B1KMusic's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Ricochet Heroes]

My only complaints are that the physics are a little weird, and that the game's too short. But hey, you only had two days.

Not sure if it's possible to get a game over from losing too many heroes; I just beat the game on my first try.

Overall great job!

[The Heroic Rooster]

Character is too slow. Especially considering that this game is obviously taking inspiration from Sonic.

Seeds = Rings.
Ants = Roboticized animals.
Rooster = Sonic.
S Hi T = Robotnik. RoNOTnick?
"Act Conplete"

You should make him able to accelerate to higher speeds, and design the stages to better accommodate said speed.

The controls are unpleasant and floaty. You should make them tighter, more responsive, and faster.

Sound dips suddenly when Dr. Ronotnik speaks. You should have the volume lower and raise in a gradual triangle pattern rather than a sudden square, and it shouldn't lower to less than 70% volume. This is to make it subtle enough that the player doesn't notice the dip in volume to accommodate the voice. I'm not supposed to notice that.

Lacking fun factor. Though this could be a consequence of the controls. If you're going to emulate Sonic, then you should probably look closer at what makes it exciting to play. One thing I notice is that seeds are not exciting to collect in this game. Try giving them a little animation, and adding a subtle sound when you pick them up, so that they have a little liveliness to them.

I lost interest around the stage where you're trying to find a password for the doors. I just got bored. That's definitely not a good sign.

So my suggestions would be to take a closer look at games like the original Sonic The Hedgehog trilogy (study the game mechanics), Phoenotopia (study what makes it polished and exciting), and, I hate to bring this up again, since it's barely relevant, but I Wanna Be The Boshy, for its tight controls.

Aside from all that, I can tell you put a lot of work into this game. But the glaring issues prevent it from getting a really good score.

DIWAKAR responds:

Thanx for the review !!

[Ventures Of ♛Cyberdevil]

It's fun at first, but it falls short.

I can see you're going for an 'I Wanna Be The Guy' theme here, but the thing about IWBTG is not the traps, but the actual working difficulty. IWBTG, unlike 99% of its fan games, is actually fun because, aside from the occasional trap or two, it's actually a challenging game, no matter how many times you've played through it, or how well you've memorized it, you will still die, a lot. That's why I like Solgryn's I Wanna Be The Boshy; it takes what makes IWBTG work so well, and amps it up to 11. IWBTB was, and still is, the hardest game I've ever played in my life. Not even Ninja Gaiden holds a candle to that one.

So where am I going with that point? When you abuse traps, it creates fake difficulty. When the player memorize those traps, they will virtually no longer fall for them.

Case and point: it only took me 3 runs of this game to no-death it (IQ:600-something), with barely any effort, on a keyboard, with the backwards right-hand-movement control scheme. The difficulty is non-existent in this game.

The other glaring issue of this game is, and lots of other people have mentioned this, the floaty controls. The character slides around too much, making precise jumping very tedious. Tedious, not difficult. It took the first two plays to adapt to the weird physics of this game, but that does not excuse them. Along with the sliding floaty physics, the jumping is also wacky; I shouldn't have to spend more than a second jumping onto a platform. Why am I falling just one pixel short of getting on top of that block (the down-to-jump level)? Why do I have to go away from it to build momentum just to jump a little higher? That strikes me as a bug.

The thing is, if you had just used Macromedia's or Adobe's Flash IDEs, instead of some "game maker" program, these problems wouldn't be an issue. You'd have to spend more time creating the physics yourself, and thus be able to fine-tune them, and build the levels more precisely around the character. That would not only eliminate the terrible controls, but it would also make for finer control of the difficulty.

If you plan to do something like this again in the future, I wouldn't say to emulate The Unfair Platformer, or IWBTG, its flash tribute, etc. But instead, I Wanna Be The Boshy. IWBTB has the most solid controls out of all the "I Wanna Be The [Thing]" games that I've played over the years. This game has devious level design, made precisely for soul-crushing difficulty. Aside from the occasional trap/joke, your deaths are your own fault. This is why I use it as THE metric for judging IWBTG-like games.

DIWAKAR responds:

OOOoooooo !!
OOK Sir!

[Jelly Lam]

This game was easy. I beat it in half an hour (26 minutes) and it was always obvious what I had to do. Not that this is a bad thing. But I DID 3-star all the levels without much effort, and only died 66 times. Mainly due to carelessness.

I found the third "episode" to be the most fun. I think you should make another game that runs with the third episode's theme, because that's where the game really ramped up. And that is the part that really redeems this game. If not for the third episode, I would have given this game a 2.5/5.

