3p0ch's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[King Dugan's Dungeon ep.3]

I have not played DROD before, back in the day like some people seem to.

This is a nice and tough puzzler. I usually think flash games are way too easy, but in this game I've so far only cleared a few of the non-tutorial rooms. My only gripe is that the sound is a little bit irritating; you might want to check out some other puzzle games to see what sort of music they used and what type of music works well, but that can be forgiven.

I'm not sure why people are complaining about the controls? You can customize them if you want by pressing Esc and redefining them. Or if you mean that you don't like only being able to swing your sword 45 degrees at a time... well, that's part of what makes this a puzzle game and not a hack 'n slash dungeon crawler.

[FactoryInspectorSimulator]

The game's description says: " you go back to work and repeat everything all over again at your shitty boring job"... yep, that's pretty much how I feel about the game.

I can sometimes appreciate games that aren't "fun" but try to send a message, like [US]SR or 3rd World Farmer. But this is not such a game. If the message is "life in the real world is boring and repetitive", I could've figured that out by going and doing homework. Random events that affect your money at the end of the day are sort of a nice touch, but they don't redeem the game.

[Phoenotopia]

Just wanted to point out that when you get a heart ruby, it should probably say "vigorously" instead of "rigorously". I say this not to be a Mr.-Know-It-All jerk, but because every aspect of this game is completely amazing and that seems to be the only tiny detail that bugged me whenever I saw it and changing it with the next update should be fairly easy. Like most of the 58 pages of commenters before me (the ones who didn't complain about it being too difficult), I think the game is Epic.

About the difficulty: going by medal counts, as of now 7600 users have picked up the bat, 1000 beat the kobold, 430 finished the game. Compare that to Epic Battle Fantasy 4: 22000 users got first blood, 5800 entered the Godcat temple, and 2900 have finished the game. Or Crystal Story II: 9000 won a battle and 600 finished chapter V. And there are undoubtably a lot of people still playing Phoenotopia who will eventually get farther. So as far as awesome games go, Phoenotopia is maybe on the difficult side but not egregiously so (although I think platformers are inherently more difficult than final-fantasy-style RPGs anyway).

[Plastic Surgeon]

Nice original concept for a "find the differences" game, and I would give it a great mark just for originality if it were free of major bugs. But like 7777777, after the Shrek stage (#3 for me) I finished with 57% and I didn't get a continue button. I didn't have any preceding failures.

[Royal Warfare]

Nice game so far. But I would very much like to have a speed up button. It runs pretty slow for me, but maybe that's entirely because I have a $3.95 laptop that makes even elementary school kids LMAO so hard at it that milk squirts outta their noses.

[Ziva]

This is a really good puzzle game. Completely logic driven, but with difficulty toward the end that stems from having to think about the levels in ways that the human brain (at least mine) doesn't normally see things. It's a good sign when most of the negative comments about a logic game are that it's too complicated and tough to figure out.

I agree with one of Akatsuki's comments -- it would help to have the character move a little faster (right clicking and changing the quality to low helped some for me, but not as much as I'd have liked).

[ComicBookMovie]

It's an ok time waster I guess, but doesn't seem like a very inspired game. Specifically, the levels were all very similar and the bosses were essentially identical. None of the bad guys seemed to aim at your current position, they just shot in whatever pre-arranged pattern they have, so there's no element of trying to kite the enemy shots along to keep one step ahead of them. Giving the enemies missiles that could veer trajectory towards you could also accomplish a similar effect. Once you upgrade your main weapon enough so your shots basically fill the screen, it becomes purely an exercise in moving your mouse to a gap in the bullets. (Yeah I know that's what all bullet-hell games boil down to, but not having to aim your shots still seems like it takes something away from the game.) If you do give players a weapon that can blast the entire screen, then to keep the player from focusing completely on bullets in their immediate vicinity and make them pay attention to the rest of the screen, you could have something like lasers that will fire across the screen (perhaps at an angle) instantly after a warning flashes at the edge of the screen from which it will emerge. IDK, maybe a mix of all of the above that gradually gets introduced into the game as it progresses to keep it from being repetitive. And bosses that do different things -- be it firing different types of weapons, or having armor that reflects your bullets back at you if you don't shoot them right in the middle, or spawning gravity wells that pull you in weird directions, or something that makes each of them unique.

If this was meant to not really be an attempt at making a serious game so much as a way to poke fun at comic book nerds, then I'm afraid it doesn't do a very good job of mocking comic book nerds either... I'll defer to WarpZone's review on that aspect.

[Civilizations Wars 2 Prim]

Cricycle is right, this game is slightly less challenging than "Press Space to Win". It's got nice intro scenes trying to set up a story, and cute characters and such that make it at least look polished, but it really needs to have game mechanics with some sort of strategic element required in order to win (aside from take over all buildings that generate troops and then take the rest, on every single level) for it to really be a decent game.

Maybe I just haven't played long enough to get to a challenging level, but I killed the frog after I stopped taking any upgrades about halfway through and started playing every level on hard mode just to see if that would make it at least a little bit more entertaining. It didn't.

I'd recommend making some enemies that can't be beaten by the obvious strategy of capturing all troop producing buildings and then overwhelming the opponent. Make the player require a different approach. Then make another type of enemy that can't be beaten by those two approaches and that requires yet another a different tactic. Then make all three of them fight against the player at once. Then this could seriously be transformed from a boring time waster with no challenge into a great game.

[Only One Chance]

lol at the secret ending (even if it's not really a secret when you talk about it in the game description). worth a second playthrough if you haven't gotten it already.

johnfn responds:

haha yeah fair point but if i don't mention it then people are like "zomg i didn't get the girl THERE'S A BUG"

[[US]SR]

If you hate the game because it's not much fun to be maimed and left for dead by forces beyond your control instead of being able to shoot down five enemies with a single bullet and take down a helicopter with a bow and arrow, then you've got the point of the game completely.

It's subpar and lazy for not letting you advance text and letting you crawl all the way off the screen (it's not like I'm giving it 5 stars), but it doesn't really need to be fancy. Now if he were to make a game where you were maimed and had to crawl your way to a MASH unit to survive with obstacles that are tough to overcome, trying not to black out from a concussion or exsanguinate or such, that'd be 5 stars, even if you still got killed half the time by forces beyond your control just to get the message across.

just404it responds:

Where were you able to crawl off the screen? I thought I had snagged all those bugs!

As for the gameplay bits, it was originally going to be a masocore game where the player would have to dodge various enemies and bullets while crossing the highway (death would still static them back to the beginning), but it became obvious that we didn't feel left out of the action; we had fun with that approach and felt like 'main characters,' so gameplay was reduced to the current bleed-out-static so the player is constantly aware of their minimal control (its a weak gameplay mechanic designed to contrast with the shoot-em-up actions of the back heroine). It felt that adding means of death beyond player controlled ones would emphasize the player's role too much. Thank you for the feedback!