3p0ch's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Chessworks]

I think it's a very good game for anyone who has played some chess. But the number of such people may be dwindling. I might suggest making the early levels be clearly marked as tutorials (maybe with a conspicuous "TUTORIAL" showing up in the right hand info pane while you're playing those levels) until you get to level 32, with an option to skip them and go straight to the harder levels, just so people don't see many easy levels and think that the whole game is going to be easy.

It might also be nice to allow the game to run as it currently does for casual players, but also make a more difficult mode where the player has to position all of the pieces and then click a button saying "declare checkmate" when they think they've got a solution instead of having the computer automatically check it after each repositioning of the pieces. If the solution is not correct, then show a move that gets the black king out of check.

Background music and possibly sounds would also be good.

Also, I think I spotted a bug on level 60. It counted it as a solution when I had the knight at K4, bishop at QR4, and rook at Q7. But I think the black pawn should be able to advance one space to block the bishop's check.

Antworks responds:

Hello, thanks for the feedback!

Having a How To Play with chess rules is in our to-do list. However, we believe it would be kind of troublesome to have players skip all the way to harder levels, since we do introduce some new stuff even for chess players. Also, we had some chess players try out the game and many got confused at the first levels, so maybe having pretty easy ones in the begining is good for making the player more confident.

About the "Declare checkmate" button. It is something we are considering. Did you find that you kind of accidentally solved the level?
Animations are also on the work!

Background music and sounds are also on our list! Sounds like we have similar views hahaa

Lastly, the bug. Yes, it is a bug, thanks for reporting! We will fix it asap.

Thanks!

[The Clockwork King]

It's great to see a game made with such depth, and a story to unravel for people who delve into it. It's just too bad the actual gameplay was slow and clunky enough to become irritating. Near the very end when I saw that timer counting down I realized just how much lag there was when I was playing... the game's pace would probably be fine if it were moving fast enough to have the timer going at normal speed. If there's any way to reduce the lag, it would dramatically improve the game.

[Pico's Exile]

First time I played a level, it worked OK.
Second time, my guy went right but couldn't face left and couldn't hit anyone to his left with the beet.
Third time, his gun was floating in midair away from his body. It would fire OK (from the position of the gun, not from Pico) but no enemies fell to fight.

So it looks nice but wasn't really playable for me.

HappyWhaleStudios responds:

That's really weird, I know there are some issues with the game, I had to rush development to finish today, tomorrow I'm going to do a massive debugging session, I hope you can take the time to try and play it again. Thanks for the feedback, a lot of that stuff I haven't heard before so I'll try to fix those things too

[Crazy Car Driver]

The graphics are simply superb. The music is nice at first but gets repetitive pretty easily. But the actual gameplay seems sub-par for two reasons: first is the mechanics are pretty basic (maybe it gets better in later levels that I haven't gotten to yet) which might be ok if it were a fast paced game with fluid controls, but the second issue is that most of the challenge seems to be from the fact that the controls are sluggish (at least from what I've played so far). Maybe that's intentional and the better cars don't have such sluggish controls, but IMO it's better to have responsive controls with the challenge arising from needing tricky maneuvering to get through the levels.

[Untangle 1.5]

Yes, this concept has been done before (the flash game incarnation I remember was called "Untie Me"), but it's a good enough puzzle that I don't mind seeing another game using that mechanic. Especially since there are probably a lot of people out there who've never played this type of game before (it's not like it's a Kingdom Rush clone or something). And this version is very well made.

[B-Lock]

A good game overall, but there were a couple of things that struck me as "off" about the physics.

One is that when the guy is on a conveyor, the conveyor seems to be accelerating him instead of just adding a constant speed. That gets particularly frustrating in the later levels where conveyors toss you into spikes.

The other is that the speed of jumping and falling seems slow compared to his running speed, which gives him a "floaty" feel. But on levels 13-16 he seemed to move a little faster than on the other levels so he didn't have that floatyness, so maybe there was lag on my end that was causing that?

At any rate, aside from those things I thought it was a pretty solid platformer. The extra challenge of getting through levels perfectly after you've gotten through the game is a nice touch.

[ChopperRun]

As it is now, it just seems like a flappy bird clone. Be warned that this is "advice" from someone who isn't a game programmer, but I think I would approach it by first coming up with game mechanics that would make this a richer game than another flappy bird. Ability to move forward and backward (or arrow keys tilting the chopper so the vertical thrust also carries horizontal impulse), weapons to fire at enemies while not shooting down allied aircraft, turbo boosts, bombs to drop at ground targets, smokescreen to baffle enemies chasing you, parachuters and... well, you get the idea. Something more than just flappy bird.

This might sound strange, but I also get the feeling that the graphics are a little too good at this point. I always got the feeling that early on people would just sort of make hit-boxes and work on the fundamental gaming mechanics -- making sure that the game runs smoothly without major bugs, the mechanics all work like you want, and the speed and density of enemies and everything would make for a decent degree of challenge and a fun pace. And after that's done worry about making it look pretty and have nice sound. But like I said, I only program computational algorithms and not games, so you might be better off listening to someone who actually knows what they're talking about ^,^

[PingCode 3D]

The difficulty is ridiculously random. For several levels I thought this was a complete kid's game, sometimes just taking three steps to pick up a fish, and then I got hit with a freakishly difficult level where I hit the help button and the solution was some algorithm that cycled three times before it got all the fish with a bunch of wall-bumping in the process.

I would strongly suggest making a set of fixed levels of increasing difficulty as a standard level pack, and including random level generation as an optional play mode. And giving the player an indication of how difficult the levels are as the game progresses (ie. something that lets them know they're still on easy or tutorial levels at the beginning and the difficulty will ramp up as they progress, so they know to stick it out if it seems too easy at first). The graphics and sound could be more polished, and some music would be nice, but I think those things are of secondary importance to making a good level pack.

RodKis responds:

Thank you for valuable advice)

For now I did increase the complexity by increasing score.
The more points the more complexity

[Crash Cortex Island]

It doesn't go past the loading screen. The portal comic runs on the left side of the screen, the right says Loading... [Cortex Island] and doesn't do anything even if I go play another game in a different tab for ten minutes and come back to check on it. Hopefully it doesn't actually take half an hour to load; if it did then it ought to at least have a progress bar. If you can figure out the issue, please re-upload it.

keonmckeon responds:

Its happened to me a few times too. it depends how many are playing it at once. its a common problem. it will load. u just gotta keep refreshing and wait until the comic strip goes all the way down

[Space Magnat]

I've got to admit, I'm not a fan of the idle clicker genre. But even if I were, this doesn't have much to make it appealing to sit around clicking it... music, animations, or the like. And it's in a language I can't read. Considering that the site's main language is English and there's not an option in the game to change the language, I get the feeling the game isn't very well suited for this site.