WarpZone's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[The Last AntLion]

A nice, simple arena side-scroller with a decent amount of upgrades and some amusing character designs.

I loved the high-pitched ant speech. I was less thrilled about the ASMR- that's Ants Scurrying in my Malleus Repeatedly, AKA the walking noises.

The music was forgettable, and the actual art style, I could take or leave. (The pixel art feels very "busy" in a way I couldn't quite put my finger on. Too many colors or competing pixel resolutions or something. And the back walls look somehow "blury.") But the ant designs and the gameplay carried it.

Recommend everybody and their aunts play this. It's a great way to kill an afternoon.

And, this. THIS is how you get antlions!

velketor responds:

Thank you for playing WarpZone!

I'm happy to see that you liked the way the ants talk, and maybe I could have chosen a better, less ASMR/annoying noise for the ants. There's always the sequel =)

It's disappointing to hear that you found the music 'forgettable' as it was created by two talented composers. I'm actually quite addicted to the music and I find it fits perfectly, but I understand it's not everyone's cup of tea. You definitely won't find the tracks from my game anywhere else because I had them custom made by professionals.

The pixel art for the characters was made by a professional Pixel Artist I hired for the project, Bruno Corgo (https://twitter.com/bruno_corgo) and the rest was done by me or using various assets from opengameart.org.

I appreciate your constructive feedback and I'm glad it was able to kill an afternoon for you =)

[Polar Potential]

Oh, I like this. It was close, though. I almost didn't figure out how to play. Maybe a little flashing arrow that says "click and drag" until the player demonstrates that they know how to fling ships is in order.

Give this sucker some real graphics, a title screen, and other assorted polish, and you just might have something here!

Edit: Dunno, maybe something like this? http://pasteall.org/pic/show.php?id=75c29f13c9598be51e3b04c890f36119

JorisRollfox responds:

Thanks, glad you liked it :)

I prefer intuitiveness over an in-your face tutorial, but since it came close for you I'll think of something. Perhaps a short how-to in the title screen of the expanded version.

As for real graphics, what do you propose?

Edit: thanks a lot for the amazing art concept, though it looks hard and time-consuming to implement so I won't promise anything. But if I can do it, I will.

[Winter Falling: Prototype One]

A very interesting game, possibly the first *literal* real-time strategy game I've ever seen. I'm terrible at this, but I love everything about it. I'm gonna have to come back to this later and git gud.

Rarykos responds:

I'm really glad, thank you very much!

[Knightin'+ Demo]

A great little homage to top-down Zelda titles. Unfortunately, my brain kept comparing it to Enter the Gungeon as I played it, and that's just not a fair comparison.

Graphics are great, especially the 16-bit use of color, though the music sounded more 8-bit, and the sound effects were minimalistic to the point of being kinda dull.

What I played of the combat was basic, but rudimentary. I kept wanting to dash or dodgeroll or hold down run, and that's just not the way oldschool Zelda is played. This is where the comparison to Gungeon wasn't doing the game any favors.

When I accidentally went downstairs from floor 2 to floor 3, that's when I suddenly realized the map layout was completely random. So. If you want procedural Zelda, here it is. Enjoy!

Me? I've got a Rat that needs punching.

Edit: If there's no procedural generation, then you need some more classic Zelda dunegon design with a boss before you can go to the next level and a locked door before the boss that can only be opened by exploring the dungeon proper. I skipped most of level 2 somehow, without intending to, and that's a problem.

Check out Game Maker's Toolkit's awesome Boss Keys series for not only length breakdowns of what makes a good Zelda dunegon, but a system of taxonomy for describing what makes a dungeon wide or deep, the relationship between keys, doors, and key items, and a wealth of other information that could help prevent the problem where a player accidentally skips your hand-made dungeon as if it were a Rogue run where the Talisman was in the very first chest.

Wolod responds:

Thanks for the great review!

But there is no procedural generation in Knightin'+ o_O

[Newgrounds in 2019]

Literally the tutorial nobody asked for, the music still gave me shivers though. It says Newgrounds in 2019, but I have a feeling it will appeal the most to ancient relics like me that remember when this website always played sounds by default.

Useless, meaningless, ultimately pointless, somehow it still made me smile.

What the hell... for old time's sake. FIVEN!!

Little-Rena responds:

Vote 5 without watching.

[GE Catgirls Demo]

The concept is pretty standard, to be honest, but the UX definitely needs some work. New player experience is confusing. Back button looks like a > forward button (when the menu is on the right.) Clicking on a shopkeep doesn't give you the option to buy things, not even in a menu the way every RPG ever has done it. (I eventually figured out you can just click on groceries but this wasn't intuitive.) Every building should have a back button (that looks the same as the other back buttons) because clicking on the door feels weird and unnatural. Camera perspective says "god-game" but the way you want players to click on things feels "first-person game."

