Sodoj's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Arc Breaker]

ay yo, welcome to newgrounds

LionYawn responds:

hey! Good to see you here

[FAIR AND FACTUAL FREE PRESS AGENCY]

papir

crow-seeds responds:

true

[Solar Complex!]

This game was a blast to play! It's a great blend of pacman and qix, polished to perfection. The music is bouncy and upbeat and the visuals have just enough life to make everything vibrant and pleasant. Well done!

Aside from this blatantly copy pasted review from your bigmode submission, I'll add that it's very easy to farm score infinitely in the NG version once those solar panel muncher bats are introduced. Maybe it would be a good idea to reduce player's score for every tile they munch to remedy that.

Edit: While the time limit is a very cool idea, there are two issues with it in its current state, the first one being that you can get <1000pts max from the time limit, while making a simple full combo row grants you 550pts, which you can form in seconds, it's way more optimal to use 4-5 seconds to farm two fc rows. That brings me to the second issue, the game doesnt end when the time runs out, which technically allows for infinite farming. In earlier levels I managed to farm a life in like 2-3 minutes and i'm sure even more optimal ways of farming could be discovered, it's even worth losing a life or two over it because it's pretty easy to obtain a new one

There are thousands of ways to remedy this, but I'll leave that to you :p

succojones responds:

Thank you for the kind words! You can't farm them infinitely because of the timer, so if people really try optimizing score they'll have to balance farming score from them and time bonus / keeping lives for the extra points at the end. I think...

[Cash Clicker: With a Gun!]

you guys made incremental games fun

[RoboNips]

heyo, this is a great prototype! i also made a "breakout but the paddle is mario" prototype way back that was eerily similar to what you have made, so i got some thoughts on your game. that prototype is long gone now, so its nice to see others give it a shot!

the presentation is great, in shorter bursts it offers that dopamine rush other great arcade titles do and, i may be biased, but the concept offers so much potential!

it is a really nice base, but it's held back by a couple of major flaws. the first one is simply being able to have multiple balls in the game, which causes a very chaotic and/or unsatisfying gameplay. chasing the balls around and trying to play the game in the most fun way where there are crap ton of balls flying and everything is shining and hectic is at best inefficient and at worst a fruitless endeavor that will also likely result into quick death. having one or two balls makes the game manageable, but also at the same time much less interesting. the balls are fast and hard to predict and player can only do so much to get involved and do something about their current predicament.

that brings me to the second point, the player does not have that much of a control. in theory, the robot dude is a cool little dude and he does more than a breakout paddle, he can walk, jump and run, but in practice, like in real life when you are a little kid, if you try to do anything crazy, you get sent to a corner to think about what you've done. giving more options to the player, not just in terms of player characters mobility, but in general could bring the much needed life to the gameplay, as it is now, it feels more like playing fetch when not going for a multi ball dopamine rush.

sitting in the corner isn't so bad of an idea in this game actually because collecting three or four balls and then standing in between two platforms in either of the corners basically makes the game play itself. this cheese strat is very consistent, very rarely did it cost me a life and it was usually when the ball unfortunately phased through the first layer of the platform, but it happened very rarely. i have actually gotten the high score as of writing this review, and by the time i was done and wanted to move on, i had almost beaten one more level by accident because of how many lives i had.

with that said, i think it says a lot about the presentation when the game is appealing even in this unintended pachinko machine state, it is mesmerizing watching the balls bounce around without a care in the world. also, while the player character might feel limiting, but he still controls smooth as butter and the game generally feels very nice.

i hope this was fair and i apologize if it sounded too harsh. the problems i talked about were also some of the many problems i had faced while developing my version of the game, so i felt compelled to share my experiences and maybe offer something insightful. i hope you give this concept another shot sometime in the future and whatever you end up making next, i'm looking forward to it and i wish you the best of luck!

[Madness Combat: 1982]

this is pretty rad

[Kill The Healthcare CEO!]

right in my childhood

[Scrap Your Pants]

samo furaj samo guraj

QualityStuff499 responds:

Opa! Balkanac! Kako si prepozno?

[Kerners!]

this game made me much less productive

[Home 45 Min Experience!]

hey this has been awesome so far, here are some things you could consider for the final release

- after the first cutscene the player gets to control the magical sphere thing, but it took me some time to realize that because i assumed i was supposed to control the girl, but something broke so i could only control the camera. that is mostly my bad, but you should consider adding some kind of indication that player is controlling the sphere (or let player know when they are in control after the cutscene in general) or maybe just swing particles in an opposite direction of where player is going, that should reduce the confusion
- the interactable object prompt being located at the bottom left corner is kind of strange and it may be unintuitive for some players, having an option to have it above the interacable object or above the player would be neat
- gamepad uses face buttons to perform in combat while the tutorial told me to use arrows, you may wanna have that patched up as early as possible to avoid confusing players
- the timing felt way too strict for me, during the tutorial i felt like i was playing a late game encounter and i couldnt string more than 6 notes together. it may be because the ui is throwing me off, i could rarely tell for sure when i'll be able to land a note. the "hit line" in the ui was too thin, i feel like if it was a couple of pixels wider and the timer a "couple of pixels" more generous, the game would feel much much better to play. see what other people have to say about it, id test the crap out of that.
- must stress again,even with the more generous timing, the encounters overall seem a little too hard for a baby beginning area. since my health hadnt reset after tutorial, i had very little health to deal with the mushroom that was outside and it kicked my ass twice. i consider myself to be relatively alright at rhythm games, so unless you are reaching a hardcore crowd, you may want to tone it down
- there are multiple instances of missing punctuation and non capitalized letters when they should be in some lines, id actually consider keeping some of it in personal documents like frinkies letters after proper proofreading, it could be a subtle, yet neat character trait
- speaking of character traits, it seems a little out of character from abby to learn a move from a book, the crotch crater mentions magazine so maybe have it be some sort of magazine instead
- i'd really appreciate to have an option to choose how much of the consumables id like to use when using a quantifiable consumable, the "use menu" closing after using an item could also get in the way of player enjoyment

um thats all i have to say, as i mentioned the mushroom dude got in my way and i couldnt progress that much further. i hope this will be of use to you and your team and i wish you the best of luck with your game!

SquishY-Bottom responds:

This is the best criticism I have ever got, every single one of these ideas we are actually either working on or should be doing. I will be adding literally all these ideas. Thank you for taking the time to write this. These are amazing notes.