EpicMooCow's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Linker]

Meh, it's a pretty good game. Nothing I've never seen before though. The graphics work fairly well, the animation is a good but can be a little laggy whenever the screen gets cluttered. However, the game isn't really pushing any boundaries. This style of game has not already been done, but it's actually pretty frequent in terms of puzzle games. It's a good start though, the game proves that you know your way around Flash, so it won't be too difficult at all for you to produce a really good game. Keep at it.

[Slime Quest]

It's pretty obvious that this game isn't good, let's not beat around the bush here. No real effort was put into it except MAYBE graphic wise. There's no real gameplay elements to it. Essentially, you're forced to watch a video, and afterwards you just click some things and then watch another video. I gave this a two, and I actually somewhat regret doing that now. I would really consider putting more work into your games next time you release one. Add a story, actual gameplay, a better upgrade system, so on and so forth. Good try, though.

[simian.interface]

This game is genius. This just proves that it doesn't take a intricate story lines or complex game play elements to make a game good. I literally have no complaints for this. The music was really good, the game never got repetitive, and everything was just so well done. I really enjoyed //mod_c and //dir. Someone of the puzzles there just made me smile because of how awesome they were.

Also, this game had a surprising comical sense without any detailed text. It literally took only three words to easily overpass any other humor in any other game. Fantastic job, I really hope to see more of this. Hopefully if you create a sequel to this, we'll get more levels! Keep it up, I want to see more from you now.

[Iromeku]

This game is far too confusing. I couldn't really wrap my mind around the concept, and I tried playing anyways and got stuck at level 3. The tutorial was very poorly constructed, and even when I was trying my best to get as much information from the tutorial as possible I still didn't understand it, and even some of the things didn't make sense when I tried applying them to the game itself. For example, in level 3, no matter the squares are in, the white square never changes. Why wasn't something like this mentioned in the tutorial?

So essentially, this game left me no choice but to just randomly match smaller tiles with the bigger ones and hope that one of the combinations worked. For such a complex game, I would really make sure you add a REALLY good tutorial so that the player can't anyone or anything but themselves. Get the player to learn while playing, rather than read a tutorial and have to learn all at once. The graphics were O.K, and the music was a little annoying as well.

[Escape the City]

This is pretty good, but it's a bit of an overused concept. Rather than creating a clone of a game with better graphics, I would have considered trying to at least add something new.

... I really do like the graphics though, and the jump is so long and launches you so far it makes you feel pretty damn free.

[Swindler 2]

Controls are very messy, it's nearly impossible for me to control my character, but that may be because I spent hardly any time playing. The first level is far too difficult. I died several times and eventually I just gave up. Having a difficult level isn't the best way to introduce your character to a game. Graphics appear to be well done from what I can see, and the animation is also very smooth.

[Get Closer]

Super awesome game. Kind of short, but it's to be expected from a Ludum Dare game. In fact, for a Ludum Dare game this had surprisingly good graphics. The story was told pretty smoothly as well, the message in it was understandable even when the game didn't tell you directly what it meant, like how near the end it became easier to obtain the hearts, so it gets easier to get closer. That's a feature that'll score you a ton of points in games, no matter how simple the story is. The music was good, fit extremely well into the game.

One complaint though, the controls get a little messy. When you have a game that involves circular motion such as this one, you gotta make sure that the controls get switched whenever you're up at the top of the circle (down makes you go down instead of up when you're at the top of the circle, left makes you go right, etc.) and this made the "impossible level" almost literally impossible for me. But great job, I'd love to see more of your work. If this is what you can do in 48 hours, I'd like to see what you can do in a month!

[J-J-Jump]

I'm giving this a better score than I usually would have. Usually it would have been a one, but I can kind of see effort in there, so I'm just going to give it a bit more of a positive score. Let me tell you why this game is awful.

For one thing, you present us with "a platformer with a twist." There are so many of these out there it's ridiculous. This is your standard platform game that only changes the jump patterns. Other than that, it's pretty unoriginal.

The graphics on this are awful. Now, usually I wouldn't let this hinder a game, but considering the fact that this started hurting my eyes after playing for awhile was a pain. Must have taken five minutes at the most for graphic working. You could have at least tried to put some effort into making graphics for this game. Games that use an 8-bit art style similar to this one basically say "I'm too lazy to put any work into graphics for my game." If you're going to use this art style, at least make it somewhat good.

There's not even any storyline to this either. There's just nothing to it at all. It dumps you straight into the middle of the game. You don't know what you're supposed to be doing, nor do you know what's going on. If you don't do something perfectly, it's going to screw you over later. It's still possible, but it usually means death and having to redo the whole thing over from the last checkpoint. I didn't even realize that I was limited on my jumps, nor did I realize I could jump multiple times until around level 2. There's no reward to finishing a level either. I mean, the least you could do is pop in a humorous five word message for us to read, but you just say "nope here's more levels."

The only redeeming feature that this game has its music. Even the music isn't that great. It gets pretty old after awhile, but at least it's bearable. At least whenever my eyes are burning from looking at flashy graphics and extreme differences in color patterns I have decent music to accompany it.

Level 10/10 is a giant middle finger to everyone who made it that far. It shifts the difficult meter to a damn near impossible difficulty just to screw over the players who for whatever reason decide to play your game. There's absolutely no reason to do that, and this actually one of the reasons why this game was so badly damaged in terms of my personal rating. That's an extremely cruel and sick thing to do in a game.

I would caution players who are curious about this game to NOT play it. There are plenty of other games out there on Newgrounds that are actually worth the time to play, unlike this game. I'm not saying you should just stop making games completely, but please actually put more than a few hours of effort into your game before you submit it.

[Equation Master]

I suppose this could be a fairly fun game for some people, but for me it was really not all that great. There's not much motivating me to keep playing, there's no replay value as far as I can see, and there's no music either. It's just kind of a dull game.

One last thing, the achievements are a bit over done. One of the worst things an achievement list can possibly do is give the player easy to earn achievements. I mean, you get an achievement for getting an achievement? Two full achievements for just one easy puzzle.