EpicMooCow's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Greenie]

I thought this was kind of an unexciting platformer. One of the main issues I had with the game was the fact that moving gave you very little momentum, which resulted in boring movement. It also meant that you had to time your jump perfectly in some situations, which was incredibly lame.

This might just be me, but hidden blocks are not a good thing to add to a game. It just makes your game more about guessing and luck rather than actual skill. Hidden blocks are not puzzles, they are just annoying. It actually made me quit level 10. That's just lazy design.

I would also recommend adding WASD to the controls. I don't mind using arrow keys, but it's always nice to let the players play the way they want. The music is nice and with some work this game could have been much better.

Letmethink2 responds:

You can edit the controls to wasd in the controls menu

[Above Average Guy]

Such a great game on so many levels. It's disappointing that you couldn't make five stars.

Let's cut straight to the chase, this game is advertised as a puzzle platformer. In the game, it says "think outside the box". The levels are designed for a puzzle platform game. However, you hardly have any real puzzles. Literally more than half of the 43 levels is just difficult platform jumping and really simple fluff. Then most of the actual real puzzles you have are pressing a key. At first, it was kind of funny. It's like you have no idea what to do, and then it suddenly clicks in your head. It's fun. Then it gets so damn repetitive. Every single puzzle seems to be "if you hit this key, you can solve the puzzle!" and eventually it just becomes obvious and is no longer fun. The only actual puzzle was the Konami one. Near the end of the game, it just basically becomes I Wanna Be The Guy.

Despite this, you had great audio, a decent story, superb graphics and animations, and everything was smooth. You even had a pretty good ending. The game is a bit like a Valentine chocolates. It has some really pretty packaging, and it's pretty good, but in reality the chocolates are mediocre at best. If you create a sequel, spend a bit more time on making creative puzzles and you'll be looking great.

[Lumber John]

Poor game. This game has almost no redeeming features unfortunately.

I'm going to start off with the most obvious thing, which is your sound. Everything from sound effects to music is just awful, especially your collect noise. It's really, really loud and annoying. Your attack noise was so bad it almost made me not want to attack anything. Your music consists of a really short loop that just continues on and on, which is generally just a poor soundtrack. It's just boring and repetitive.

Your graphics are really bad. Pixel graphics are a bad idea in general. People do them because they're too lazy to do anything else. However, occasionally, somebody comes along and manages to do them right. You weren't one of those people. Your graphics just don't fit together and aren't charming at all. It just looks really unattractive and kind of hurts the eye because everything seems a little bit too bright and there's too much color variation. Trust me, being talented in art is difficult, but graphics is not something that can be brushed off, especially in flash games. Your animations are just as bad. The animation for attacking is so bad it's almost funny.

If that wasn't bad enough, your game play is so basic and boring that it's no fun. Picking up notes feels like a chore. Your character moves so slow it's brutal. In my opinion, just remove run from the game and have your character moving at the run speed all the time. Because no one is ever going to need to move that slow at any point in the game. Your combat can hardly even be considered combat. There's no actual meat to it at all. It's just spam the Z key as much as possible. I mean, your enemies don't even move. The combat system is literally so bad it might be the worse combat system I've ever seen in any game. When you hit something, it should be knocked back a little. One of your main issues is the fact that your controls are really weird. WSD to move, SHIFT to sprint (if you really want to keep it in there), Left Click to attack. That's a hell of a lot smoother and easier to control.

The worst part of this game is the fact that you didn't even redeem yourself. No story, no comedy, no dialogue. It's just as simple as it can possibly be, with bare minimum effort, and it shows. I feel like you were trying to mimic like an old NES game or something, but you failed miserably. This game was just a train wreck. Next time you create a game, you really need to put effort into creating an original game.

[Only One Chance]

One of the better Ludum Dare games I've seen. Considering this was made in 72 hours, this is pretty good. People underestimate the power of comedy in a game, and I feel like that's really what reeled me in this game at the beginning. I'd just like to commend you on that before I get started.

Considering the fact that there were two people in the game, you missed a lot of opportunities to take advantage of that. There were only two short situations in the game where the fact that there were two people was taken advantage of, which was disappointing. Adding more stuff to do with two people would have been a good idea.

Dialogue was made pretty poorly. For the most part, it went by a little too fast and it was kind of difficult to read. What was even worse is that with the amount of movement going on, I couldn't read what they were saying at all because the dialogue would just kind of overlap with each other. If you had placed the dialogue at the bottom of the screen instead, for example: "GIRL: I'm saying dialogue!" then it would have been a lot more convenient.

