WarpZone's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Hungry Hungry Wiggies]

Is one player meant to control this?

Or is it intended for like, 6 kids, all sitting at the same keyboard?

I have to admit this isn't quite what I expected. It doesn't really teach the kids anything (other than "eat the food that falls from the sky if it's the same color as you,") I suppose it could be a metaphor for "eating right," but I don't think most kids will think about it that deeply.

Also, if it's intended for multiple players, you should be aware that it emphesizes competition more than teamwork. I'm just saying.

Great surface, though. Nice thick line work. I can do that. :)

BoMToons responds:

Ha ha, no it's meant for one player, but it really does stretch your mind to play. As for the educational aspect, I think that somehow that part got over-emphasized, I'd much prefer an entertaining non-educational game, to a boring educational one. But entertaining AND educational would be the ultimate combo. Besides, this game teaches rhythm skills, which is a valuable tool for youngsters :P

[Panik in Suburbia]

It%u2019s not as good as it could be.

What we have here is your typical "commissioned" flash game. All the earmarks are here: Lots of effort poured into the artwork. "Inoffensive" corporate-approved characters. The simplest game engine ever ripped from Flashkit. No more than two moving objects on the screen at a time (Gotta make sure the 1% of the audience playing this on a 486 can enjoy it, dontcha know.) No scrolling whatsoever. Constant dying through no fault of your own. And of course, ads all over the place. It%u2019s a real winner, all right!

I would normally temper my response because I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings, but somehow I doubt the publisher of this game has any intention of maintaining the game or responding to feedback. When you can't even be bothered to take the broken unicode characters out of your promotional text, that's a pretty sure sign of apathy.

All of that said... well, they tried. It's long. The art is pretty. C minus.

kerb responds:

if you think we wont reply then check the responses to all of our other games.

[Luminara]

Delightfully complex vector sh'mup!

Graphics: Simple vector shapes with a surprising ammount of personality. You can tell the mine-layers from the homing drones from the richochets at a glance.

Style: Quirky, fun, and hyper. The squaresplosions, while distracting, are fun.

Sound: Generic techno music goes well with the simplictic, brightly-colored visuals. The "Let's go!" is a nice touch. Shots fired are subtle, except for the deliberately grating laser, which only makes the (thankfully temporary) powerup feel like that much more overkill. Most people around here will probably give you shit about the music, but it fits the visuals perfectly, contributing to an overall theme.

Violence: If it don't bleed, killing it in front of me is harmless.

Interactivity: Loved the unlimited shots. Loved the temporary invincibility. Loved the rapid level progression. Loved the powerups, especially "buddy." Tolerated the flashing cube explosions. Absolutely hated losing track of my goddamned cursor. I was clicking on ads at one point!

Ways to make the cursor visible:

-Just use the operating system's cursor! We're used to it, we can see it, it can never be covered up.

or

-Make the cursor graphic more distinct (a flashy targeting recticule, blinking arrows, thin line crosshairs that cover the entire screen, whatever.) and make sure it's on top. The easiest way to ensure this is to attach it to its own layer, and then attach all the other game objects to a lower layer. (Simmilar to the way I'd immagine you're currently doing the HUD.)

Ideally, you want the player to be able to see his ship and the crosshairs AT ALL TIMES, even when the screen is full of explosions.

Overall: Great game, with one minor issue that sorta breaks the playability.

jmtb02 responds:

Wow, a monstrous review, well critiqued. You made some good points and I appreciate it greatly. Thanks! -jmtb02

[Tower's Tactics: Throne]

Fun until you realize you have no control over it.

Graphics: Tiny Midevil Dudes with very distinct outfits. Great spell effects, though a tad ambiguous. (I.E. The first time you see an enemy cast a whooshy, swirly thing, you have no idea what they just did.) Excellent backgrounds featuring paralax scrolling, sun flares, and some nice high-end CG in the cutscenes.

Style: Everything comes together really nicely. Feels more cinematic than most movies! The sheer epic scale of this game is staggering for a Flash title, with different classes, armies fighting armies, an ongoing story, and a map screen with unlockable battles!

Sound: Great music, great sound, above-average voices. I'd really like to know where they got this music from. It's fuckin' epic. And I mean that literally.

Violence: Clang, clang, squish, UGH! Tiny characters and a general lack of gratuity make this less of a bloodbath than one might expect. In fact, this would have been a 0 if the sound effects weren't so convincing.

