Gaiacarra's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[The Next Floor]

Potential.

The game just loses so many points for the SERIOUSLY aggravating elevator controls. Firstly, the animation that occurs when you switch floors, with the little pause and the doors having to close and open? That can go fuck itself in the asshole with a rusty nail. Secondly, I should not have to drag it precisely to exactly the floor I want it to go to. I should be able to just "throw" the elevator downwards with a vague downwards mouse movement, and it should drop down one floor. This is a fast paced game, you can't be asking your players to pull off that kind of precision.

There should also be a keyboard hot-key to "call" the nearest elevator to your floor, and you should be able to use the up/down, W/S keys to move a "default" elevator up and down (this would be mostly useful early on while you're still learning and don't have very good weapons).

No quality button earns you my scorn. No save feature earns you my perplexed scorn. I mean, seriously? Even Defend Your Castle had a save feature, and that game was made in what, 2004? So those need to be added.

So, summary of what really needs to fixed:
- Remove. The fucking. Close door/Open door elevator animation.
- Implement the whole "vague mouse gesture" thing that I mentioned. This isn't as big a deal as item one, though.
- Seriously, remove that fucking obnoxiously superfluous animation and you'll fix half the gameplay problems already.
- Add a quality button, and also optimize your code or your graphics or something - if the guys who made Seed Of Destruction got it to run smoothly on high settings, so should everyone. Unless bitmaps take less processing power than vector art.
- Add a save function. Seriously, what the hell?
- ...so, we're clear on removing that animation I mentioned? Ok, just making sure.

Other than that, alot better than the pretentious crap you usually produce. No offense, it's just there's more to making a good game than having a novel little "innovative" gameplay gimmick in it.

[Death Delayer]

Problems.

I really love your game. I love the claustrophobic, morbid atmosphere, I love the game-play ideas, everything. Here's the problems.

Hit detection. What the fuck. Half the time nothing would happen when my magic pulsed, even though the cursor was right beside a scorpion or a line of ants or whatever (incidentally, how did those ants manage to build a tunnel through the air?). The second problem is the oxygen. How do I stop it going down? I tried pulsing magic around the guys mouth, but uh... nothing happened. Either I was doing something wrong (maybe you have to pulse just as he breathes in...?) or it's another hit-detection glitch. If it weren't for the hit-detection glitches I probably would have just chalked it up to a steep difficulty curve and not complained about it at all.

Now, I like the very Spartan attitude the game has towards its players: give them the basics and then leave them to figure the rest out for themselves. And I have a kind of a paradoxical opinion on it. On the one hand, I felt there was too much of that: the instructions page left me feeling kind of perplexed, probably because it never explicitly said what the magic pulses were for. But at the same time, I want MORE of that feeling of isolation and helplessness. I don't know how you could do that though, it would probably have to be an atmospheric thing with the sound or the graphics.

Which brings me to the graphics. They do their job: they're not horribly bad. But they don't do justice to a game like this. My advice is that if you made a sequel, to collaborate with someone who knows how to make really cool, stylized graphics.

Overall, I fucking love your game, but it needs a little extra polish and some glitch-fixing. I was going to give you seven, but fuck it, this sort of thing needs to be encouraged on Newgrounds. 8/10 | 4/5.

Hetrae responds:

Thank you very much for the review - your encouragement is greatly appreciated. As for the hit detection - the most likely problem is that you said you were beside the scorpion - you have to be right on top of it (where the wings connect to the back should be covering the scorpion, and blocking your view of it) - this is the same for the ants - though try hovering over the ant hil - it has a bit of a bigger detection space, and does the same thing. For the oxygen - you have to hover over the lungs. However, this only stops it for a little bit, there are plants that give you more oxygen -you have to find them. If this doesn't fix it, then try adjusting the quality.

This was supposed to be a three-series game, rising from Prolonger of lives to Death Delayer to Death Defeater. If I can find an artist that is willing to take a risk, and most likely not get paid, (and I have tried finding one) - then I will be sure to get improved graphics.

Thanks again for the review and rating!