You had a pretty good story, which is pretty much the only way you can make a good game in 72 hours. However, the story could have been so much more. There was really no interaction between the two characters. On rare occasions, they would say a few words to each other, but other than that there was really nothing. So I didn't really feel any connection to the characters, which is something that's important to have, especially in a story-driven game. Let's be honest, this was a pretty basic platformer, so you need to have a good story to back it up.

The ending was terrible. Probably the worst ending you could have had, to be honest. Maybe it's because I didn't look for a secret ending, but you're just dumped into a box with music playing. There's no depth to it. The least you could have done was just a bit of dialogue between the two characters. You know how kids are forced to eat their vegetables for dessert? This is the equivalent of forcing kids to eat their vegetables for like an empty can of beans.

Beyond this, it was a pretty good Ludum Dare game. If you had added just a bit more dialogue, placed it at the bottom of the screen instead, and added a better ending, this would have been a five star game. Nice job, though. If this is something you can accomplish in 72 hours, I'd love to see what you can do given a few weeks.

johnfn responds:

Hey, thanks for the fantastic review, EpicMooCow. You've certainly given me a lot to think about, and I really appreciate you taking the time to write all this out. Such an excellent and thoughtful review kinda reminds me of Step from the audio portal's audio reviews, perhaps you are his alter ego (or he is yours!).

I'm gonna take all of this advice to heart. Thanks again, and sorry for the bad ending hahaha

[Sentry Knight]

Near perfect game. Something this good hasn't been released since Knightmare Tower.

While you've got some great stuff going on, your game seems to be way too dependent on magic. When I played the game, I wanted to be more focused on how much damage my arrows were doing. It was really obvious that this game wasn't designed for that, which is really disappointing. With two upgrades to my bow, one upgrade to my arrows, and the 15% damage increase to my arrows using all talent trees, my arrows were only doing about 10 damage more. This pretty much ruined my game experience.

What's even more disappointing is the fact that magic isn't available enough to have the big impact on the game that it needs to. The shortest cooldown you get is 10 seconds (not counting the cooldown upgrades you can get) which is far too long. It's okay if you want to have a fireball nuke that's available every 10 seconds, but add another ability that's available more often. That way the player can actually cast spells constantly and don't have to depend on their arrows for ten whole seconds. This particularly comes into play when fighting really tough enemies, like the cannons or the battering ram. You basically have to cross your fingers that you can critically strike them for a really long time.

It might just be me, but the fire talent tree seemed a little weak compared to the other talent trees. I didn't have the time to individually test each talent tree, but if you compare the abilities to all the other abilities, they don't seem near as cool. This seems to be a problem in just about every video game, even huge video games like Diablo. It's clear that effort was put into balancing the trees, but from what I can see, there's an obvious favorite (demon) tree. It's somewhat fair, because the player can clearly see what they're getting into, but if you're like me, and just chose one at random because you didn't care too much about magic, you're going to get the short end of the stick.

World 4, Wave 5 ended the game for me. There's this thing that game writers just can't get through their head. Screwing your player over is a BAD IDEA. The player is your friend. One battering ram and about five trolls. By the time I was able to kill the battering ram, 2 trolls had gotten to my tower and were doing about 50 damage to it each hit. Not to mention the fact that there were still another 3 behind it. It was a really rude slap in the face. "Oh, you got this far? HA, nope." A ton of games seem to have this problem, where they just spike the difficulty up for no reason other than to screw the player over as much as possible. DON'T DO IT.

All things considered, this is a pretty good game. You have some really bad mistakes while creating the game, and they were almost enough to drag your game out of a five star rank, but the fact that you have great art, superb player development, and a nice variation of enemies will keep you locked in at the top.

[Painters Guild (Alpha)]

A game with potential that was executed poorly. Reconsider putting up a game in alpha state next time.

For one thing, there's no way to buy anything. The amount you have to pay for the goal every year is so outrageous that there's no way you can buy a single thing. Therefore, the game becomes completely linear. It's the same thing over and over again with ranging difficulty levels, which means the game loses interest fast.

I'll keep this short, but this game is far too boring at the moment to make me want to buy it, and it's going to be difficult to turn the game into something that will want to make me buy it just because of the concept you have.

