Fro's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Stickerboy]

I tried this on mobile and it just wasn't playable in my opinion. It was way too difficult to click up and down and I ended up not being able to play for more than a couple of seconds at a time. On the PC it's much easier to play.

It's a very nice and simple game. Very good artwork and everything else is very clean and smooth. The only complaint at all is that I think it needs to be more clear where you can put the stickers in the how-to.

It seems the first store behind the pillars, even though it looks like every single other store, doesn't count as a store and you lose points. Even though the very next one that's identical counts.

The game is fun because of it's simplicity, but adding little point multipliers, shield upgrades, more medals, etc... would make this more challenging and have more replay value. As it is the only real replay value in my opinion is just the newgrounds medals. I now have all of those so I'm unsure if I'll play it again.

[SHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO]

No spam on newgrounds please. I will ban this with my mod powers.

Oh wait, I can benefit from it with medal points? Ok then.

Oh wait, I now can't move my hands for the rest of the year? Worth it.

ninjamuffin99 responds:

ez points just for you fro

[Sonac the Hodgeman 5]

This was surprisingly fun!

To me this is a game that represents newgrounds and it's medal system very well. The medals are just challenging enough to make you play through the game multiple times, but for casual gamers like me just easy enough to get without pulling your hair out.

It reminds me of some old school games on newgrounds. I enjoyed it so much I went back and got all of the medals on the older games except for one where the triple kill was too difficult for me.

Super simple, fun and easy. I liked it a lot.

Darren responds:

Don't blame you, admittedly the triple kill one depends a bit too much on random luck of getting the right enemies in a row. Glad you got a kick out of the games, they were very much made to be in the spirit of Newgrounds.

[Unblocky]

I'm really bad at this game.... Maybe I'll practice it daily to try and improve my memory. Or at least until I get all the medals...

I also downloaded and left a review on the play store.

MonoFlauta responds:

You can train it every day while watching the ads in the mobile version :) hahaha
Thanks a lot for playing!

[Just Passing]

When I review I usually leave this long review about what I like and what could get better, but I find no reason to this time.

Just wanted you to know that I really enjoyed the game. Congrats on winning the best Halloween game competition! This really gave me that old school newgrounds feeling. I almost gave up, but ended up finding the way. The plant lady really tripped me up, but I kind of got it with dumb luck.

JoelLikesPigs responds:

Thanks man, much appreciated - That old Newgrounds vibe is a seriously nice compliment, I remember coming here all the time when I was younger and having people play my game and be so positive is a great feeling.

[Arcade Defender]

Alright, I told myself that I was going to wait until I have all of the medals before I reviewed this, but I get the idea of the game and it's going to be quite a grind for me to get the rest of the medals. (I will, but I only have a few down times during a day and not enough to do it in the near future) Anyways, on to the review.

~ Animation/Graphics ~

Extremely basic, but awesome nonetheless. You great that great old school style of graphics with a new modern color scheme and feel. I love the combinations of blue and purple against the dark color of space. At times the screen can get busy with bright colors, think when you have those wide green laser things... they can take up so much space on the screen and are in such a constant stream that enemy bullets can hide behind them and you never see them coming. Not really a downfall, it's just something that comes along with the shootem up bullet hell type of game such as this.

Everything runs smoothly with no lag. Nothing to complain about here at all.

~ Gameplay/Content ~

I usually call this gameplay/story, but there isn't much need for a story behind this and hence there is not. The difficulty level is perfect in my opinion. Anyone with a couple of hours to sit down and play can get the 50 wave medal without having to reset too many times. P DOES NOT PAUSE IT LIKE YOU SUGGEST, I REPEAT P DOES NOT PAUSE THE GAME. The only way that I can see to pause the game is when playing on mobile and lifting your finger off the screen. I thought that perhaps if I clicked away on the desktop the same way then we would get a pause. I even convinced myself a few times that when I minimized it for a couple of minutes to do something really quick that it had worked because when I pulled the game back up I was still alive. Apparently I got lucky a few times by accidentally hiding in a corner and coming back on because this only worked the first few times.

