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gnome42

57 Game Reviews

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It looks nice on the surface, but it's poorly coded and super grindy of a game.

You managed to make a highly addictive game out of a super generic premise, and the UI, graphics, and quirks like limb-specific shots and surfing added a nice, fun touch, but by day 10 or 20 I found myself growing increasingly frustrated with the repetitive soundtrack and the continuous, incomprehensible remarks of the main character.

The skills were a nice touch, but spending multiple days' worth of hard-earned cash on a poorly-arranged skill tree just didn't appeal to me for some reason. I mean, I would have loved to endure more grindy madness to make up the royalties I might spend on a 2% chance of dealing double damage on JUST bosses (in layman's terms, for every 50 bullets you fire, a single one will count for 2).

Eventually, while enduring lag that worsened as I got deeper into the game (due to faulty memory allocation or failure to garbage collect, maybe? a simple refresh solved the problem), I fortified all but the last level, which had ~120 zombies remaining. The strict time limit forced me to play the same area two or three times, but eventually I killed the final zombie, suddenly realizing I didn't have enough money to fortify the area. I couldn't play that level again (as there were 0 zombies), but conveniently I was able to grind more than enough money on the map regions I had already fortified.

That brought me to the boss level, which, although it certainly passed into the threshold of challenging (a good thing), went beyond that into downright frustrating. I managed to chip away a fairly large portion of his health, but the homing charge attack is just too much, as it's pretty much trial and error until you figure out how to actually not get hit by his primal yodeling attack--very sophisticated for a master of necromancy, by the way.

Anyway, I realize I'm being overly critical of this game which you've put countless hours, blood, sweat and tears into, probably because I'm a self-righteous ***hole or something, so I'll end on a nicer note by mentioning my appreciation for the finer things like graphics, addictiveness and challenge, and I wish you luck on your neverending quest to debug.

There goes my sleep time

Just played this game for about 5 hours straight.. I'll admit it's super addictive, but it was also super tedious at times--for each 'day' that passed, I'd have to do another 15-25 actions on a zombie, which would be random grinding since I'd already unlocked everything earlier. I also had several thousand unused RP throughout the latter portion of the game, which was meh: earlier in the game I'd grind for RP, and now I just had too much of it. Oh wells.

Away from the repetitiveness of some parts, the game was pretty great, from art to music to gameplay. I really liked the rushed scene where Woods busted in and asked me to show him what I had--the character's voice was like an echo of my own, especially since I had just started fresh with a new zombie. I just wish that with character interactions (like the part where I murdered everyone?!), there'd be options on what to do/say in that situation. And maybe it'd be nice if there were a few more character interactions.

The game got a little lonely, but what pulled me through (despite the repetitive RP grinding I was forced to do by the objectives list) was the story--I'm a sucker for a story, especially when narrated like this. I mean, the story was predictable halfway through, and the way it was expressed was slightly reminiscent of the awful memory web in Prototype (but combined with the brilliant side-stories in Iji).

As for the ending, well, gee, there really was no ending at all, was there. I thought there'd be different endings depending on what research you did (thorough training vs passive RP grinding) or how you dealt with Woods etc, but nope, I killed everyone, stayed with my zombies (still grinding through the days) for an indefinite amount of time, and then exited once the narrator resigned.

Blahblahwalloftl;dr
+limited but immersive gameplay
+art and music
+highly addictive (could also be a negative)
+I've always wanted a zombie pet I could train--but not really

-dreary, repetitive grinding at some points
-abrupt and unexpected ending, sorta underwhelming
-predictable storyline with muddled narration
-it took away 5 hours of my sleep that I'll never get back

Apologies in advance if parts of this review don't make sense or are overly critical and cruel and stuff. It's 5:30am and I should have been asleep right now.

Evil-Dog responds:

Nah it's a great review, I agree with most of what you said. We make games, we learn, we hone our design skills :D we'll get there!

= Braid + The Company of Myself + Color My World

I give this game a pretty low score for originality, but it was well done for the most part. A couple things irked me, like the falling blocks level (didn't fit in with the rest of the game), and the one bonus level which requires the boy to push blocks into a shallow hole (which loops to the top of the screen) for the girl, but he magically dies when he falls into it--poor level design really, when you have to implement such a cheap mechanism.

Anyway, the game was nice for the most part, nice graphics, good music and clever game styles, but I just wish it had a little more originality.

Pretty game, but super unbalanced and easy.

I can see a lot of time/work was put into the game, what with graphics, animation, customization and all, which made the game look very nice, though I did nitpick about a few features and functions (such as not being able to preview before buying, and a few annoying bugs still persist)

However, the bane of this game is that it's SO EASY. And super unbalanced. Starting out, I chose Commando, and quickly realized the class was crap. I switched to dual weapon and breezed through the rest of the game using Unload, while filling my stats with Power and Agility. Accuracy was unnecessary past a few points (shocking since I was dual wielding), and defense/resist were pretty useless given the enemy rarely hit me (because of agility). I never lost a fight (I'd have to spam buffs to lose, really) and remained pretty much untouched by everyone.

The game has too strong of a positive feedback loop. Enemies don't get nearly as hard as they should be in stages 3-4, but the player can continue adding more and more stats to quickly overpower any enemy. It'd be nice also, if other classes weren't so obsolete compared to Dual Pistol mode. After beating every enemy, I went back to play with other classes (stats remained unchanged--full power/agility/sp, everything else nearly empty), and although fights took longer (I didn't have Unload or anything as powerful), they still ended up with me rarely/never missing, and rarely/never taking damage.