In short, please stop fighting years of muscle memory other video games have baked into me and other players. The "shared language" of video game UX we already have should be used as often as possible, and innovative new UX solutions should only be attempted when you have no other choice or you REALLY figured out a way to make the gameplay better.

I feel like the gameplay could be improved if you made the player master the basics (earning more money, feeding the catgirls, etc) before the more obscure buildings open up. Otherwise the player is likely to make early mistakes that render the game unplayable. Teach through gameplay. Not through walls of text.

Also... how the hell do you earn money? I only have one catgirl, she's fully happy and fully fed and only halfway tired, but the old lady still won't let her work at the grocery store. Zero explaination of what's preventing it. The wall of text tutorial didn't help. The old lady should just tell you "That catgirl needs more X to work here, try training her at the Y."

But even that shouldn't be necessary for the MOST BASIC job, because the whole point of a minimum wage job should be playing your way out of a dead end whenever you accidentally spent all your money.

Once you've fixed the UX and the early gameplay, I think it'll improve the new user experience by a lot. Which you, the developer, desperately need if you want people to support development.

Message me if you'd like more extensive feedback on menus and UX design.

FunToCreate responds:

Hey thank you for your feedback, I'll try to change things you mentioned :)

You send cat-girls to work by talking to the Old Lady or other and then choosing "Send Cat-Girls" (I guess I should change it too ^^" ).

[noOS]

Sorry, dude. I just can't do it. 12 seconds per sentence is just too damn long to wait for pointless exposition. Either get to the bloody point or, ideally, give me a button I can press to advance the dialogue. I wanted to get into this game but the conversation with the Quantum Field Harvester just made me feel like my time was being wasted. Did not finish. 2 stars for ambiance and originality.

Kouboooo responds:

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

[Highgrounds]

Pay-to-win is a cancer on the face of gaming, okay? Let's just get that rant out of the way up front. The day pay-to-win gambling games like Magic: The Gathering become a more reliable source of income than other genres of game is the day we lose everything we as gamers hold dear, handing over the keys of the kingdom to (slightly more) cynical marketeers who only care about sucking dry the 1% of human beings who live to spend money on conspicuous bullshit like booster packs and food spiked with inedible flavorless flakes of gold foil.

Having said that, this one actually has some gameplay in it, I guess. You can use that in an ad if you want to. " '- Actually has some gameplay in it, I guess,' - a core gamer." From building your deck to managing your income to choosing what to buy this turn, the game is constantly presenting the player with strategic, tactical, and immediate choices.

Unfortunately, after building up this strategic element, the game procedes to sabotage itself by making it impossible to actually use units you have fielded to solve problems. I got as far as the Wizards before I figured out that there's no actual way to counter anything what needs countering. The game "helpfully" advises me that I need to Wound units that can Bolt, but this advice is meaningless because the enemy gets to move its units after I have moved mine but before combat resolves. It doesn't matter if I own a unit that can Wound in the right place or not because the enemy will always move its bolters away from that unit and counter with a defensive unit.

Extrapolate this out to every other strategic scenario, and you'll see that nothing can ever reliably counter anything, unless you field an army that's all the same type of unit. (So it's like every other deck-building game in that regard.) Combine this with a two-tiered premium currency system, unreasonably slow server response times even if you're playing single-player with no login, and apparent lack of a Trainer, and you've got a nasty, spiky moneypit that doesn't even pretend to value the player's time or skill.

Is it a sad testament to the state of the games industry that this is not the most cynical wallet-emptying game I've seen this year. It's not even within the top ten. There's another quote for you. " '...not even within the top ten (most cynical wallet-emptying games I've seen this year) - a consumer' " Man, that's a great quote! It should play well on Gamasutra. I'm handing you gold, here. Just think of all the whales you could gut with a hook like that. I'm not surprised that deck-builders get critical acclaim these days, I'm just surprised that they have the gaul to market it on a free browser game portal like Newgrounds.

I could maybe see it if it was something like ROBOKILL or Creeper World that actually offers the player a legitimate gameplay experience, then I could see it. But this 'freemium' pay-to-win shit? That shit needs to go back to dying a slow death on mobile devices. PC gamers don't want it or need it. Broke gamers can't afford it. And no amount of box quotes from AAA reviewers is going to help you get blood out of a stone.