The mobile version is much more difficult to me. I think I don't have the dexterity to move my finger on a phone screen as well as I do a computer mouse. These damn young kids and their dexterity.

On to some questions/concerns/comments/whatever else I may think of in the next few moments of this review...

Half of the buttons don't do anything on the main menu. I didn't test again on mobile, but do they do something on mobile and not on the desktop version? Are they buttons of the future that have no use right now? Are they not buttons at all?!?

Clicking the free tokens thing doesn't work. Basically same questions about that... I just noticed that I can continue from the same wave as long as I only spend 3 lives? That's awesome.. perhaps I will be able to finish this game a lot sooner than I thought! I see that it doesn't add to your highscore, which is expected. This is a great feature.

I know people don't like to do tutorials, but I feel like this game could have benefited the old folks like me who always had games come out with tutorials. A lot of things I discovered through your comments on reviews or by realizing I missed it over in the game description. Perhaps even just having a short description pop up when you hover your mouse over something, but I could see that not being compatible with a mobile version. I'm just old and have a learning curve, forget about that..

I was confused by the faster shooting button for a long time. I had no clue that using it took tokens so of course I always switched it on. I couldn't see a reduction in score or any negative side effects, but I came to the realization one day when I clicked on it and saw my score go down. After that the token collection was a lot better than I had originally thought during the game.

I'm confused when the power up comes down that makes you invincible and shoot a ton of bullets for a bit and how I know how long it lasts for. Does it appear completely randomly? Sometimes I get it 4-5 times in a game, sometimes I'm lucky to get it once. I just want to make sure there isn't a way to produce it by doing something specific in the game. I also don't always understand the mechanics. Am I actually invincible during that moment? Sometimes I go into it with a shield, come out of it with a shield and it seems like it lasted forever. Some other times I feel like it lasted half the time. That may just be a perception depending on the type of enemies that approach me, but I guess that's why I'm asking. Other times I go in with no shield, leave with a shield. Or go in with or without a shield and leave with my ship one shot away from being destroyed. I really don't get it, there seems to be no pattern to it.

I like the variety of weapons, but I feel like the missiles should be a little better than they are. Perhaps you made them the way they are so they aren't over powered. I think they aren't the best heat seekers. They miss a lot and have very little turning ability. I also don't like that the spread makes them lose their seeking ability. Oh shucks. :(

The ships are... weird? I guess you took the comedic route with them, but for some reason I just don't think I would have went that direction. I would rather have more epic looking ships as they go up in power and/or have ships with different attributes. (One with high attack and speed, but low health or one with high health, low speed, medium attack, etc.. etc.. etc...) I'm also slightly confused on the wording of how to buy ships to get an increase in attack.

If I wanted to buy the gameboy ship, would I have max attack power since it's the last ship or do I get 1 more attack power for every ship that I buy? For example, if I buy the banana last is that now the most powerful ship that I can get or is the gameboy the most powerful? I was assuming the gameboy was the most powerful, but I couldn't quite be sure with the wording in that section and really found no reason to purchase them out of order to test it anyway.

~ Audio ~

The sound effects are actually really amazing in my opinion. They kind of caught me off guard because I had played the game on mute almost the entire time. In fact, I didn't listen to the audio until I realized I needed to review every aspect of the game. The sound effects were well done and the music was awesome. They are a little overbearing for my office so muted them again, but I could see playing this with the sound as a fun extra.

~ Overall ~

I really liked it. At the end of the day it's just a vertical shooter, but it seems really well balanced and you've improved it greatly since I first played it on day one of submission. Great job and thank you for taking your time to improve it based off of reviews. Again, P does not work for pause. At least on chrome it doesn't, I haven't tested it on other browsers, but with my discovery of the continue button this shouldn't be so much of a problem anymore.

TristanMX responds:

Well, this is the kind of review/feedback that may need its own post to cover all, nevertheless I will try to answer most of your observations. If you want to discuss this furter I will gladly hop into a thread to answer, just tag me in.

- Animations, thanks! I've been doing pixel art since january, so this is a big shot for me.

- Gameplay.
P does pause while the game is running, if you mind send me more detail of how did this not happen I will review it deeper, I tested it mostly for mobiles so ther may be glitches in this web version.