Interactivity: This is where it all falls apart. There's a few easy training levels... you think you're starting to get the hang of it, you level up and equip new skills, and then, BAM, you hit the Boss wall and start losing every battle you attempt.

Yes, death is a mild inconvenience in this game, which merely detracts points from your true life meter, your Favor. Yes, you get experience points for the valliant attempt. Technically, that probably makes the game "winnable" and "survivable" and whatnot. I suspect this was added at the last minute in response to player feedback.

Unfortunately, while the Favor system may make the game doable, it doesn't make the game FUN. Nobody wants to play a strategy game where the primary levelling mechanic is losing the same fight over and over again until you're strong enough to finally beat it.

There is very little, if any gameplay to be had in the actual battles. Clicking on enemies is almost impossible, coordinating a strategy in realtime (geek the mage, defend and heal the leader, attack their archer,) is a joke, and every split-second you spend pointing or clicking, means another sucessful hit by the bad guys.

If you picked the wrong classes to round out your party at the begining, and then you get stonewalled a few stages down the road, your options are basically Start Over or Stop Playing. I chose Stop Playing.

I might go back later, trying to min-max my way into a party of tanks who can survive unaided, but I don't feel like I have a very strong incentive to do so.

It's an unmitigated cluster-fuck. A bunch of guys stacked on top of each other going "clang" until one side dies. And since the other side can use skills easily, and you can't... you die. Period. Unless you've already died enough times to be higher level than them.

Overall: Fundamentally flawed game mechanics ruin a package that is otherwise gorgeous, epic, and deep. It really pains me, too, because the art direction, character design, story and effects are all ABOVE REPROACH. This is the work of an awesome game development team, here. It's just that the game sucks. :(

Here's my advice: Do-over. Keep the characters, story, and graphics. Re-do the scripting. Re-design the gameplay.

Maybe make it overhead-view. Maybe make it 3/4 view. Maybe make it turn-based. Maybe make it pause whenever you're in a menu doing something. Maybe just slow the enemy movement down to an insulting level so that noob players have time to think, click, and aim. Maybe make it automatic that monks stay back and heal, and grunts target spellcasters first. Maybe just let the player input all his commands before the battle starts. Maybe follow some suggestions other reviewers have had.

But you gotta do something here. This game... does not work. It is broken. Fix it. :(

Septenary responds:

Blegh, I didn't realise it was so bad. Thanks for the long review; I appreciate your comments. I'm glad you liked the graphics and style. Here's the suggestions I've interpreted, for use in the second version:

-More blood, larger characters and more violence
-Easier battles to win
-Take out favour and judgement (although no, it wasn't a last-minute add in: favour was one of the initial concepts that I started with)
-Pause the game while selecting enemies, so that more decisions can be made without taking damage
-Make more "strategic", less random damage
-Make it 3/4 view in order to make units less clustered and more visible

If you have any clarifications or more suggestions, I always appreciate personal messages.

[MindScape]

Woah! Fuck! Someone made a good game!

Graphics: Thick, crisp lines and a color aesthetic that's all over the charts bring a boring emo kid and an army of wacky enemies to life! Nice animations. I loved that lookin' around animation, even though I didn't notice it 'till level 4 because I was constantly on the move. Simple, well-designed stages come in a few flavors. An occasional trippy background adds WTF factor. Not to mention great cutscenes! This game has it all!

Style: I *really* have to hand it to you for maintaining such a strong, unifying art direction over such a wide variety of elements. The diverse parts all come together to form a cohesive, demented whole.

Sound: Great music, nothing annoying about the sparse sound effects, and TONS of atmosphere. Was I immagining things, or did you fade different tracks together everytime I turned a corner in the psychadelic section? Voice in the movies woulda been nice.

Violence: The ESRB probably things that robots punching a person counts as some sort of voilence. But Newgrounds regulars know better!

I dunno about you guys, but by now I'm desensitized to the point where my personal goreometer consists entirely of what happens when a character's head is crushed by a brick.

So If a bright red splotch comes out and barely interacts with the envrionment, that's a 1. A seven would be a really graphic head-crush with bits of bone and brain and the blood's all brown and kinda hemmorages a bit with the body twitches.

You don't wanna know what a ten is.

So anyway, don't take the 0 personally. It's not your fault.

Humor: Nothing was boring, not even the boring parts. Like, you know those monochromatic sections of blue wall in assylum stage? Not boring! Even those parts still managed to add to the ambiance in some way.

