sharpnova's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[you are the coin master]

Help, I was blinded by bad art design.

[Jazzy Beats]

It's probably not fair to this review that I don't like brawlers. At all. I think they have the ugliest movement and location mechanic ever to exist in video games and it's mind blowing to me that more people aren't able to see that.

That said, I've played some that help me forgive the medium to an extent. This is not one of them. It felt slow and clunky and the art style just felt.. uninspired to me. Actually that's not the right word. It was cohesive and somewhat unique so it was probably inspired. It was just uninteresting. Drab on the eyes. Not pleasant to look at. Not exactly unpleasant but I want a feast for the eyes always in any game I give my time to. That is an important requirement that any serious gamer should have.

I'm giving it a 3 because it seems functional and for the minute or less I played it, polished enough to not have any noticeable bugs.

If I loved brawlers it would probably be a 3.5 and if I loved something specific about this art or music theme, a 4.

If you work hard and improve your art creativity and pick a better less flawed genre and make something really original and fun, a 4.5 might be possible for you.

For a game to get a 5 from me.. well don't worry about that. That's not a realm of excellence you will likely ever reach.

WhalesAndGames responds:

Don't worry, we completely understand that not all genres are always everyone's cup of tea, and we're glad to have different people with different tastes telling us their feedback in regards to what they think of the game. The same thing can be said in regards to the art style. Some people love it, some people also didn't like it. It's part of the reason why we like to try and use different art styles for the different games we make, to experiment, and that's one of the cores that defines us.

We love to experiment with different concepts and genres, for us, that's makes game development and design a great learning experience is exactly toying around with different sets of mechanics and use opportunities such as Ludum Dare to experiment and see the type of results we can get. Some will feel short-handed, others might feel more polished, but our enjoyment for game development comes from the opportunity to get out there and do different things.

As for this game in specific, there's definitely some pacing issues as well as a lot of flavor and tweaking that we felt could be added in after LD's judging period is over and will definitely polish it in the future if we get the chance. It's not a perfect game by any means and, as we've said on the previous paragraph, part of the reason we enjoy what we do is exactly the opportunity to improve on what we do as we receive feedback further and back.

Thank you for your review!

[Fox Flares]

every single mechanic in this game is unclear, frustrating, and just poorly designed.

very badly done. and a complete ripoff of the concept and gameplay from ICS. But holy CRAP did ICS do it better.

If you want to fall back on the "it was made for LD excuse (which is invalid anyway since this is a post-mortem build) then at least have an original mechanic.

if you're going for a copycat mechanic with no originality, then get the mechanics working properly.

is it too late to vote in LD? I'd love to throw some zeros your way there as well.

aeveis responds:

Thanks for your feedback! Can you go into more specifics of how each mechanic failed? That would be more helpful. What's ICS? Postmortem build means some things were fixed after the compo was over - I spent an evening addressing some feedback from LD comments. You can vote in LD if you participated in it. Thanks again!

[The End]

oh my god i hate these controls. i know it's a common control scheme for rockets.. but my god i hate it so much.

[Eat And Poo]

This is terrible.

[FoE:Remains]

wow. this is ambitious and well executed

[Stealy]

i would say the music you chose for the shop was the worst music choice in any game ever. compared to the other song it hurts my ears. it's disgustingly repetitive and even the part that repeats sounds horrible.

i like the idea of the game in general though there are some obvious things it's missing. but that music made the game unplayable.

Grent responds:

I'm sorry you feel that way! Admittedly, audio was the bit we spent the least amount of time on, so we ended up with some cheesy canned loops. Thanks for playing, anyways!

[Musk Mining Industries]

took me forever to figure out that you split the controls to opposite sides of the keyboard. and it wasn't until long long long long after that that it flashed a little message telling me the controls that disapeared almost instantly.

holy crap you have a lot of polishing to do on this.

colburt187 responds:

Yeah the controls are on the screen after the title but its easy to miss. It was for a game jam so all a bit rushed, will probably polish it up a bit later.

[Sofra]

So not being able to control whether I set down or pick up ruined this for me. Absolutely made it not fun at all. I'm at level uhm... it doesn't say the level number. I have six bunnies and it's completely impossible. The spikes kill whatever I've set down and I have to set down at least three on spikes to even interact with the lever.

Terrible game.

[Upside Down Asylum]

Damnit I hate when game developers do combination locks. You all implement it differently.

Don't you know the puzzle is finding the 11-21-7? Not figuring out precisely how you want us to input it.

I tried turning clockwise three times and landing on 11, turning counter clockwise, past 11, onto 21, then clockwise to 7 and that didn't work.

Then I tried the reverse. Then I tried a bunch of other combinations.

Combination lock that is this unforgiving in the exact way you idiotically thought we should input the numbers? Horrible puzzle. Ended the game for me.