Some buttons are meant for googleplay (leaderboards and awards for example: pink and yello buttons) I just decided to focus on improving a little the game and didn't remove them. So yea, they do nothing on Web. The free tokens stuff was also for mobiles, in the new version I'll be uploading soon will replace this for something more suitable. Same case than before, decided to focus on improving the game.
Usually the tutorial is left for the end, I haven't developed one yet and some mechanics definitely must be explained in a clear way, like the increased fire rate, you pay 3 tokens per second to use this ability (green button in the game screen). The increased fire rate is meant to help you when no power ups are running, sometimes you'll feel a little stress because of the crowded map and at that point the player must have a way to compensate the lack of power up, but of course, it has a cost. Nothing is free and it also adds up to the token-collection mechanic.

About Pixel Perfect bonus; all of the power ups have a cooldown time for spawning, this is there for balancing purposes, if you leave things completely random the game may feel unfair sometimes, and some others too op, so to produce an enyoyable experience I needed to implement a way to moderate the spawn probability and time. This also makes you want to upgrade the power ups lasting time, as you enhance each weapon you'll notice that the spawn time in-between the lasts time you picked up a power up and the next spawn is reduced.
Pixel Perfect bonus is meant to help you farm tokens, while it increases the waves spawn rate a little and at the same time throws tons of ships at you (not related with the wave spawn time) to enjoy a massive destruction and op feeling. While it is on, you are invulnerable, and always when it finishes it blows up all of the enemies on the screen while it leaves the shield on for you again. This always works this way. It also as a spawn cooldown and a probability of appearing (2%) when killing enemies. You can't have it all the time.

Missiles, well they are a little op on my oppinion since they produce explosions that cause area damage, so having them target a single enemy will destroy them much faster than the laser and in groups. So that's why I decided to spread them, although and re-evaluating letting them turn while split is on, it seems fun but balance may be an issue, so I need to determine whether yes or not will they seek while split is on. One thing I'm definitely doing is improving their turning speed.

Skins, will improve some, just wanted to throw some funny looking ships just for the sake of fun. Is like piggies in space on the muppets, I mean... why would you have pigs flying a spaceship? The same reason why a cucumber, a banana or a chicken will do... xD... I will draw some better looking ships for those who want to brag about them.

So how to skins affect the gameplay? Each skin bought adds an amount of damage to all of your weapons (yeah, all of them... will update the description). Having a more expensive skin was a way of "locking" them for you and encouraging players to fetch more tokens, this will remain as it is. Once you have it, the damage bonus will be there always, you don't have to equip them to have the bonus so just choose the skin of your preference. Speed, damage, armor are variables that are not included in the game. The whole progression relies on the complexity of the formations for each wave since enemies always have the same amount of hit points. These factors will produce a very different game, so for now that's why I'm not including them. The damage bonus of the skins I calculated was based on the max hp of the strongest enemy. Going: increased enemies HP and player damage as upgrades will produce the same type of games that flood the internet, so I wanted to be a little different in a good way.

On audio, thanks! Some are assets I included in the game, some others are just effects I was able to generate. Don't forget to support the music composer too, his webpage appears on the splashscreen of the game.

Thanks for taking the time to do such a complete review, I really appreciate it and if you guys want me to include a particular feature that may benefit the game I'll be more than happy to hear your suggestions.

[Deep castle]

~ Animation/Graphics ~

The graphics were good. I liked the old time game feel you get from them. Everything looked nice and I didn't really see anything that could be improved. The animation was also fine, but it was way too slow. The ducking and swinging of the sword felt way too slow. Everything would be a little bit better at a faster pace, including the enemies.

It would have been nice to see a variety of sword swings to change things up. For example, give all of the different swings the same hit distance, but instead of just the baseball swing you could have a downward slash, upward slash, jab, etc...

It would have also been nice to see enemies have a strike instead of just touching you for damage. The zombies could claw at you for example.

~ Plot/Gameplay ~

Adding basic background stories to games like this can actually add a lot of value and quality to a submission. Just a simple story line of needing to defeat the green floating skull summoner who killed your king or attacked your village, etc...