[End of Review]

If anyone's interested, here's the end status screen I was greeted with after completing the game:

http://i.imgur.com/GFtB83k.png

I can't just post a link knowing it will eventually rot. If you are reading this review in, let's say 2018, and the above link is dead because either the image got deleted or imgur went down in a blaze of glory for whatever reason, then here's the transcript of the picture just as a backup:

http://pastebin.com/uB0UsxNt

If (when) that link goes down too, then I apologize in advance for the ulgy, unformatted text you are about to read:

039892370
TOTAL SCORE: 367200
COMPLETE LEVELS: 36
COMPLETED LEVELS AT THREE STARS: 36
COLLECTED STARS: 108
SKIPPED LEVELS: 0
TOTAL BEST TIME: 0:26:8
SET RECORDS: 0
USE HANDS: 963
OPEN PLATFORMS: 62
COLOURING JELLY: 148
USED REELS: 47
HIT ON SPIKES: 21
HIT ON CUTTING BLADES: 45

[Collective]

It was interesting and fun while it lasted. I like the quirky utilization of death in this game. It reminds me of SeppuKuties (http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/467521), and I think the challenge would have been more substantial had you taken a page from SK and implemented a game-wide consequence for death that forces you to conserve your lives rather than mindlessly mashing through a level with no consequences.

On that note, the game was very short, and way too easy. I beat it in about 10 minutes.

The last level reminded me of something you'd expect to see in I Wanna Be The Guy or VVVVVV, but it was uncharacteristically easy, as I finished that level in 3 tries (2 deaths). The first death was falling into a spike on the right side, and the second was from the platform on the bottom unexpectedly rising. But after those two slip ups, I zoomed through it with little effort.

With that, I think the level design could have been done better. I feel it was limited and lackluster. This game has so much potential, and I see that you plan a possible sequel/extension to the game. I say, go for it. Take this game and run with it to its limits!

For now, I'm hitting "follow" (the heart with a plus in it) and awaiting your next project.

Until then, good luck!

[Chunkadelic]

Took me a while, but I managed to 100% it!

The game was a blast, but the lack of any reward (such as a medal) for the effort of beating 9 games in a row without failing makes me want to take away a half-star.

Perhaps you could re-release this game with medals in the future. But until then, this game gets a 9/10, a fave, and a follow!

[Sundown Dash]

That was Nintendo Hard!

The ending made it worth it, though!

[TCT RPG]

Barely started the game and it has an Earthbound vibe to it.

The story is intriguing from the get-go with a mandatory-by-law V For Vendetta-esque curfew, references to Nineteen Eighty-Four. This totalitarian government world is completed by hints that the story is set in the future by the characters being baffled by a guitar, and interest is created in the encounter with a character in the forest.

I've spent a good 15 minutes on this game, and I'm actually motivated to continue on. Unlike the older D'sova RPG, the controls feel solid, and walls aren't a problem. I also don't notice any outsourcing, which is definitely a plus.

The art and music choice is a little odd, though, and it ends up being distracting.

From what I've played, this is one of your best games yet, up in the ranks with the Legacy of Guy trilogy, and I feel that it deserves an overall 4/5.

[D'sova RPG]

I see some serious design flaws here.

1. The walls.

The clumsy wall interaction, that sends you back to your last position, regardless of the angle you hit the wall at. Instead of that, I should be repelled. As in, send me back in only the opposite direction of the wall, suitable to cancel out movement, but not reverse it. Ideally, this should be implemented in a way that if I'm hitting a vertical wall diagonally, I will slide up the wall while being prevented from moving through it to the left.

That's worth a half-star

2. Outsourcing resources that are essential to the game on another website.

I cannot believe someone would have the audacity to do this. The game should be self-contained. If the game is on Newgrounds, then the updates and map (and other possible resources) should be hosted on...oh I dunno, how about Newgrounds! Inside the flash game, not on some obscure website that you partnered up with. The reason why becomes apparent when the site doesn't pay their bills, loses their domain, and the domain gets parked. Basically, you have succeeded in breaking your own game with your lack of foresight.

This is severe, and is worth two whole stars.

[Soul Search]

Extremely difficult. But most of the difficulty is artificial, thanks to the obnoxious mouse controls. If there were an option for keyboard controls, and an indication of where you are in the game so I don't feel like I'm making zero progress and just wasting my time, I might have actually enjoyed this game.

The poor quality of the controls, the monotonous nature of the gameplay, and the lack of information combines to make this an overall unrewarding, unmotivating experience worth taking 2.5 stars over.