ChaoticBrain's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Cave Escape]

It's not a good game.

Even though I did miraculously manage to escape the cave with just 2 seconds to spare, I realize it was only because I happened to make very few "mistakes". I put "mistakes" in quotations because it would otherwise imply that there was actually error on my part, and not the result of random chance. It's nothing but a luck-based mission the first time through, and there's no challenge whatsoever once you've beaten it the first time, since the correct path never changes.

The 3D effect is mildly interesting, though.

[Get it dark]

This game brings nothing new to the table. I found that when you reset the puzzle, it does not reset the number of clicks you made. Also, it always says that you did it in "only (x) clicks", no matter how poorly you did.

ciupiknu responds:

Well if it would reset the number when you pressed reset, the click count would not be correct anymore because you`d just keep resetting it to get the lowest click count and that would be a sort of cheat. and the "only (x) clicks" part is just being nice to the user:).
Thank you for the feedback anyway !

[Hangman Classic]

The flashing background is fairly obnoxious, as is the fact that you actually give out three-letter words.

[Whindy 2]

At least it's not one of those insultingly vapid dress-up games.

This game still has quite a few kinks to work out, however. The jumping is a bit clumsy; it feels a bit unresponsive, and compounded with how awkwardly bunched together the platforms can be, it can become a bit of a pain to move around the level.

The method for powering up is slow and clunky; I'm not sure why I need to stop and charge for eight whole seconds to use my invincibility mode, since it doesn't really limit where and how it can be used, it just makes it annoyingly inconvenient. It's also very misleading to have the very first enemy you encounter be immune to your invincibility. Most players will probably assume that it's completely useless once they try it out.

Finally, I lost a life when I ran into an enemy that was crawling behind a door. You really should make sure that enemies stay in the foreground if they're always going to be touchable.

[Gravity Duck 2]

It's not all that challenging, and starts to get boring after a while.

More damning, the biggest challenge that levels have to offer is the fact that you don't know where teleporters will take you until you use them. Trial-and-error gameplay is one of the worst ways to add difficulty to a game.

[Checkpoint]

Warning: this game is suitable for masochists only

In my humble opinion, a game is something that should entertain the player first and foremost. But it seems fairly obvious that you made this game with the primary intent of entertaining yourself.

It's functional enough that people are willing to play it for more than 5 minutes, but very little care went into the design otherwise. The physics are quite sloppy and inconsistent; wall-jumping up a single wall, your progress upward with each bound varies by a margin of 75 pixels, and I once had the misfortune of staying perfectly still near a sawblade, have it pass over me without injury, then pass me again and kill me. Not to mention you can literally duck-slide from a ladder to your death.

In level design, it seems that the game just doesn't know what it wants to be. A straight-up action platformer, a "corpse-maker" puzzle platformer, or a series of trial-and-error levels in the style of IWBTG. It does all of these with equal lack of polish, and I feel the lack of quality could have been fixed if you had settled into just one of those genres.

Finally, there's the announcer. First of all, the concept of a snarking, omnipresent announcer is a trope so overused that it practically borders on cliche, but this game is a shining example of how NOT to implement it. Instead of injecting humor into the game, it mean-spiritedly lobs personal jab after jab on the player. I won't lie, this is my biggest beef with the game, more so than the above points. I think I'm in the majority opinion when I say that it accomplishes nothing other than to put the player in a bad mood. And that's my strongest argument for claiming that you put your own amusement ahead of the player's when developing this game. This is not a good road to go down. Whatever future games you may make, you cannot simply bully the player, especially if you don't mix it in with some sort of emotional reward to offset it. All it manages to accomplish is make the player so disgusted with the game that he simply refuses to invest any more time in it.

So, to recap:
- Test your game extensively, and make sure the controls and physics are as polished as you can make them. Hold off on releasing it if you suspect for even a moment that it can be tweaked to be better.
- Decide what the main focus of your game is going to be. This is a jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none. Give the player ONE type of game to draw them in, specialize in that one type of gameplay, and merely dabble in others for variety.
- If you insist on using an announcer in the future, give it more personality than a peanut gallery. Give it a personal grudge against the player, or make it genuinely upset when the player succeeds. Or, be creative and put a new spin on it that no one's ever thought of before.

