Xopods's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Robokill Trainer]

If you want commercial quality, pay for it

This is an excellent game, and well worth the price tag. Those griping about the fact that it's only a demo don't understand anything about making games. Most of the games on this site probably took under ten hours to make, which is why they can be free. This game clearly represents and investment of several hundred man hours, similar to a downloadable indie title. That's why you have to pay for it.

This sort of "d00d itz flash why its not free?" attitude is precisely the reason the majority of Flash titles are such garbage. If we believe browser-based gaming is the way of the future, we must be willing to pay people for the time they invest in delivering us our entertainment.

[Straw Hat Samurai]

Good concept, lacking in execution

I love the idea of drawing lines to slash. However, the response is too slow... you draw your slash, the guy stands there thinking about it for a fraction of a second, and then he goes, typically with the result of getting hit before he moves.

The enemies are kind of dumb, slow and repetitive. The shield guys are the most interesting. The archers are frustrating, because it's next to impossible to dodge their arrows - why does your guy move like lightning when slashing, but like a snail at all other times? Of course, you can dodge by slashing, but then the aforementioned delay is a problem.

There are some collision detection problems... some of my slashes missed when I thought they should have hit, and vice versa.

I never figured out what exactly was necessary to get a coup-de-grace, or why it was more valuable than the (seemingly much harder) decapitation.

Although I got bored about 75% of the way through the first level, I decided I wanted to play on to see the end before reviewing. However, I wasn't able to beat the catapult. You say to "hit it back in the balls," which I assumed meant you were supposed to deflect its boulders back at it. However, I tried vertically slashing them in the air, or horizontally slashing them on the ground before they disappeared, and neither worked. Maybe it's the collision detection again, or maybe there's something else I didn't think of. Also tried shooting arrows at it, but that didn't work of course.

Anyway, as an experimental game, I'd say it's a success in that it shows that there's potential for the genre, but the gameplay is too frustrating, the controls too finicky and the levels too repetitive to keep me coming back in its current form.

[Deep Lift]

Buggy

Decent graphics... kind of limited in concept, but it is a Flash game after all.

However, it's buggy. I can only jump once per level. After that, the up key doesn't do anything. At first, I thought it was an intentional part of the game, but then even when I died, after coming back I still couldn't jump, so that must be a bug.

[Kaleidoscope Reef]

Very nice

Cute game, great graphics... gameplay is a little slow-paced and repetitive for my liking, but good for the casual market.

I think you need to make it a little easier to figure out what to do at first. I almost gave up after dragging the jellyfish around the screen fruitlessly for a minute, letting it hit the ground and disappear a few times, etc. Maybe it was just bad luck that it took me that long before I accidentally dragged it over a rock and discovered that it turned into an anemone, but still... you may lose players who can't figure it out before their attention span runs out.

Small bug: I was dragging a jellyfish/anemone over a rock just as I beat a level (the second-to-last one). When the screen scrolled, the anemone came with me and the graphic for it ended up permanently stuck on the screen in the same position - it wasn't an interactive anemone... couldn't feed it anything, but it stayed there right up to and including the victory screen.

[Z-Rox]

Interesting

Interesting concept for a game. Have you read Rudy Rucker's "The Fourth Dimension"? I'm guessing that's the inspiration here, so for others who find the game interesting, it's recommended reading.

The fun factor is a bit limited... maybe if you incorporated other challenges. For instance, you show the cross-sections of a more complex image and have to pick it out of a lineup of 4. In harder levels, you could have them rotated.

I notice that you do have other game modes, but they're all locked, with no indication of how to unlock them, so I don't know if you have anything like that.

[Bomb it 2]

Bomberman was a great game...

It's no surprise that there are so many Bomberman clones out there, since it's one of the best video games ever made. This one's not bad... my main complaints are the music (annoying, though at least you can turn it off) and the graphics, which are too busy for such a small resolution. They'd be great if the window was bigger, but as it is, it's often hard to figure out exactly what's going on. I think simpler is better when space is limited.

[Mr Ray - Missing Colours]

Ignore the morons

On a site like this, you're bound to have a lot of teenagers, who will call anything "gay" if it isn't targeted at their demographic. Just ignore them.

The game itself is well made... nice art... I dig the parallax. I think even as a kid, I'd find it a little patronizing, but that's true of most entertainment for kids. I was raised by parents who treated me more or less as an adult most of the time.

One thing I didn't like was the need to walk close to things to pick them up or talk to them... it just slows things down and adds unnecessary clicking. You should always be able to interact with anything on screen.

[Atomik Kaos]

Good concept, but lacking something

I like the idea, but as other reviewers have said, it seems a little too based in luck... since it only takes a few seconds to play a level, it's easier to just keep restarting and "experimenting" almost at random instead of trying to line things up and time them well. The difficulty curve is also not smooth. Level 1 was pretty hard for a first level, while the level where smart bombs are introduced is pretty trivial. Level 7, with the shrinkers, seemed very hard to be done in only one try... why not make that one two tries?

You've also got a spelling mistake on the very first screen... you typoed "brought" as "brouhgt" or something like that.

VortixGamesStudio responds:

Thanks. We are thinking of a way to have less luck involved in future versions.

[MADNESS: Hank's Nemesis]

Laggy and not particularly fun

Endlessly piling up corpses creates ridiculous lag... you need to have them disappear for a while, or perhaps get vaporized the next time the laser passes over them.

The game is also much too long/easy/boring. If everything moved faster and the hit area for the laser's collision detection was larger it might be a better game.

JPGarcia responds:

hey thanks for the review, it's true, i wanted the room full of bodies but the lag sux
i ll make another one ;)

[Mental Training]

So-so

It's too limited to be an accurate intelligence test... there are way more forms of mental aptitude than just quantitative and qualitative comparison. Still, it held my attention long enough to get up to prodigy level, at which point things got a little hard... I was only getting 8/10 or so on average at that level.

I found the visual comparison ones really inconsistent in difficulty, especially the Mental ones. Instead of increasing in difficulty as you went up in levels, within each level there were some painfully easy ones and some in which I could not discern any difference even after poring over the image carefully.

I agree with the previous reviewer that the use of Euro currency skews the test results in favor of Europeans. The weight comparison is much better.

I also found one error in the money comparison test on Prodigy level. There was one where both sides had exactly 40 Euro. I picked one at random, but I got it wrong. I guess the other side was "more equal" than the one I chose. :-P