xXCrowXx's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Emoticon Defense]

Good concept, seriously flawed

I'm left with the distinct impression that the maker of this game doesn't understand how to play tower defense games. While having a multitude of options available is cool, and the interchangeable upgrade system has a potential to make the game innovative, the vast majority of the choices are so useless as to not be worth buying. In fact, several options (the ones which increase reload rate at the expense of damage) are actually DOWNGRADES for your towers. For an intelligent player, such options may as well not be present in the game.

Worse, the pre-buying descriptions for the accessories are so vague as to lead you to mistakenly purchase a useless item. Not knowing the lifestealing hat has such a low chance of working, or even that it operates on a per-shot basis, for instance, leads players to spend a lot of money for something their tower isn't likely to make any use of. With no way to sell an individual hat, or even to buy a a replacement from a different hat tree, the player is left with no way to recover from the mistake except to sell the whole tower at a loss or to have an effectively hatless tower.

Tips to make the game actually work:
- Rebalance all the accessories so they all might actually be worth it given the proper situation. Right now only the sniper, strong, moneygain, level 1 of the life gaining, and sometimes double/triple damage items are ever worth anything. Increase likelihood of functionality and the general effectiveness of other upgrades.
- As you rebalance, remember that damage per second is king, with a minor bonus to long range (as it increases the seconds during which you deal your damage per second). Right now the machine gun and fast upgrades reduce BOTH. Fix that.
- Make the enemies more varied. Make some waves deliver enemies in a tight cluster so splash becomes better, make the fast waves faster (and make sure the slow effect is actually effective at dealing with them, I suggest the slow effect sets enemy movement speed to 1 rather than a % decrease), and make the average number of enemies per wave smaller so that there is more room for clever use of abilities.
- Replace the level 1, level 2 accessory system with a "you can buy two accessories of any type" system. Maybe then swaping hats mid game would actually make sense.
- The max level per tower needs to be higher.

I hope this helps you to take the kind of innovative accessory system you have in place here and turn it into a game that's actually interesting. Right now this game is, strategically speaking, a boring piece of crap.

[Jungle Magic]

Fine game

The ability to continue playing while other pieces are clearing is a good addition to the genre, but it does make even more conspicuous the design decision that strangely has become the standard for these games - that you cannot swap pieces unless they create a match. Anyone who has played Tetris Attack / Panel de Pon knows how much freely manipulating the game board can lead to combos, chains, and "skill chains".

Do consider removing the algorythm that undoes "invalid" moves, and placing more emphasis on connecting very large segments at once / continuing a chain reaction.

[Pixel Grower]

Artistically cool, but game-wise.. no so much

At the higher stages there is no true play control at all; the pixels fall to fast to be reacted to. At that point, the game is no longer a game.

It is, however, an amusing piece of art, and that is worth something.

[Pixel]

Great piece of art

Artistic design of this game is pretty awesome.

In principle, the gameplay is solid - however, the difficulty is nonexistent. There's no reason to bother tryoing to play well against anything but the last boss; by midgame I started just ramming stuff because I had so much HP I had no reason to even try to avoid anything. And even during the last boss it isn't worth it to dodge anything; it just takes too many hits to kill by ramming.

Provide a hard difficulty mode and it could be interesting as a game as well as a piece of art.

[Wizard Defense]

Very close to being awesome..

This is a pretty good defense game. At first glance the game is too simple, then at second glance it's amazing, but once you study it, it kind of falls apart because of balance issues.

For people having trouble with the game: you want to use Easter Attack and Lightning Spear, and upgrade how frequently you can use them. Avoid fire spells, and make sure you kill at least two of the first group of Cerberus enemies you meet so you have the money to survive the next few levels.

What makes this game good is how the abilities interact with each other. That the vanished enemies can still be effected by abilities is brilliant, and it leads to great strategy. Also, the variation of elements sometimes requires a change in your spell book, which makes upgrading decisions interesting. Unfortunately, there are no dangerous enemies that resist Thunder, which reinforces that already very powerful tree of spells.

The Easter Attack is WAY too good. The enemy stopping ability is so good I often used it against enemies that resisted Earth attacks; unlike every other spell in the game, it stops even the enemies it can't hurt, and it stops them longer than any other ability in the game. On top of that, it's a area effect attack which deals the most damage of any normal spell!