[Zombinsanity]

Disappointing game. I'm a huge fan of good Run 'n Gun games, and this had a whole lot of potential. Unfortunately, this wasn't very good.

This game complete lacks action. Everything feels a little bit too slow and boring. This game desperately needs a speed boost. The main character should run faster, bullets should move faster, zombies should move faster. The action needs to come quickly. Also, I don't feel like I'm shooting a gun here. The pistol feels like I'm firing like a peashooter. The pistol should fire like a desert eagle. It should kill faster, and make more noise. There needs to be a lot of zombies and they should be dying in two hits. You can worry about scaling difficulty up later, but you need to draw the player in first.

Consider adding more mobility to the player. This is an action shooter, and it's hard to make the moment seem exciting when your player walks around the level like an old man. Consider adding a slide and a double jump, and then rearrange your levels to properly take advantage of these. Also, never give the player an opportunity to corner themself. There's a lot of areas where this came into play, and it's a bad idea. There should be two ways to get in and out of an area. You should never feel like you've been bottled up.

Your zombies are really, really easy to move around. You can literally just jump around them because they're too slow and stupid. You can take the same path around the level and just kind of get a train going. It doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure out how to do it either. Your zombies are just too bland. However, I have you credit on your variety. By like the fourth level there was a pretty big range of zombies.

It's a nice attempt, but it doesn't feel fast enough to be a good action game.

[The Everloom]

- CONTAINS SPOILERS -

I came to this game ready to butcher it because it looked like it was another typical game with poor graphics and a poor story. I got the exact opposite. Phenomenal game all the way across the board. Great story, great music, great game play, great graphics. You completely nailed it, which is extremely hard to do with a flash game without action that is driven by story.

The game felt a little bit too linear. It was kind of just "take this item to here, get a new item, which you take over to here." You pulled it off, but I noticed it and it took away from the game a little bit. For a game that had the world open, it didn't feel like you had much opportunity to really explore. The game was just straight down to business the whole time and lacked any fluff for fun. It's not necessary, but it would have added to your game a bit. Adding a mini-game or a side mission here and there just for the sake of the player's entertainment would have been nice.

The very end was really disappointing. This wasn't a hint towards a sequel, this was a really cheesy shout that there will be a second game. For such a great game, that part just seemed a little half-assed to me. Rather than telling the player "HEY MAN LOOK I'M MAKING A SEQUEL LOOK AT THIS I'M DEFINITELY MAKING A SEQUEL SEE" give them a hint based on the story. For example, if something occurred within the story that would clearly bring the main character back into a dream.

Other than that though, this was a great game. If you're making an Everloom 2, I'd definitely keep that open world feel in mind. You're in a floating paradise in the sky, so make the player feel like they are free to do whatever they want.

Kajenx responds:

Actually, "The End...?" Was supposed to be a reference to what the Sage said about how there are no endings, haha. I'm not sure if there actually WILL be a sequel, tbh. Though, a lot of people are taking that to be what it means, so I'm sure I'll be getting hate mail in a year when it's not out. >_>

[Chicken Chaser]

Pretty good game. You could have easily created a masterpiece if you just put in a little more effort, but other than that it was an enjoyable game.

Keep in mind the system that you're making this game for. Computers have mice, so take advantage of it. It's sort of difficult to play a game using specifically the keyboard, and mice gives the player a lot more control anyway. It's not a huge issue, but if you added mouse support this would easily be a much better game.

One of the major disappointments in this game was the lack of player development. Your player stays the same the whole game, which is sad because you left a whole bunch of room for upgrades. If you had a shop that sold better weapons or gave you more health in between levels, you'd be set.

Other than those two complaints, this was a really smooth and pretty game. The music was great, and the game play was pretty good. Overall, a good game that's definitely worth playing.

[Apocalypse: Survive it]

While it's an interesting experimental concept, this game really wasn't that great. I can't give an honest review though, because this is experimental and this was following rules for a contest, but this game was just disappointing. If the voice actor had better delivery, especially considering the fact that it's a game that's pretty much based around game play, you would be looking pretty good. Something along the lines of the Stanley Parable would be ideal. Unfortunately, this just felt boring and slow. Also, using subtitles would really come in handy next time. However, I have to recognize the fact that this was for a contest, and I have to recognize that the rules were pretty much followed appropriately, so I'm giving it three stars.

Kolumbo responds:

Thanks. Look out for the bigger & better version soon-ish.