[Dot Dot Dot - Soundboard]

A very sloppily designed soundboard.

It is missing about half the dialogue from the original clip, which was less than 2 minutes to begin with. There's a lot of keys not being used, so it most certainly is not for lack of room on the keyboard. Worse, most of the sound clips that are offered here missing bits off the beginning and end. "Dot"s 2 and 3 sound like "ot", "By" sounds like "eye", "stranth" sounds like "tranth", "explain" sounds like "splain"... you get the idea. Finally, it lacks the "O Fortuna" soundtrack, which I'm sure is the one track everyone would have wanted to use while playing a "Dot Dot Dot" soundboard.

If I were to try and actually use this soundboard, whether for a sentence-mixing video, spamming a vent, or anything else a soundboard is normally used for, the results would be poor, to say the least.

Overall, this strikes me as a half-hearted attempt to bank entirely on the success of the flash animation it was based on. Even though the original animation itself, hilarious as it was, took relatively little effort (compared to frontpage frame-by-frame animations), it still deserves a tribute with far more effort than what was presented here.

And yet, everyone up to and including the admins in charge of picking front page material have completely bought into this. It blows my mind.

[Tesla Death Ray]

Lots of problems.

The hitboxes on some of the enemies are too small. I'll be holding my ray over a giant crab tank, and it'll stop taking damage for no apparent reason, until I adjust it to like the midsection. Even though I was able to beat the game eventually, the hit detection needs a lot of work.

Energy does not recharge between rounds, so if you bottomed out at the end of the last round, you're going to be a sitting duck for a long while at the beginning of the next round.

It should not be possible to completely upgrade your tower 3 rounds before the end. If anything, it should be nearly impossible to max out your tower before the end, so that the thrill of upgrading isn't suddenly yanked away in the endgame. Add one more tier to all of the upgrades.

If you lose a round, the game should return to the point before you bought any upgrades for the current round, so you could try a different approach.

Clicking Menu should not instantly wipe all your progress. You should have a confirmation dialog box and/or a save feature to prevent all your hard-earned progress from being lost.

[Super Mega Bot]

Phew! Finally beat it!

This was an amusing and frustrating experience. The concept was pretty solid overall, and the scoring system is relatively merciful to everyone except those going for a perfect score.

I do have some issue with the controls, however. The robot takes just a little too long to accelerate and decelerate. Turning around while moving at top speed means you have to wait up to half a second to get turned around, and if you run into a wall and want to turn around, the robot will have a seemingly delayed response time (it's actually waiting for current velocity to expire first). This tends to lead to a lot of unintuitive level solutions, especially in the vertical scrolling levels: letting go of keys well before you want to stop or change direction, or moving forward when your regular movement speed would send you straight into those spikes.

Overall, it's a pretty good game, but I would tighten up the controls just a smidge.

[Dungeon Dice]

Feels incredibly shallow.

When I see the title "Dungeon Dice", I come in expecting that it will have a fairly big element of luck to it, with some added tactics and rewarded abilities to give you some feeling of control. Problem is, there are no tactics, and the abilities you get have such little impact on the game that the only thing which stands out is the luck element. Battles are simply not engaging; you are expected to just click in the center of the screen until the battle is over.

There are some very obvious improvements that could be made to this game. First, the addition of dice right now does nothing to change gameplay except tip the odds toward and away from you by some indeterminable amount. All the dice should be used, not just the highest-scoring ones. And you should be able to choose which dice attack which in one-on-one battles, so you must make the choice between playing offensively or defensively at any point. (Having potions of some kind could add weight to this decision.) And if it's AI programming you're worried about, just let the player choose which dice will fight which. I don't think many people will complain.

The power-ups are also mostly meaningless because whether they are useful or not depends on an unpredictable outcome. Instead, the abilities should be applied after the dice roll, but in turn cost more to use. This way, you actually have some control over how useful your dice are, but you have to carefully budget this power so you don't run out of it when you need it most.