Plasmarift's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Caliber]

It's pretty cool. It's challenging enough to where it is very easy to die if you aren't careful. The art is good and the music/sound effects are fitting. While there are limitations like no jumping or melee attack, it's still fun (I've played other such games with a similar setup that just weren't fun to play so this isn't something that can be easily pulled off). Though I came across some problems/feedback:
- On the level before the final boss, the bazooka and assault rifle switch places in the keyboard setup (the assault rifle was assigned to 3 and the bazooka to 4 on all the other levels that came before it, but on this level, they are reversed). Also, on this level, the bazooka ammo is set back to 0 (is this intentional since you don't want the player to go into the final boss with enough bazooka to take it out fast?). Lastly, there is bazooka ammo in this level on lava that you can't reach.
- I'd recommend adding a skip function at the beginning of the game. The prologue isn't very long, but after playing through the beginning three times, you just want to get past it to the action.
- A pause, mute, and restart function would also be good.

It's been pointed out that there isn't regen health, but I don't see this as a problem; just a difference. The game requires you to basically "get good" and learn from your past mistakes. I beat the game once by the skin of my teeth, but then beat it again, finishing with a lot more health. Also, thank you for letting the health go over 100%; that's awesome!

You did very well on the design of the game and I look forward to seeing more stuff from you!

GreenLarry responds:

Thanks for such great feedback man.

I set a strict deadline on when I had to finish and publish the game so I missed the bugs you mentioned, if I have time this weekend I might go back and fix them and add in some extra polish like a pause button like you mentioned.

Its making my day that someone actually enjoyed my game enough to play through it more then once, thanks for the kind words!

[Castle Crashing the Beard HD]

The graphics are classical arcade and done well, the music is good, and the gameplay is good as well. I have some feedback on the game:
- I'm using a keyboard and there is no way to get off of the credits screen (I've pressed all the buttons).
- The hitboxes might need to be adjusted. Some fireballs that look like they should go over your head actually hit you instead (it doesn't happen too often though).
- While it's certainly not a deal breaker, the fact that it defaults to fullscreen upon clicking the screen is annoying. I get that you want people to see the graphics, but forcing it on the player is something else entirely.
- The skeletons' spear attack is extremely annoying. The only way I found to "mostly" avoid getting hit is to jump behind them and then attack.
- The main criticism I had was with the invulnerability frames for Tom. You can basically keep hitting Tom until the game decides "okay, that's enough. Time to move onto the next part" and it makes him temporarily invincible. You can't hit Tom while he's attacking and summoning bugs and skeletons. I'm having trouble putting it into words, but these kinds of things really take me out of the fight. It seems like instead of making the Tom head a more formable boss, it's like you just gave him invincibility frames at different sections of the game to give the illusion of difficulty. I replayed the original, which I enjoyed very much, and it was difficult in that you couldn't mess around due to the low amount of life you had and you couldn't stay in one spot for too long.
- This updated version offers a lot the previous didn't like 2 Player gameplay and little powerups to choose from once you unlock them (and with this, A LOT of replay value). I have to say I still prefer the original, but this is basically an entirely new game so it'd be like comparing apples and oranges. Great job on the game!

BoMToons responds:

I think your criticisms are valid, esp. the bit about Tom "deciding" to be invulnerable sometimes. I think, if I were to do it again, I'd maybe have him start smoking and turning red when that's happening, or pull into the background more so it's more apparent when you can and can't land your hits (maybe some kind of "ghost" mode or armor or something...). It was tough to balance the fun of being able to stun lock with combos (ie: combos feeling super powerful) and not ruining the fun of the boss phases progressing. Not sure I solved it as well as it could be (as you pointed out).

- Skeletons are tough, and yeah, the intention was to force you to sneak up on them from behind. We wanted some new mechanic for those "special" enemies since they're near the end of the game and difficulty should ramp up a bit.

- I'm looking into the credits screen keyboard skip issue

Thanks for your thorough feedback!

[Binary Quest]

There are some problems with the game:
- If you interact with the daughter while holding the cake, you will always give it to her whether or not you say yes or no.
- When you have the cake and you talk to the sword guy and he asks "are you going to save the princess?" and you answer yes, he says to take the sword, but he doesn't actually give it to you.
- Why are you give the sword by the sword guy if you say yes to "I can't believe I met No-e the hero" (note: you only get the sword this way when you aren't holding the cake)
- Can you make it so you can skip passed the ending story text by pressing spacebar to get back to the game? There's a lot of trial and error sometimes and you can end up seeing the same ending multiple times.