Three stars for graphics, stability, and obvious polish. But why the hell does this need to be on Newgrounds, of all places!?

spryfox responds:

With all due respect, we are practically killing ourselves trying to make a CCG that is *not* pay-to-win. We get crapped on by publishers who tell us this game will never succeed because uncommon units are just as powerful and useful as rare units. You saw booster packs in the game and got defeated by a single player mission and immediately assumed the worst. Please understand that this sort of thing is incredibly discouraging to the few indie developers like us who are trying to find a way to make the games we love, still give them away for free, and somehow eke out a modest living. Highgrounds is by no means a moneymaker. It doesn't even pay our bills.

Please don't take any of this the wrong way. We understand why people get so enraged by free-to-play games. Many f2p games are awful. But some of us are trying to do better.

Highgrounds is a very challenging game that requires a lot of skill and practice. The computer will kick your butt until you really internalize how to play. Veteran human players will kick your butt WAY worse. A large percentage of those veterans have not spent a dime and never will. And we're totally cool with that. (Pro-tip: if you want to succeed in multiplayer without spending money, make sure you complete the single player campaign. You get many free powerful units as reward for doing so.)

For anyone who is willing not to immediately jump to conclusions, please know that we're doing our best to be more like League of Legends and Team Fortress than the mountain of skeezy CCGs out there. We are trying to make a game of skill in which you pay for variety, not for an unfair advantage. And we have a pretty solid track record, having worked on two games, Triple Town and Realm of the Mad God, that have been widely praised for NOT being obnoxious pay-to-win games. (Note, we stopped working on Realm of the Mad God back in 2012, when Kabam took it over, and we've had nothing to do with how it has changed since then.)

You can read more about Highgrounds, and how to succeed in it, here: http://spryfox.com/forums/topic/introduction-to-highgrounds-faq/

[Cycle; Third Dream]

This is the most amazing Purgatory simulator I have ever played. I tried everything I could think of to make something interesting happen. I used my axe on the floorboards of my house, on my neighbor's house, on the Mayor. I bought a safe and tried to stuff it full of cash. I tried to buy a pink shirt with a star on it just because it was half off, then the damn game thought I was more overlapping the carpet next to the shirt, apparently, then the damn store kicked me out because night fell while I was fighting the menu. In a fit of desperation, I actually tried talking to the NPCs, even though I knew perfectly well that they're all vapid idiots with nothing to say. That's when I discovered that the fisherman will duplicate a function of the shopkeep, but only on Saundays? Uh. Thanks, I guess. I tried for 2 minutes to buy bait before I figured out that I was clicking on his name.

But the last straw had to be when I walked out of my house, saw row after row of fruit-laden trees. Waiting for me. Ten seconds of waiting each. I felt my soul die inside. I can't do this any more. It's just. So. BORING.

So basically it's like my Grepolis experience, but with an even shorter honeymoon period.

I only have one thing to say to 08jackt: Please stop wasting my time. Give me a reason to be here, a reason to care about these characters and this world, a non-cosmetic reason to care how much money I'm making. It can be anything at all. But for fuck's sake, put something noteworthy or precious or terrible or scary or amazing or awesome or fun IN THERE!

One star because mysterious footsteps in my house when I wake up scared the pants off of me and made me think the whole thing was about to go off the rails... until I realized it was just part of the background music and you'd probably have stripped it out of there if the sound design had actually been up to you, but you're just using whatever free sounds you could get ahold of, aren't you?

Bottom line: Minecraft minus everything you love about Minecraft. Glitch minus everything that made Glitch great. Hell, I've played FARMVILLE clones this week on Newgrounds that felt like they were giving me more gameplay for my time. Cow Clickers, Cookie Clickers, every kind of tedious time-waster mobile-like inexplicably focus-tested on the one website guaranteed to give them the worst possible reception, and a FEW of them managed to make me feel like I was being entertained for a few seconds at a time. Not this one. I would make a joke about it being a viscous cycle, but there's nothing viscous about it. It's a piece of cardboard in a tumble-drier on low heat.

The one nice thing I can say about it is it didn't slow down on my computer, despite using movieclips. But that's probably because nothing ever happens. Ever. Imagine my shock when I turned the quality down to Low and discovered it was this slow ON PURPOSE!

JackAstral responds:

Ahaha fair calls. Really the game is intended to be slow and peaceful- obviously it isn't for everyone xD

Thanks for the suggestions and criticisms though, I'll take note of them for future versions. It means a lot that you took the time to play and review it, despite not enjoying the game. Thanks for your time, hopefully I'll be able to work on some projects that are a little more exciting (and fun :b) to you in the future.

[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.