[Easter Island TD]

Ugh.

wooh. tower defense... wooh...

Oh fine, I'll review it properly. You know, the only flash Tower Defense game I ever liked was Bloons TD 3, and you know why I think that was? Well, it was a couple of things, but most notably it was that the towers were things you could get excited about. They all looked different, they all did very different things, and you could tell they were doing different things because the stuff they shot out looked different as well. The area-of-effect ones were big... blob things that shot out needles, the long range ones were big catapults that fired spikey balls, there was one that threw boomerangs...

Here, like in most TDs, it's just "Stone Head", and "Red Stone Head", and the effects are god-damn boring as hell. So this one shoots only air enemies, this one only land enemies? Ooh, and this one "slows them down for a short time". Snore.

Along with the towers being exciting in Bloons, the UPGRADES were exciting. You really felt like you were upgrading your tower when it started shooting out shurikens instead of needles. It was great! I mean for fuck's sake, here you've got little tiny red DOTS to symbolize upgrade status. Jeeze.

In Bloons there was also stuff you could throw down other than towers, like bombs and spikes, which made the game alot more engaging. But that's secondary. The big thing here is that your towers are boring, the upgrades are boring, the enemies are boring, it's all just bland, bland, bland. What I'm talking about us pizazz, variety. Your game has none, and as such it's just another mediocre Tower Defense game.

[Hovernauts]

CONTROLS.

Controls, controls, CONTROLS. This game was alot of fun, but CHRIST who designed the movement controls? I felt like I was piloting a rusty unicycle over a freshly waxed floor. The rate of fire was also pathetic for every weapon except the Scout's bouncing bullet thing.

[So-Zetta]

Ok.

Your interface needs work. You can't switch between items easily and you should (read: need to) be able to switch between Move, Use and Examine by pressing the M, U, and E keys. Other than that, it doesn't look very pretty, but that's something to worry about in the final version.

Story was cliched to fuck with the guy waking up like that, so I hope that's not what you have planned for the full game. And don't tell me "oh I'll make it so it's not cliche". No you won't. Amnesiacs and waking up in strange places are so overdone it's not even funny.

Puzzles were terrible, but that's probably just because you made it in a few hours. The thing to remember for a final version is that if any of the puzzles require the player to use meta-game logic (ie, to include the fact that they're playing a video game in their working-out of what to do next), that's a massive downfall. Just put yourself in the shoes of the protagonist: if you found a dirty toilet, why the fuck would you clean it? What the hell was that supposed to do? The only reason I thought of doing it was meta-game thinking: it's a game, so there's bound to be a solution if I just keep doing random stuff.

The drawings of inanimate objects were sort of interesting, though it was difficult to work out what they were sometimes. The drawings of people, on the other hand, were pathetically terrible. They were also plagiarized. You can say "oh I'm just working within the Anime style" - but you're not. You are being unoriginal, bland, and irritating. That's all. Although honestly the unoriginal art wouldn't be so bad if you were at least better at drawing it.

The music was nice.

To summarize: it's alright, for a demo. 4/10 | 2/5.

[Gravitee 2]

Pretty terrible.

Bad game. The gameplay is just... really boring, not least of all because there's pretty much no way to tell where your ball is going to end up going, so you end up just flinging randomly. Add to that that you can't restart the round as quickly as you like (the level-objectives window thing flashes up each time you do), and that the sound and graphics are both just "meh", and you've got a game experience that's just plain dull and not enjoyable at all.

[--Pulse--]

Unplayable.

It's pretty fun, but totally unplayable because there's no way to restart once you die. You just have to refresh the window.

Grent responds:

I unfortunately didn't notice this problem until the trial version of Flash I was using to fix the glitches had expired (what happened to the copy I was originally using is a long story), so it was unfortunately stuck like that until recently when I bought CS5. It's fixed now.

[Rotozap]

Alright.

Controls are really awkward. Music is annoying as hell - try something other than generic techno.

There's a fair amount of lag and the graphics could do with a slight spruce-up, and it'd be better if the game was a bit more stream-lined. But it's decent enough, overall.