We already talked about the speed issue. I think that if the pace of the game was quicker it would add to the difficulty, which is needed, because there isn't anything difficult about this game at all. There was a simple gameplay strategy that if you followed not only was it easy to win, but it was downright hard to finish the level without full health.

Strategy: Walk right, swing sword 1-2 times at zombie. Back up, finish with 1-2 swings, etc.. Repeat until you hit them three times. Continue to walk right. Skip 90% of the skulls as they aren't a threat at all. If the guy from behind shows up kill him right away. When you see a guy with a spear walk until he throws it and push the duck button. I see someone saying in the reviews that you don't even have to use the duck button throughout the game so perhaps you can knock his spear out of the air with the sword? I don't feel like playing through again to find out because it'll take too much time... Last, but not least.. throw your spear at the boss. Instant victory.

Sooooo... if you don't like the idea of changing the pace of the game here are a few ideas to increase the difficulty of the gameplay. The guys that attack from behind should have more health. 2-3 hits and they would add a challenge. Even when multiple spawn at once they are so close together most of the time that just 1 swing kills them all. The spear shouldn't kill bosses in one hit. I'd have to play through again to even see what the bosses do and if they're any trouble. The only boss it didn't seem to work on was the final boss, who I did have to play through twice because if you don't hit him right away he floats off the map and just spawns skulls. After several minutes playing with the skulls I realized he wasn't coming back so I died, replayed, hit him with the spear right away and had to hit him a few times with the sword. It looks like the original hit keeps him from floating away.

Another option would be to have the spear throwers pick up another spear or have several spears. They currently just disappear after they throw and are only a slight annoyance, even when faced with other monsters approaching you. Another idea with the spear thrower is to have them attack with the spear and then approach you like the other zombies, or even have them pull a sword and start to approach you.

I think that there should be an enemy like the floating skull that always locates you on the map and floats in your direction as well. There are a lot of opportunities for enemies if the game was a bit longer.

On a different subject, how cool would this game be if it was a lot longer and had upgrades in between levels. The enemies could get progressively harder to kill and you could have upgrades like strength, health, spear upgrades that allowed you to upgrade how many times you could throw it in a given level, and even different weapons that have different features. Daggers with shorter range, but high attack speed. War hammer that's slower, but causes a lot of damage or even knocks enemies back a bit, etc.., etc... A ton of possibilities there that I could go on about for a long time, but I won't get into.

~ Audio ~

The music was done well. Your audio person should submit the song to the audio portal that way you can link to it in the credits section. The sound effects were done well. I'd like to hear more noises for enemies, maybe moans, growls, dying sound effects, etc... Perhaps they would be too annoying if they were too frequent. I didn't really take away anything for that. Just a preference thing is all.

~ Overall ~

I'd probably play again if you get the medal working. In fact, if you do get the medals to work send me a message or tell me in the response of this review. The game would increase in quality if the speed was increased. While the game is nice and simple, it lacked difficulty and anything that would make me want to come back and play again because of the lack of features.

You did a great job overall though.

[Skeleball]

Hey MonoFlauta! This is the first time that I saw a game of yours ever in my life.

I didn't score that great, 3,300 something was my best score.

I don't feel like there's too much reason to keep playing past the point that I had gotten to because there really isn't any achievements or a high score table to show off my amazing gaming talents. I really like the strategy of the colors switching. There was a lot of stuff to pay attention to so you didn't lose in such a simple game.

Keep eating white balls before you die? Man, I don't know if this game is for kids, that's for sure. Also, had the perfect amount of fire zombies!

[GunsVSCars]

~ Animation/Graphics ~

I think an instant way to improve the score here is to work on the artwork and graphics. The first thing that sticks out is on the opening menu. You open up to the green grass that looks like it's been copied and pasted next to itself over and over. While this does create a nice little section where you know you can place a tower, it isn't evident enough to create a clear tile/path way. It would have been nicer to see this set up more like a highway where there were several clear lanes. This would be better graphically and would also set clear expectations for people so they would know ahead of time where to set towers and where the cars could drive through.