And I have a hard time classifying that ambiance. It was too goofy to be serious and too tragic to be funny.

So how do I, as a reviewer, convey that in statistical form? By putting a big ol' seven up there in the Humor category, even though it wasn't funny. (Also, by using several sentances to explain what the seven means!)

Interactivity: Loved the rotation, the switches, and the race at the end. Yes, they were all gimicks. I liked them anyway, because they were FUN gimicks that DIDN'T SUCK. They added new gameplay, without making the game annoying, tedious, or impossible.

Let me tell you a true story, about the gimick that had the potential to become the deal-breaker, here: The rabbit key fight.

As the battle ran longer than I expected it to, I had no way of knowing if my actions were having any effect. I began to wonder if there was somehting I was supposed to be DOING during the tug of war animation... I started to worry. And then he got faster, and I started not getting there in time, and it wasn't until then that I realized I could take damage from the misses. I started to panic. It was happening faster than I could possibly hope to get to the right hole...

Then I suddenly got him, for the LAST time, at around 1/3 health. Apparently through pure random chance, he popped out of a hole that was close enough. And when the animation sequence started, I let out a very real sigh of relief.

I don't know whether you used statistics, careful scripting, or just playtesting to determine that this fight would not be impossible. But it had the desired effect on me.

Overall: Everyone involved needs to PUT THIS ON THEIR RESUME. (Assuming you punk rebel types use those.)

In fact, do you think you could maybe do a Tutorial open-sourcing your control and movement code? Not the rotation, so much. Just the jumping and collision.

It's just that people keep submitting these crappy, half-assed platform games on NG all the time. You know the kind I mean? Where you get stuck in the walls, or fall through floors, and holding down the key makes you bunny-hop?

Well, your game had NONE of that bullshit! I wish every noob could work with this engine, instead of the de-facto standard, the 2001 tutorial they're all apparently using.

HeRetiK responds:

You took yourself the time to write such an elaborate review so I'll take myself the time to answer your questions.

-) I didn't fade different tracks in the psychedelic part. It would have been a cool idea though. Only thing I did was fading from one track to another when leaving / entering this section.
-) I did a lot of careful play testing at the rabbit key fight.
-) Actually I did use a tutorial for the collision detection part:
http://www.harveycartel.org/m etanet/tutorials.html
The greater part, however, was modding the basic engine in a way that would make gravity shifts possible.
-) I know what kind of platform games you mean, I made one of these myself until I got off my lazy ass and read through the tutorial mentioned before. And I hate reading tutorials. The things you do for a proper game engine...

Thanks for stopping by!

[Trigger!]

Simple. Too Short. Nice crisp style. Not bad.

Graphics: Nice colors, crisp lines, and iconic shapes make for decent visuals. The whole maze has a nice machine-like sense of purpose. Boring character, but hey, can't have everything.

Style: Uhhh... See Graphics. :)

Sound: Add sound please. Google it. It's not that hard, sir.

Interactivity: I hate these mouse maze games. But yours was nicely done. The boulder was uber-cheap cuz I wasn't expecting it. (Maybe if you'd shown it there, attached to one wall, and then when I hit the button maybe it would wiggle a little, come out of its socket, and slowly roll out before following the path it did, the noob player would have had more of a chance to react to it. Instead this is on-the-job-training, which kinda sucks.)

Overall: A nice little game. You used a lot of good ideas that made this more than the typical mouse-maze. Too short, and needs sound, but other than that, good job! :) For your next project, try something a little more original.

AceDecade responds:

Thanks for the long and thought out review! =D
Yeah, alot of people hate me for the boulder XD, I'll try to refrain from hidden traps, as for sound, I had planned it, but I'm no good with sound in flash, it's always too big and I don't know how to make it less quality. Thanks, and I plan to learn sound and put it in Trigger 2 =D

[Marilyn the Goth]

A typical non-conformist dress-up doll...

Graphics: A nice first effort. Alexander's proportioning is a bit off, with points and curves in slightly odd places, and lines subtly conflicting with each other instead of working together to suggest a unified shape. You see a lot of drawings like this from new or young artists... The good news is, it's the sort of thing that one gets better at, with practice.

Style: Goth can be cool. And some of the clothes Alex has given this doll are kinda fun. I liked the striped shirts. Unfortunately, I used to download kiss dolls all the time, so I've seen all this before.

For your next goth doll, Alexander, try giving the shirts different-lengthed hemlines. Maybe add some folds or wrinkles to the cloth. Some of the clothes should hang off of the model's body in places. Very few, if any of the garments, should truly be skin-tight.