I think the area effect ice attack should slow opponents for a lot longer than it does. Since stopping the enemies is strategically better than slowing them down, slowing effects need to in the long run delay them more than a stun does. I know the stun effects don't always work while the slowing effects do, but by the middle of the game you cast so many instances of the lightning spells that anyone you target WILL be stunned.

The fire spells need help. Fire rain isn't any good until you get it highly upgraded, and even then the meteor attack is the hardest to use of the ultimate spells, making the game hard if you use both fire spells. Fireball isn't necessarily bad, but since it's harder to hit your intended opponent with it than with any other spell and it doesn't stun or slow, it should really deal more damage than the other spells. Especially since there are so many fire resistant enemies out there.

Fire rain didn't have an animation for me. I think that is a bug.

I suggest finding a native English speaker to help you with grammar. When you make a game, send the text to someone and let them send back to you the grammatically correct versions.

Again, with a few minor changes this game could go from good to great. Thanks for making it, and good luck in your next games!

[Lastman]

I know it's supposed to be a retro thing..

But seriously, almost every NES game and most Atari games have more responsive controls. Enemies that can be jumped on should die when you jump on them rather than the frame rate randomly deciding whether you hit the hitbox or the hurtbox, and decent jumping mobility has been a standard mechanic since the days of Mario.

Also, mid game ads are such a ridiculous nuisance just so you can cash in. I for one don't support this at all.

[[Visible] II]

Frame rate issues become a big problem

In a platformer game that requires precise positioning or else death occurs, and which has a finnicky sense of momentum, losing random frames during jumps (and sometimes even just walking!) becomes a huge problem. Even at low quality, the game was rather choppy on my 4 year old computer. I suggest trying to optimize code or figuring out some way to reduce the graphics load the next time you make this sort of a game. For instance, I think you've been using transparency to handle the faded appearance of the bottom portion and the person. Since the background is just white anyway, you could do the same effect by just redrawing the objects in lighter shades.

[Shopping City]

Not quite enough variety in gameplay

I just had to ask..
Why are the little kids going into the night club?

Seriously though, it would be interesting if the different people types had different preferences in stores. The fact that every person behaves in the same way ruins the importance of the slowing tools. This is a particular shame since the slowing tools are, by far, the most intersting part of the game which is otherwise quite straightforward.

[Journeys of Reemus: Ch 3]

Not up to par with the other games in the series

As a big fan of the series, I feel kind of let down by this game. Reemus games are in general great because of the extreme surrealism and the very difficult puzzles. There really isn't much going on here that is all that bizarre, aside from the already established death slug = alien parasite thing.

The puzzles are also significantly easier than usual; for the most part I figured out what needed to be done immediately and then it was a matter of going through the effort of wating for the characters to slowly walk around and do what I wanted them to. The color sequence door opening scene is particularly bad in this regard; there were simply too many screens that I had to watch Liam plod through.

Here's hoping that this game was meh for a reason other than that the creators have run out of truly cool ideas for the genre. I'm still looking forward to chapter 4, but there is definitely room for improvement as they go there.

[Bug War]

Inferior to other games of the same genre

It's obviously trying to emulate spore wars and other games of the same sort. However, rather than intriguing you with flexible, strategic gameplay, it instead confronts you with a clickfest of frustrating play control.

If you sort of like this game, I strongly recommend checking out .. dang, when I lost the password to my old account I lost that favorite and I don't remember the name. Anyway, it's a space based spore wars type game where you do basically this, but although you are permitted to attack anywhere, any intervening stars would blast your fighters with defense satellites, and each star could be of any variety of types (economic, fighter producing, defensive, something more unusual). Or heck, the original spore war is more interesting with its caps on the maximum sizes of things that must be managed.

In this game, you can allegedly command more than one colony at once.. but it doesn't do anything because there is no graph theory pathfinding algorythm in place, so only commands from one colony to an adjacent one is interpreted. Meanwhile, you can't even tell colonies to send their whole contents somewhere, so simply ordering your units to attack with everything becomes a click fest where it should only involve 2 clicks in a properly designed game.

The worst part of the affair, though, is the inflexble paths. The maps are almost always linear, so that the only thing to do is to keep clicking to send your units to the next colony in the line. Sure, sometimes there is a circle instead of a line, but it doesn't change the strategic picture any.

Also, the defensive towers, while an interesting idea, are too weak for their costs to actually add anything to the game; making them is always a bad decision, so from a game theory point of view, they might as well not exist.