sharpnova's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Outpost:Swarm]

a bit laggy. graphics are low resolution. and i didn't like how i couldn't set it to full screen again if i hit escape and ended full screen mode. if i could, there were no instructions or menus to show me how.

Squize responds:

Yep, you can only turn full screen back on via the title screen, as we figured players would either want full screen, or not, rather than change mid game ( I understand that real life gets in the way and you may need to swap between the two views when playing, but the whole full screen stuff wasn't in the original, and we could only devote a certain amount of time to this newgrounds exclusive ).
As to the graphics, they're not low resolution, Flash scales things up in full screen, the bigger your display the more it has to scale, there's no way around that really.

Thanks for taking the time to play it.

[Wilt: Exordium]

new review: revisiting this years later. i think the handling is actually fine but reiterate that the boss fight is way too long. three phases makes sense. not 4 or 5 or whatever it was.

old review: i enjoyed it enough but i have a few complaints

-needing to spam the gun as fast as you can to beat the boss fight (i beat it on first try so i don't know if there was another way) was annoying.
-the boss fight was just too long.
-the movement/control didn't feel very good. i think it's the way you accelerated so uniformly or the way it felt more like you were sliding than running. and the inability to stop on a dime probably contributed to this.

[Hunt of HORROR]

i just really hated how you couldn't cycle through the horrors with the keyboard so you have to move to the upper right of the whole vista just to change them. also i hate camera views where you have to move the mouse to the edge of the screen to move around. clunky outdated and feels terrible.

[Legend of Pandora]

-when creating a new game and not having ever played before, there's literally no reason for you to have the three save slots pop up and have us pick one. just unnecessary interface clutter.

-when having people enter their name and nothing else, you should have the focus be in the name entering box upon the loading of the page. doesn't make sense for us to have to click into it.

-when having the user enter their name, they should be able to hit enter to submit. you shouldn't force them to move their hand back and forth between the keyboard and mouse that many times. it gives a very unpolished first impression.

-i noticed at the very start that when swinging to the side, the graphic showed up as a pickaxe for part of the swing, despite the fact that i was wielding a sword.

-the default controls are possibly the worst you could have picked. people have to hold their arms at a very awkward angle. basically the left hand is ok but the right hand has to shift over far further to the left than is natural. this is typically the reason why flash games of this type use the arrow keys for movement and a/s or z/x for interaction/attacking. you could have kept the general flavor of your control scheme intact though by having movement be done with WASD and interaction be done with left/right or up/down or some combination of those. it would be odd but it would be far better than what you chose. i think a lot of time authors try to impose their notion of what the "right" controls should be based more on nostalgia for the old NES days than anything else. if you were objectively trying to create a fun gaming experience on the flash platform, you would have gone with a scheme like this: arrows for movement, 'a' for attack, and 's' for interaction. this is the scheme i quickly adopted, but i shouldn't have had to. you could have gone for something experimental but usable enough that people would give it a shot. instead you went with a brand of nostalgia-inspired elitism that simply annoyed me and i imagine, many other people.

-being unable to respec your skills and stats is reminiscent of outdated game mechanics. an age of game design where the player was given less flexibility and room for experimentation because the developer wasn't really thinking ahead.

-i liked the '1', '2', '3', etc. aspect of the interface. it was short and sweet for a flash game. but i didn't like that you couldn't interact with straight forward things (like the quest log) via your keyboard. i personally consider the whole "constantly shift your right hand between the keyboard the mouse simply because i'm under the impression as a game designer that you simply can't do without your right hand being used for both" to be one of the cardinal sins of flash game design. there's really no reason i shouldn't have been able to cycle through the quests with the arrow keys and select with the action key to read.

-similarly, forced mouse interaction for the inventory and items was cumbersome to the experience.

-lack of keyboard interaction for such simple things as saving and warping was also annoying to me.

i'm going to wrap this up for now. i think i've given you enough feedback to polish this thing to a shine. notice the rating i'm giving. i still think this is awesome. now i'm going to play it. if you need more feedback for the rest of the game past the first save point, you know where to reach me.

matakukos responds:

Thank you, your feedback is really valuable for me! I want to make this game perfect =)
Fell free to send me any feedbacks so I can improve the next part of this game.

[Submachine 08: the Plan]

massively awesome.

beat it and got 4 of the 5 secrets.

i'm not sure where the 5th secret is but does it have something to do with the cat statue? i smashed it but nothing happened. and i put the stone button in the column to the right of the cat statue and pressed the button but still nothing happened.

[Demon Decimator]

i can't believe we can't use WASD.. or at least a keyboard key to select or cycle through the demons.

you fully expect us to just constantly move our hand back and forth between the mouse and keyboard.

that is so amateur..

[Madness Accelerated]

give me a break. this is really terrible.

FetusMilkshakes responds:

Thanks for the review, it clearly states why you dislike it and how we can fix it.

[Rot Gut]

no sound and mute button and sound icon in upper right do absolutely nothing.

[Time Fcuk]

what is this doing on the front page? this was on the front page years ago.

seriously what is going on?i gave this a 5 the first time.

why would i give it two 5's?

[The Most Wanted Bandito]

lol. wagon came up. i shot it 3 times real fast so it died. it dropped coins but i didn't get to pick them up cuz the wagon was dead so i'd beaten the level.

lol!

how did that stupid bug slip through? something that obvious? rofl!!!!!!

royalin responds:

IF you only knew how many bugs we encounter on each game, thanks for the heads up but why you scored it so low... :(