Also, name your doll. It's a small thing, but giving your character a name would have helped a lot. A submission entitled like "Dora VenomLace" or something is much more interesting than "Random Goth Submission #3." A little thing like a name, and hints of a lifestyle, (What's her favorite food? Add one to the doll.) can add loads of personality to an otherwise mediocre doll.

Interactivity: Everything works, and although the garments are skin-tight, they line up well enough. IMHO, snap-on is the way to go, but some traditionalists enjoy the simpler method.

Overall: Average doll. You can tell some effort was put into making this. But it wasn't anything remarkable, and the drawing style looked very rough and inexperienced. That comes with the territory, though.

If I were you, Alexander, I'd call this submission a success, and start up a whole new doll. One with a completely different pose and everything. Maybe try copying an artist whose style you already respect. It'll teach you a TON of subtle things about anatomy, perspective, and suggesting a 3D shape that are difficult to learn any other way.

Those HOW-TO-DRAW books would be a big help too, if you're not too proud to learn from the anime and disney conformists. ;)

Best of luck to you in the future, Alex. I'm looking forward to seeing more of your work.

Midian responds:

AlexanderTheInsane is a decent artist; I checked out his work in his MySpace and thought they were pretty good. Though odd as it may seem, he did not draw the girl you saw in our submission, but only the girl in the preloader. It was I, Midian, who drew the main girl and all the clothes & accessories, plus inserting the actionscripts and text.

You're right about the title. Perhaps I should change it into something more eye-catching. And I should give the clothes and hair a realistic touch up, and the background could be something better than purple fire trace-bitmapped. I'll try to find some time adding some shading to the girl. But since I'm new with flash, this may take a while.

P.S.
Thanks for the review!

[cursor storm]

Modest effort, but brilliant execution.

Graphics: Felt a little small and cramped, but everything was rendered nicely, heavily stylized, and consistant within the game. Would have liked to see some prettier backgrounds and maybe a slightly bigger playfield with bigger characters, but that's nitpicking.

Style: Very nice. See "Graphics."

Sound: Nice music, subdued and to the point. Sound effects compliment the music and aren't irritating at all, which is rare in a Flash game. Wouldn't change a thing!

Violence: You, um, do something... to things... and they disappear. Not sure if I'd even call that "violence," but it's definitely "action!"

Interactivity: Excellent for a game of this type. My only complaint is that the boss won't take dammage from the draw tool.

Humor: I'm really not sure why I scored this so high. Something just made me smile about the glowing red cursors of other users and the big red hourglass of LagDoom.

Overall: VERY nice. I would love to see more short, simple games like this, brilliantly rendered and executed, rather than tons of ambitious, elaborate mario clones and RPGs that end up being ugly and poorly made. MAKE MORE GAMES! :D

unknown911 responds:

Thanks for the enlightening review!

The draw tools _does_ damage the bosses, but it's very hard to use against them. It's obviously good against big clusters of enemies though ;)

Thanks for the criticism, this definitely will be getting a sequel after all the positive reviews I've gotten so far, your suggestions help :)

[Toast: Game]

Great engine! Decent game.

Graphics: Sprite graphics with original characters are always cool, and these characters are very nicely done! Unfortunately, some of the transitions like the "get ready" text break the player's suspense of disbelief by mixing pixels freely with vector shapes. It's almost always better to go either all pixel or all vector.

Style: The strongest part of this game was certianly it's original style, theme, and characters. Nice work! Combat works well enough, but the way enemies and the player die could be embellished a little bit if you really want to nail that classic 2D platformer look & feel. Think "fall off the screen when you die."

Sound: The music gets the blood pumping, but it seems to clash a bit with the characters and the world. Sound effects are good. Though you probably ought to replace that one mario sound effect with something more original. There's tons of free sound repositories out there.

Violence: Jump on the brightly colored toasters to, well, break them, I guess. No biggie. Jack Thompson has bigger fish to fail to fry.

Interactivity: A competently executed run n' jump (by Flash's standards, anyway.) The controls could be further improved by not allowing a held-down spacebar to equal bunny-hopping. It would be nice to collide with the sides of a block instead of just the top of it, but I know this is hard to code. If I were you, I'd make it easier to land on a single block by upping the horizontal decelleration if you're on solid ground, and perhaps capping the maximum fall speed so the player has a bit more time to react. (Or by making all the relevant platforms more than one block wide.) Collecting butter is easy and I could not impove upon it. Good work, there. Combat is decent, but could be further refined.

