WarpZone's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[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.

[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

[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

[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!

[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.

[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.

[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

[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.