Gaiacarra's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Imperil]

Nice style, nice controls, although the camera was a little jumpy sometimes. Functional. Just not very fun. The puzzles are that kind of non-puzzle where you figure it out as soon as you walk in the room ("move the block form point A to point B" style puzzles), which makes carrying out the solution tedious. The combat got interesting when you were forced to fight multiple enemies at once, but it didn't happen very often. I played up to part way through the third area (with the telekinesis power) and then stopped because I realized I was bored.

[BEATO]

Basically just a (nice) tech demo.

With lower-speed songs the gameplay is really only as much fun as the music. It would benefit from more complexity. Powerups, or maybe sometimes you have to dodge objects rather than catch them. An excuse to slap the spacebar now and again would be nice, maybe in service of Ikaruga-style polarity switching?

At higher speeds the game is unplayable. Whenever the stream switches direction (clockwise to counter-clockwise or vice-versa) your life drains to zero before you even realize what's happening. There are two solutions. One, you just accept that higher songs are more difficult and that you have to train on slower songs, and work your way up. This would be okay if slower songs were fun enough to make practicing on them fun. The other would be to find some balancing mechanic to separate difficulty from tempo - for instance, missing a beat could cost you less life on higher-tempo songs.

Also needs a pause button and a mute button for the main menu.

[Hexa Shift]

I don't agree that the randomness gets in the way of strategy - games with random elements can still be strategic. But I think the sheer size of the board makes it overwhelming. It's very hard to see how your first few moves are going to affect the endgame. A 10 or 15 tile board, maybe even just 5 tiles, could make for an interesting puzzle, since you could actually think several moves ahead.

[Dig2China]

What the hell are these controls, man? "Launching" games like this are an established genre, why'd you go and reinvent the wheel? I mean, tap to launch (cus I just love having to stop playing because the tendon in my index finger hurts), drag to boost (what in the actual shit) and click and hold to turn (as opposed to just pointing the mouse where you want to go).

I also feel like the difference between the various different kinds of objects isn't clear enough. Generally when objects in a video game serve radically different purposes, they're distinguished visually in more ways than just being different objects. A rusty old safe looks just as much like something I'd want to avoid as a big rock. The rock should be black and spiky, the safe should be glimmering and golden. They need to feel different, not just look different.

[Heart Star]

It looks and sounds really pretty, and I guess it would kill 10 minutes if you don't want anything high stress. But it's too easy! It barely qualifies as a game, it's just "put this guy here and stand on him to reach that platform" repeated over and over again. I also feel the controls aren't really right for the genre - there's no need for a fixed jump arc (ie, not being able to control your direction in mid-air) in a puzzle game, there's not much joy in redoing a puzzle because of a last minute missed jump.

[Stack n Roll]

It's alright.

Jeez, man... a little presentation goes a long way. This thing looks and sounds like something that came with Windows 98.

Anyway the game is quite fun... it's pretty much like Solitaire, it passes the time. Also like Solitaire it seems extremely improbable you'll ever get anywhere in it. Maybe slightly reducing the number of colors would have been a good idea, or increasing the usefulness of the balls.

Your interface is a bit weird looking all around, but the biggest flaw is that there's no way to start a new game after finishing the current one. There's also no mute button, which is a must for any flash application of any kind. High score board doesn't work.

Overall: decent solitaire-style game, but a total lack of effort in presentation and UI.

rpawlak responds:

Thanks for the review. I'm new to newgrounds. The game does not seem to work properly here; http calls to my server to process the high scores don't execute and flash cookies won't work here either. That interferes with the re-starting of the game. It works differently on my website www.stacknroll.com. I suppose I would need to make a special version for it to work properly here.

[Baseketball]

Boring

Repetitive and a little too easy, unappealing aesthetic and lackluster presentation (graphics, sound).

[Monsters in Bunnnyland]

Nice presentation, no substance.

I can't give this any more than a 3/10, and all three of those points are for the visuals and the relative level of polish. You have a nice, fresh looking art style and a sleek looking UI. But the game has no substance.

The biggest problem is that the levels just aren't fun. Very poor level and puzzle design. You just kind of stumble through the puzzles without any real thought or challenge, do you see what I mean? End result: boredom.

More specific problems are the controls, which are frustratingly slow and floaty. The music is very poor. It gets on your nerves almost immediately and just isn't very listenable. Having good music DOES matter, particularly in puzzle games.

The level design sometimes suffers from elementary mistakes like pitfalls that you couldn't see because there's scenery in the way (as in the very first level) or ways in which you can get a character stuck and have to restart the level, which you fall into by mistake far too easily, sometimes as a result of just trying to explore the level. Mechanics, like switches and so on, are introduced somewhat haphazardly without proper introduction, causing some of the early levels to be a little bewildering at first.

Overall, just a very bad game.

limex responds:

Thanks for your constructive criticism :) Negative feedback may even more valuable than applause.

[Lazy Cat]

Awful.

Another generic, churned out physics puzzler. Frustrating controls, totally uninspired "puzzles", and absolutely no sense of aesthetic design.

[Pursuit of hat]

Good fun.

A completely competent puzzle-platformer. The puzzles were challenging and interesting and the graphics and sound were all professional and easy on the eye and ear. Pulling your own limbs off made for both a quirky character and an interesting puzzle mechanic, which is always important in a physics puzzler what with there being about fifty billion of those on the internet.

Puzzles got just a little bit stale by level 18 (which is when I stopped), but I notice the game ends two levels later, so I guess that's not a big deal. The game did lag a little bit and the controls were a little on the sticky side.

Music, though not awful, was pretty boring and repetitive, which I think is a flaw worth fixing in any puzzle game, since you spend a lot of your time listening to it on a loop over and over again. Good (rather than just average) music in a puzzle game makes a big difference.

It's a shame you didn't mix up the graphics a bit, the same pastel-colors tileset got wearing after a while. Changing the visuals every few levels keeps things fresh and stops the player's eyes getting "tired".

Overall, about as enjoyable as a 20-level puzzle platformer can be, presentation could have used a tiny bit of perfecting.