There really ought to be stronger distinctions between classes--ie Akimbo has much reduced accuracy, Melee deals less damage or has lower agility, etc. Also, tweak the stats so that Agility doesn't give the player a 50% chance of going twice in a row, aka a very high chance that the player can get long chains of attacks, untouched by the enemy. Resistance, when full, makes the player an iron fortress, and Precision is a little obsolete when the accuracy for all weapons is already so high.

All in all, it was a pretty game, but badly needs tweaking so it requires more than a repetitive clicking motion to win. 5/10 is the best I can do.

Eh..

A nice idea, but quite poorly executed. When it comes down to it, the game was just a massive time attack rush through awfully narrow maps, making it more irritable than fun to play.
Maybe if there was some depth or some ultimate goal, the game would've been fun, but it was just another one of those "navigate to the end" games, except with redone graphics and an awful timer.

Better luck next time, sorry.

It's okay..

The randomly generated levels were pretty cool I guess, but the game overall is poorly coded (as you're probably aware, it could have been made better), and some of the level blocks are poorly designed (such as the spike-ceilinged conveyor belts).
Additionally I'd like to see more game modes, one of them being perhaps a classic mode with custom-made levels, where this one would become the randomly generated endless mode.

This is not tot say that the game is bad; the graphics were very well done, and the different game elements were made nicely, it's just that the game could've been better, as the elements were incorporated a little poorly, and collision detection could've been a little better.

Also, I found it frustratingly hard to play with the fast scrolling speed coupled with the poorly-arranged obstacles at times.

Anyway, overall this game wasn't bad, but it could've been implemented much better.

Much room for improvement.

I'll try to go through everything that was wrong with this game, without being too harsh.
This game is only 3 race tracks of time attack mode; there's only one player, no AI, and no incentive to play except to beat your own time.

The tracks themselves are designed very poorly. It seems as if you simply took a large grey brush with a thick white outline and drew one on top of a blue background. Nothing more. No scenery, no textures, nothing. Just a grey road in an endless blue sea.
Graphics aside, the tracks don't even take into account that the car doesn't turn at those angles. I found myself constantly having to stop, turn for 4 seconds, and then go again at the multiple sharp turns native to every track.

The racing mechanics were awful. All I can pride you on is the acceleration of the vehicle. Steering mechanics were absolutely dreadful. In fact, they were more "turning mechanics" than steering ones. Cars shouldn't turn when static (the tires don't even rotate). One more thing I noticed was that when going in reverse and turning, the direction the car steered in changed (while I was holding the same keys).
On that note, race cars don't reverse nearly as fast as they accelerate, a fact which you neglected.
As for lap completion, I started cutting through the track in the first level, and it would randomly declare me as having gone on to the next lap. Halfway through my 3rd lap it congratulated me on finishing and went to the "submit score" page.

And on that note, I find the whole MochiAds thing to be extremely irritating. I was surprised it wouldn't randomly mid-race go to a time-out and then show me a new advertisement. Even if the game was half-decent I wouldn't stand for that much advertisement, let alone for this.

Overall, I find that this 'fun racing game' would be something out of a "flash games for first-timers" book, closer to the first few chapters. There have been other racing games on Newgrounds before, and I feel that those should have set some sort of standard.
I'm sure you noticed the flaws in your game and concluded that the game was playable and decided to submit it. Yes, the game is playable, to some extent. However, it's extremely pointless, devoid of any action, and overall poor.
Maybe you should improve on the concept and resubmit a new version, starting with some textured terrain. Best of luck in future submissions, but this one was not a success.

It's fine, I guess.

But it's just going to die in obscurity in a few days, as have the ones before it.
Suggestions for a new upload (not a fixed version since once this goes off the "Best of the Week" page, people will forget about it and the edits will be for nothing):
Add a word filter. Or at least, some rooms with filters. The problem with this chat is all the 11 year olds spamming the chat with inane, vulgar things. The lack of any sort of filter only encourages this.
Add a longer delay. The current delay is what, one second? The users mentioned above take more than that to type a single word, let alone an entire sentence. It only minimally blocks spamming, but then again, a longer delay would only impede more serious users.
User moderation system. It's nice that there are active moderators, sure, but I find that having user moderators would be much nicer. By this I mean that all users would have certain powers like kicking (ex: 1/4 users vote = spammer is kicked from room). Arguably though, you have solved this (to some extent) with the mute button. However, not every user will mute a spammer, and some might even decide to join in the riotous fun, which is why kicking a player would be a better solution. I guess an alternative would be that if n% of users mute the user in question, s/he would be fully muted, or kicked from the room.

Because of the complete lack of chat moderation (except for the current admins, who I find don't do much at all, anyway), this chat only gets a 6 from me. Sorry.

Amazing game.

I haven't seen anything like this before, and it is simply amazing. The last level itself was so full of emotion.. all the previous Jacks, his youth, his first performance, his first time meeting Kathryn... all of them are jumping off the cliff in order to help the current remnant of Jack survive... with each one that falls into the pit, Jack loses a little piece of himself, one that he cannot retrieve. Heading to his safehouse is in fact leading him to his demise..
For in his mind he may be this performer.. but in reality he is an ill patient who is losing himself little by little, more and more each day...

Wonderful.

I had almost forgotten about the *existence* of that game.. I was never too good at SkyBalls, though, heh, and I'm not much good at this one either. It's a lot like the original, and I gotta say, I'd never have thought something like this would be possible in Flash.
Thanks for raising the bar.

What is this.. I don't even use it.

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