor healing potions to get skill points in bargaining. It's obvious you're going to basically need to do this if you're ever to have any hope of buying the more expensive gear later, but it feels like cruel and unusual punishment.

You can choose sword, bow, or magic, and they all basically do the same thing with different stats, but the wooden sword that gives you a huge bonus to Learning that you find in the first dungeon means, again, the game takes a choice away from you rather than giving you one.

There's more to say but I'm running out of space. The bottom line is it's an okay RPG that could have been great. It's long. That's the best thing I can say about it. If you like grinding you'll love getting this much grind for free.

But you never choose dialogue options, combine things to make interesting combos, date (or indeed, meet) other party members, or do any of the other RPG things normally associated with "Choice." Achievements, skills, items and victories are all purely mechanical. They are a puzzle with one right answer, and that answer is painfully obvious the moment you look at it.

You never choose between factions. You never have a choice except "take this quest now" or "take it later." It is not a game about "choices," or even options.

Just grind.

Noxins responds:

Most people who write a tl:dr review tend to play the game they're reviewing for more than 10 minutes.