Humor: The cocnept of anthropomorphic toast is kinda goofy, but it would be even better if you'd add some sort of story with dialogue or even voice samples. Flash gives you an amazingly broad range of tools with whiche to tell a story. It's a shame not to use them. If you absolutely must stick to the pixels, at least add a little intro screen where a big evil toaster steals the bagel pricess or whatever. It would enchance the characters, which are already this game's strong suit, if you add a story to them in a way that engages the player.

Overall: You've done an excellent job of programming this game's engine, and a great job designing sprite characters. The control/gameplay could use a little tweaking, but the real missed opprotunity here is one of storytelling. I'm sure this game will score well, and it deserves to! But if you take it a step further, and really refine it, you could have one of the top 10 truly memorable Flash games of all time here, or a damn fine proof-of-concept for a GBA game. As it sits, you just have a competently executed flash platformer. If that's all you set out to accomplish, good job! :) But keep working on it and in another month or so, it could be SO much more!

Hacker12 responds:

Dude I wich I could reply back to you as well as you reviewed my game but. Thanks for the input ^^ and also the mario effect is the only sound I could which would fit the brick smashing effect.

[BattleMage]

A nice, long platformer with kinda dodgy gameplay.

Graphics: Yes, we do recognize rockman's walk when we see it. Backgrounds are nice-looking, everything's animated well, but a lot of the animations reminded me of other game sprites just traced using Flash's drawing tools. Because of this, different game elements each seem illustrated in a different drawing style.

Style: The opening theme and cinema scenes were done well, though a bit simplistic, it tells the story well. The characters don't look like they all came from or belong in the same world together, I suspect because they were all traced from different sprite sheets. Nothing really jumps out as being extremely well-done or original. I think a personal, unique drawing style (I.E. all characters drawn by the Flash artist from scratch,) might have made a lot of difference.

Gameplay: True to the Rockman/Megaman theme, there's lots of persnickety jumping where hitting your head on a ledge will make you start all over again if you don't do it exactly perfect. Enemies move a bit more like Castlevania, appearing far outside your attack range and then gravitating towards the ground where you are.

Unlike Castlevania, though, these bad guys aren't confined to their own limited areas, which means you're constantly surrounded and often have no choice but to take a hit in order to progress. They'll be swarming around on a ledge beneath you where you need to jump, and you have no way to hit them or take them out. If the enemies dropped random health powerups, maybe this wouldn't be an issue, but the way things stand, they only drop money, so every hit you take is permenent.

The boss moves in odd ways and you can't duck or stab upwards, so I was at a loss as to how to beat him. The only way I could ever hurt him was by trading hits when he cross the screen, and of course, I had been softened up by all the enemies underfoot in the first stage, so I died first. Maybe there's a trick to it. I dunno. You only get one life, then you have to start over, so I didn't have the patience to play through it again. That was a nice thing about Rockman. If you got to the boss with half health and then died, you could always call it a practice fight and try it again with FULL health.

Overall: I liked this game, but the gameplay was frustrating in some ways. I absolutely commend the author for actually telling a story! THAT aspect of the game RULED! I look forward to his next release. Hopefully something with more original graphics, and perhaps a more solid visual theme tying everything together. He's taking the gameplay in a good direction, and he's made a more competent action/platformer than I've seen in Flash. The health/lives mechanism kills it, though. A health meter is better than one hit, you're dead, yes, but a health meter with a limited number of lives that lets you continue right at the boss, is even better. That's just my opinion, though. There's a lot to like here, if you're not as easily frustrated as me.

To the author: Keep up the good work, and I hope to see more games of this caliber from you, perhaps with a bit more diversity and polish and a less severe margin of error.

Arclite83 responds:

Thanks for the great review; you make a lot of good points, and you've given me a lot to consider for BM2 in terms of mechanics. I did take shortcuts with the artwork, and while the originals were from different areas I feel the final style was my own (simplistic) interpretation of the sprites. It's hard to make something this bulky wihtout using more complex graphics, and I was seriously hindered to simplicity because of the engine (I already have a fix in mind for this).

All in all, you've made some great points, and I will definitely take some of this and run with it. I'm glad you like the story; I have the jyst of the next one complete, once I fill in the details and iron out all I hope to accomplish with my next engine revision, I should be on my way to making BM2.