Xopods's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Silly Bombs]

Gets better as you go

At first I thought this was a completely unoriginal game, but it does have some nice ideas as you get further into it, using swinging torches and movable metal blocks to create some puzzles, rather than always shooting the bombs directly.

It's not a great game by any means, but it's a reasonable diversion for 20 minutes or so.

[REDDER]

The right kind of retro

A lot of supposedly retro games just use it as an excuse to get away with low-fi graphics and sound, but you've really captured the spirit of a retro platformer here. I dig the simplicity and the exploration. I didn't have the patience to play through the whole thing in one go, but I'll probably come back to it, and will definitely share it on Facebook. Makes me want to try something like this for my next game, but I have too many other projects on the go, unfortunately.

[A Crow in Hell 2]

Hard != bad

I don't know what's wrong with people... sure, give a game 0 because you suck at it.

I found the controls pretty smooth... the game is tough, but not unfair. The graphical style is slick, but it's a look I'm starting to get tired of - I've seen it a lot, and it's starting to feel like it's just a way for artists to avoid having to put any detail into their work, rather than an original look.

My only real gripe is that there isn't really enough variety in the gameplay - it's all just timing, and being precise in your movements; I'd prefer to see some situations where a bit more thinking is required.

[Robot Dinosaurs]

ROFL

As a game, not great. As a name, brilliant.

The sound effects must have been fun to record, too.

[Line Game: Orange`]

Graphically nice and clean, but damn hard

Well, you warned us... the regular levels are really not easy. In fact, the tutorial levels aren't easy, but they're not nearly as difficult as the regular ones. A few comments:

1) Seems weird that you can beat a level and still feel like you "lost" because you didn't have enough juice to get to Bronze. If the goal is to get there with 100 mL, why not just start the person with 100 mL less than you do now and make the goal just to get there at all? Alternately, make 0-100 mL the new Bronze, and change the other medals to Silver, Gold and Platinum. Hard is one thing, but throw your players a bone now and then, eh?

2) Likewise, since dying without having collected an orange resets your juice meter, why not have each orange save the amount of juice you had when you collected it, and allow you to continue from that point with that amount of juice (maybe minus ten or something each time) instead of what you died with? It'd make it a little easier to get through the levels at least.

3) For the next version of the game, maybe allow people to save their replays and then play against their own "ghost line" the same way many car racing games allow you to see the "ghost car" representing your best race to date. Normal folks are never going to be able to compete with the global high scores, so being able to race against yourself would be fun.

[Chrome Wars]

A highly polished bore

The game looks great... the interface and graphics are all very slick. Unfortunately, there's no strategy, not much luck, no challenge, and no real point to the game. All you do is charge then keep doing brute until the guy is dead... unless you just keep passing, I can't see how you could ever lose a fight (on Normal mode anyway... I can't even imagine how easy Easy would be). And once you have all the best stuff, the enemies can barely even scratch you.

Also, you have a balance issue with crits... since Defense reduces the chance by 2% per point, and Agility only increases it by 1%, beyond the first few levels it's almost impossible ever to score a crit. As an experiment, I started dumping all my points into Agility to see how high it would have to get before I was able to get a crit... the answer: 110, even with all the best equipment. That fact makes the +Crit% stuff almost useless... you'd be better just giving up on getting crits and dump all your points into power or grit or whatever.

[Bloody Fun Day]

One of the best

I'd be hard pressed to decide between this and Amorphous+ for my favourite game on NG. You might want to change the description, though, as I expected it to be another mediocre action game - at least mention that it's a puzzle/strategy game.

Anyway, the graphics are excellent, the gameplay is addictive and challenging, and the interface is slick. With the addition of a fixed puzzle mode, this could easily be a downloadable title. The only thing I didn't like was the music... if you're only going to have one song, it needs to be something more neutral and unobtrustive.

Amazing job, really.

[Snow Madness]

Needs animation and better responsiveness

I don't believe in super-polished games... but this needs a little more. You need to animate the blocks popping and dropping down, at least - otherwise, it won't be clear to someone who's never played this genre what's actually going on.

Also, the game lacks responsiveness at times. Sometimes I click a block and it doesn't pop, and I have to move the mouse around before it will do so. I think maybe you're using onMouseIn or something, so if you pop one block and another drops into its place, and you try to pop that one, it doesn't realize you've got the mouse on it. You need to listen globally for mouse clicks, and then test which bubble you're on.

vartagh responds:

I'm currently working on a "polisher" version of my game :)
i'm looking also at improving the game code :-)

[Journeys of Reemus: Ch 2]

Love the graphics, but not the gameplay

The graphics are really amazing... I love your style. The music isn't bad either.

However, my problem with the game (and it's one that I have with a lot of games of this type) is that most of the puzzles are solved more by moving the mouse around and trying to find something you can click, rather than by thinking about it. Often, you know what you need to do, but it's a matter of discovering which of several likely-looking scenery objects is actually interactive. A good example is the bone you need to get to hold open the zapper flower... there are a dozen other bones, sticks, etc. lying around, but you need that specific one. That kind of thing makes the overall game less fun, to me anyway.

[Xenon Prime Racing]

Technically impressive, but...

It's nice to see a 3D Flash game that actually runs more smoothly (at least on my computer... maybe Macs handle vector more easily than raster or something) than most of the 2D stuff I see. The graphical style is simplistic, but not ugly or distracting, which counts for a lot.

There just isn't enough game here, though... as others have said, it feels more like a prototype or an engine test than a finished game. It's challenging, sure... I came in first both times I played, but only by a hair... but especially with the simple graphics, there needs to be some variety in the gameplay or it gets boring very quickly.

Still, you deserve better scores than people have been giving you... way more work went into this than some crappy platformer or click-everything-really-fast game.