It's a pretty good game overall except for the problems I listed. The music is also very nice and fitting. I look forward to your next project.

being-brin responds:

thanks! I'll try to squash these bugs over the weekend :)

[Arm Of Revenge Trial]

- You make the player wait for the bad guys to stand up again so you can hit them. Why not just make it so the player can hit them when they are on the ground. This get more annoying when you introduce the super large enemies that take a lot of damage to kill. The old version of the game had this problem as well.
- Going off of the whole "can't hit enemies when they are down", even if I am punching over them as they get up, they still have time to hit me as soon as they get up while I somehow wasn't able to hit them. That doesn't seem fair. Plus, as soon as the player gets up from the ground, the enemies can stand over them and hit them as soon as they get up, leaving no time to retaliate.
- Something just seems off with the combat in general. I'm getting hit by enemies in front of me while I'm attacking them (I think they walk up while I'm attacking someone else and they aren't getting hit). It seems like you can't hit multiple enemies at once. You also can't interrupt enemies' attacks, but they can interrupt the player's?
- The fighting in general just seems repetitive and boring.
- You should work on the grammar in the game.
I do like the artwork and the combat system seems more complex compared to the original with new equipment and skills. I do wish you luck in your future of game design.

MagicWing responds:

thaks for your feedback

[Consume_Evil]

Big glitch I found:
- I only unlocked three areas and can't progress any further. I ate the dude who was on the couch just before going on the second mission. I don't think that was supposed to happen until after I beat all the levels in that area.

Aside from the glitch, I was enjoying the game. There is dialogue that you can miss by not interacting with things in between missions. The missions are short and sweet. It feels as though this is a continuation of this universes' story; was there a game before this one dealing with the same universe? I would've liked to explore more of the game, but I'd understand if nothing could be done about it since this is an older project.

Fred-Bird responds:

UPDATE: Apparently I had changed my mind about the "romance" conditions for Philon halfway through and forgot the adjust accordingly :V
It fixed now.
Im glad you enjoyed the world! This game goes before heavenly escape, and there will be more that go both before this and after h-e. But it'll take a while haha

[Heavenly escape: REDUX]

The game is pretty good. I like that you make talking to characters optional instead of required. While a backstory for all the characters and such isn't provided (like why the main character was in prison, why does he not burn when using the sword, etc), conversations reveals pieces of the story, which is cool. Parts of the game were fairly challenging though I found some flaws with the game:
- There's a glitch with the prisoner kin (shadowy guy). After killing him, you can continue to strike the area where he was to get more angel wings. Although the game will only display three pairs, I believe I had 8 wings (some of the attacks during the boss didn't hurt me in the beginning).
- The game doesn't alert you or hint at the fact that you can "teleport" after getting one angel wing. While the instructions do say to use "Arrows/wasd/d-pad only", I pressed all the buttons at the beginning and when the back button did nothing, I figured it wasn't going to do anything.
- The hitboxes for the boss' attacks is confusing. Sometimes they'll hit me even though I swing at them. Yes, the player's health goes down whenever they are hit, but the player can't be focused on the health bar to see which one hit them. You do include an animation after an attack is successfully hit, but I only see this working for top and bottom attacks (also, they're pretty subtle so it's hard to tell).
- I wish the beginning cutscene could be skipped. It isn't too long, but regardless, it lesses the replay value when your forced to sit through cutscenes you've already seen.
- (this one is a personal preference) While backtracking in games is not necessarily a bad thing, it is when the player doesn't have any control over the pace of the game. To get two of the angel wings, you are required to backtrack. It gets old going through the same battles you just went through.

The art is cool, I like the haircut of the main protagonist, and I enjoyed playing the game.

Fred-Bird responds:

Thank you for the feedback!
I added a skip button and fixed the exploit - I really thought I had that one sealed up!
I also adjusted the effect when destroying Azrael's attacks so it's a bit more visible.
Cheers!