From the top to the bottom of the menu.... What's the graphic between the first gun and the car supposed to represent? It doesn't seem to have anything to do with the game. It's not a tower you get to choose and I honestly have no clue what it is. The guns themselves were alright, but would have turned out much better with clean solid lines. The car also needs a bit of work. It's a bit large and boxy. A slightly more realistic drawing at a smaller scale would have looked much better in my opinion.

The lettering on top looks nice, but I would have used a different color pallet. They are all so similar that the letters run together. Also, the dark color of the S blends in the dark color of the car too much. I would have gone color 1 for Guns, color 2 for VS, and then back to color 1 for Cars again. The lettering in the middle of the screen could have been a little better. You went with a nice bubbly lettering on top that I think would have looked a lot better here as well, just using much smaller sizes.

While we were on the topic of instructions I would probably reword it. It's a bit wordy. Perhaps something along the lines of:

How to play: Place the weapon on the field. When a vehicle is in range of a weapon it will shoot. If a vehicle manages to collide with a weapon the weapon will be destroyed. If the vehicle reaches the red line the game is over.

The logo on the top right, which I assume is your icon or tag, is poorly edited. There's a lot of white space around it and this could be cleaned up a lot! A lot of the same exact things can be said about the game over screen.

Lastly, just a small amount of attention to detail could help out. Maybe add some dirt, exhaust, or a little bounce to the vehicle. These small things can sometimes go a far way when increasing the quality of a submission.

~ Gameplay ~

Errors: Sometimes the screen turns black and nothing can change this other than refreshing the page. I've had it happen after a stage has started or after clicking the back to menu button after starting losing a round. I've also had a stage start and everything is running smoothly besides the fact that I cannot select a weapon or the shovel no matter how hard I try. It's either refresh the page or lose again to make it work.

There's a lot of things that could have made this better. I feel that because of the size of the map and vehicles that there wasn't much gameplay here. I'm sure everyone loses around the same time in the game because it doesn't matter what weapon set up you have it just doesn't take very long, as slow as they do move, for the vehicles to get to your second or third level of guns when there are 3-4 of them back to back.

Using the shovel on a weapon should give you a little bit of money back so it can be used more strategically when you have several cars coming at one tower and not much you can do other than watch yourself lose.

There's a huge lack of content here. A simple thing that could make the game better immediately would be to add a description of what the weapons or shovel does when you hover your mouse over it. We just assume that the second weapon is better than the first, but without playing them with some trial and error we don't really know what the difference will be. If I hadn't read your author comments I would have never guessed that other item was a shovel. I thought it was some sort of sign that could block the cars temporarily.

You could also do things such as add upgrades to weapons. Maybe it would be more beneficial for someone to upgrade a weapon to level 2 instead of buying another gun. The main thing that would make this really fun is adding a variety of weapons and enemies. When I think of playing games like this I think strategy. Not just gun one shoots this fast and gun two shoots faster. Guns that explode and have splash damage, ones that spread into multiple lanes, ones that freeze or jump from one target to another, etc...

Have the game start off super easy. Old junky cars, move onto nicer cars, police vehicles, vans, suv's, trucks, etc... All having their own little characteristics and strategies for defeating them. Things that make people think quickly and can change the way they are playing at any moment. Those things could make this simple not so great game into an awesome game that gives people a reason to return or to continue playing.

A health bar for weapons and also vehicles would be awesome here too. It's almost necessary in games like this. I've seen games where people can toggle the health bar on and off as well. After doing some of those things you could add scores or achievements to make it even more motivating for people to return.

~ Audio ~

The audio was straight forward and clean. There was no background music though? I don't have much to say here other than it would be nice to have some ambient music playing in the background and then give people a mute option if they so choose to not listen to music. You could also have a separate or the mute button to include the sound effects of the weapons as well. It would also be nice to add a little bit of sound to the vehicles. It's kind of bland and boring without these things.

~ Overall ~

An extremely basic gameplay that could be really fun to play if a lot of things were added and cleaned up. Make sure to pay attention to detail in your games when doing art and audio to help improve the overall quality.

Good luck on any future games you create and send a message if you ever want a review.

AndrewBedni228 responds:

Thanks for your review!