m1kclark's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Angry Soldier]

It's not very thoroughly planned. For example, Level 12 solves itself: if you simply wait, then the ball will actually roll onto the exploding barrels all by itself, killing all the enemies without you firing a shot. I expected something more Rube Goldberg or riddle-like, whereas this was altogether un-challenging.

[Linx]

There's a HARD level set!!??

I won! All 40 levels ... only to discover there's an alternate level set that's labeled "Hard".

O_o

Fantastic game design. The user interface could have used an "erase this block" button instead of just overwriting. The music loop would have been better if it were longer, but the content of the music and instrumentation itself were great. ... I may have to actually do the hard levels now ... dammit.

Skellus responds:

You can use space to clear blocks

[Top Defense]

Freezes

It would have been a great game, but half-way through a wave, after I upgraded something, I couldn't fire anymore (see "fucian"'s comment a few below mine). The game was receiving keystrokes, but not detecting the mouse at all. (I didn't take away stars for that.)

Other than that, it was a nice game. It was a bit slow as defense games go, but that allows the player time to decide a strategy against the oncoming waves, particularly since the number of possible weapon-combinations kept increasing. It kept my interest. I thought the upgrades were a little wonky, though: I would click a Lvl2 upgrade for one item and the price of ALL Lvl2 upgrades for anything else would also increase exponentially. Odd. Keep working on it, I think, but it's a good start.

[The Perfect Fighter]

Horribly buggy

Twice, my character's sprite froze mid-fall. The CPU opponent was unable to hit it, move it, or interact with it at all. Not that it stopped the CPU from trying to hit me, but nothing landed and I could not move. I could restart, but the ridiculous load times make me lose patience too fast.

With this many bugs, this game was NOT ready for prime time. And it's really too bad, because you clearly put A LOT of effort into this. You MUST go back and actually fix the problems in the game.

flashkof responds:

fixed

[Faultline]

Ingenious!!!

Wonderful idea, beautifully executed, introduced a simple concept to a platformer game and then explored ALL possible consequences. I'm really pleased with this game.

BUG: I died by being crushed on level 27, with three faultlines created. The faultlines returned to normal, but my sprite got caught half-way through the death animation and the game got caught in a loop somehow. The exit-door particles were still moving, and the faultline-handles were still gleaming, but everything had frozen.

[Doodle God 2]

Subjective logic and N²

There's one really big problem with these games. The first problem is that MY logic and YOUR logic don't always coincide. I'm a scientist, so I wanted "plutonium" + "boiler" = "nuclear power", but no go. Meanwhile, getting "radiation" uses the most random, unintuitive combo ever. There are dozens of such combos I would NEVER think of. So when I run out of "logical" choices based on my ideas, I'm reduced to trying *random* combos. For N elements, though, there are N*N/2 combos. In Episode 1, we started with 4 elements = 8 combos. Easy. As you progress, the element pool expands one element at a time, and you can keep up easily using your experience.

In this game, though, you *destroyed* our experience. We start with 124 elements!? Even just the "Void" + "x" combos require 123 attempts right off the bat. That's just too many. But THEN, you really screw us by including NEW combinations of OLD elements. That's over 10,000 combos of elements that we have to consider when "logic" stops producing results. I *might* entertain the idea if there were hotkeys, but as it stands this game gets dull fast when I can't reproduce your methodology.

In brief: How can this possibly be fun for people who can't read your mind?

[Destroy More Cars]

100% Bug, again

It seems that getting 100% itself causes a serious bug in your game. Also, I'm confused why you would go through all the trouble of having an RPM gauge when all you do is "hold mouse" or "don't hold mouse".

[Nail Household Expansion]

slow and awkward

The funding accumulation is so slow that it's boring: increasing the funding rate would improve interest, and making the enemy upgrades faster would balance it out for difficulty. In the meantime, there are 3 things this game really needs:
(1) An example/tutorial page where you can see the characters doing their attack. Right now, we must experiment to see each character's and if you're unlucky enough to start with Baba or Jiji, you automatically lose that level.
(2) A way to restart the level, or even go back to the main menu. I found it irritating to know that I botched the level, but had to wait as my health dropped from 90% to 0 to do anything about it.
(3) The game should PAUSE while we're deciding which character we are going to hire or upgrade, or at least we should be able to see the playing field while we choose.
I'm sorry to give such a critical review, because you clearly put a lot of effort into the other aspects of the game.

[Aliens Kidnapped Betty]

Like

This is well-thought out game, where clearly the logic it took to construct each level required much more time than it takes to play it. Also, are those original Star Trek sounds when you die or make the door? Good game.