[Jewel of the Stars]

For your first game, this is very good. You have backgrounds, sound effects, sprite animations for the protagonist, enemies, and the environment, and a pretty solid design altogether. I haven't found any glitches. However, it is far from perfect. Here are some suggestions:
- Be sure to list all the controls in the description. Also, you didn't show the spacebar or enter key in the initial startup of the game as a possible control. Some dialogue came up and I didn't know how to get rid of it and ended up getting hit by the first monster because the dialogue box was blocking my view.
- Like the others have said, change the Ctrl and Alt keys; those who play on apple products will have trouble with this key assignment due to the Ctrl key shifting the screen as well as other problems. You could change them to the z and x key for example. You can also add the ASDW keys as alternate movement keys and assign the k and l button.
- The game lacks music. You can find plenty of songs in the Audio portal (search adventure music or something) or you can use stuff from Kevin MacLeod (royalty free music. Just be sure to give him credit).
- For advancing dialogue, make it so the spacebar or enter key, when pressed, will show all the dialogue it was going to scroll out and the next press will dismiss it and start the next string of dialogue. It gets annoying having to wait for dialogue. Also, make the font size bigger; it's hard to read.
- Include what program you used to make your game in the description. This will give the people who created the program some publicity and answer the player's question (believe me, others will want to know).
- What is the protagonist's sprite doing? It looks like he keeps opening and closing his mouth. Also, when the protagonist is falling, you can add in an animation of his cape waving as he falls.
- Now for the important part. The game doesn't offer a lot of challenge. You could literally go through the entire game without killing any of the monsters. Plus you don't offer an incentive to kill them such as the monsters dropping gold or killing them makes you stronger, etc. The most difficult part of the game was the platforming and that's only because a few levels have a bottomless pit so a single mess up will result in a restart (mind you, this isn't a complaint about the bottomless pit). However, I'm sure the difficulty will ramp up later in the game.

This is a great start for it being your first game and I can't stress that enough. I've seen people put out some pretty horrible first games. I enjoyed the fire power and I look forward to the continuation of your game or whatever project you chose to work on next. Also, if you need a voice actor for one of your games, let me know. Good luck!

KAY-s-JAY responds:

Hello, thanks for playing my game and also thank you for the feedback, it really helps a lot, you pointed out lots of errors, ill try my best to fix them all and i'll definitely let you know if I want a voice actor

[Help Yourself]

I've played games similar to this one such as "Kill Me" and "The Company of Myself". I do like the game, but it has a serious flaw; there is A LOT of waiting. There are many reasons for this: the enemies in the game move way too slow, you don't give the player an option to kill their character, meaning they have to wait for the enemies to kill them, and the biggest one of all is that in order to progress through parts of the game, you usually have to wait for your previous deaths to play out.

For example, on level 10, it takes the enemy about 30 seconds to get across the entire level. Several times in this level, you have to stand and wait for the enemy to kill you. Because you'll often need to wait for the previous death to play out before you move on to some parts of the level, you force the player to wait longer and longer each time. Also, keep in mind that if you mess up and kill the enemy or get stuck in one of the yellow force fields (this has happened to me), you'll need to restart the entire level.

Some other things to note:
- There's a glitch in the game. If you enter level 10, leave it, and then go back into it again, all yellow force field platforms will be visible, but they won't all be solid.
- Sometimes when I fall off the screen in the game, it won't restart until press the directional keys, as if the character wasn't dead yet. This happened a few times in level 8.
- Speaking of level 8, on the first yellow energy platform (the one that appears when you jump on the squares with the red dots), if you jump back to it from the second higher energy platform, you fall through it.
- When it comes to jumping on the "dead" blue blobs that represent the character you control, it doesn't always work for me. I can have a lot of them stacked over the same area and still somehow fall through them when trying to jump on them.
- While I'll admit, I was a bit confused at around level 3 since the mechanics hadn't really been explained, it was interesting figuring them out. You could always design the beginning levels to where it will reveal the mechanics naturally, such as jumping down a small hole with spikes at the button and the button to open an door just below the door so that the player will jump down once, die, and the second time land on the previous one, demonstrating that mechanic.
- I'd advise adding a mute and pause button.
- Do the coins in the levels do anything? Do they unlock anything?

I know this is a lot of criticism, but I did enjoy the game. The artwork and music are good and the puzzles, despite the wait time, are creative. I have suggestions for some things you can implement in the game.
- Perhaps offer a way to speed up the time in the level to cut down on wait time.
- You could also add acceleration to the enemies' movement algorithm. That way if you are waiting in one spot for a long time, they will increase more and more in speed to cut down on wait time.

I wish you luck in the jam and in your future of game design!

NoodleSushi responds:

Thank you for your constructive review! I know the game is not perfect since it took like a week to finish, especially implementing the level editor and system and all. I'm thinking of improving it, but right now I'll just chill for a bit since took a lot of effort for a week to me. I'd like to respond to the bugs or issues, like in a 'fun fact' or 'did you know that...?' -ish kind of fashion in case you were curious why they happen.

-The force field staying visible and hollow was an object initialization issue. I programmed each object to animate once its voltage changes, but for some reason that sometimes didn't happen and doesn't change the animation according to the voltage, during initialization that is.
-The character does not die off-screen unless you move because below the screen, it is standing on top of its solid counter-part.
-I'm gonna have to do advanced collision detection or something else for this. The player falls through the platform since his falling speed was too fast for the sensor to detect, my bad.
-I might have to test it a bit more, it might be because of its collision shape being a circle, not sure.
-Yep you're not alone on this, some (or more) people had some difficulty figuring out level 3 and giving up, I myself have thought of this as well. This is something my level designer could improve on.
-I agree
-Not really, coins are just collectibles for fun, like a challenge to collect all of them. But yeah it does not have any other purpose aside from just collecting them.

Thank you for your suggestions and bug reports, this is the very first in-depth constructive review I have for this game, and congrats for being the first! I appreciate you taking the time to play my game, giving me feedback and suggestions, it really helps. I'll take note of them if I ever come back improving the game.

*EDIT*
Also I didn't know there are other games similar to mine, aside from Braid or Chronotron. I'll check them out, thanks for sharing!

[Rooftop Postgirl]

Lesuperchef basically covered things, but here's a few other notes:
- You should include the instructions in the description.
- Having a text box show up after the giraffe leaves is a bad idea because if you are mid-jump, you fall straight down (to your death if there's nothing under you).
- A few of the birds are impossible to avoid unless there is some function of the game that I'm unaware of.
- The "leaps of faith" the game requires you to take is a bad idea since, at time, the player needs to wait for something to happen before jumping, like a platform to start rising. You want to be consistent when it comes to things like that. Either reinforce waiting when there doesn't appear to be a path or make jumping into the unknown the thing to do.

I don't do reviews much anymore since I usually end up pointing out the same things, but your game shows promise. I wish you luck in your future in game design.

PoteComPao responds:

Thank you for the review. I'll try to improve the level design, maybe this game is a little bit too random.

[SHUTDOWN]

I thought the game was very good, but I wasn't able to finish it. When I made it to the sewer and instantly saved it when the text came up, the game froze. I refreshed it and tried loading my save, but nothing came up; just a black screen. I don't really feel like playing through it again knowing this could happen at any save point.

I have a few other issues with the game:
- Although you do explain that pressing the spacebar again after jumping activates the floating ability, you don't tell or make the player use the ability to reach higher places (I just thought you could move left and right with it, not up and down). I thought that I would come across some upgrade later on that would let me jump higher or something.
- What is the rectangle with the two dots on it supposed to be? The music changes when you get one. Is it necessary to flood the areas or are they just music boxes?
- I agree with potatochipsu, restarting the player back at the surface each time is tedious. I know that it only takes a few seconds to get back to the checkpoint, but after dying a bunch of times, the time starts adding up. We only have so much time in our lives, some more than others so I'd prefer it if all game creators could cut down on such things in their games.
- The game included a bit of backtracking to get to some areas (since some paths branch off from one another). It's annoying especially since the platforming segments to get to these areas aren't really difficult (especially when the path leads upward), but it's also a part of a lot of games.

I did like some of the things that you implemented though:
- The zoom function was pretty helpful and certainly made traversing the map less confusing and more getting to the point.
- You can down on some backtracking by transporting the character back to the starting point.

I might have given you four stars or more if that glitch hadn't happened. I wish you luck in your future projects. Good job.

furbbbb responds:

Hey ! I'm sorry this happened to you. I think there's some issues with the built-in saving system of Construct. I removed it for now (you'll start over if you close/refresh the Newgrounds's page) If you want to play it again, everything should work correctly !

Also, thank you for your detailed feedback ! The rectangles with dots are cassettes tapes, they just trigger music in each zone of the game.

Thank you for playing the game, have a nice day :)