Bezman's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[What an awesome Dress up]

work on your drawing skills

I liked how you went in the direction of animating the wings. Though the shape tween (when the wings rise) doesn't work too well, it's good to see some movement.

Clothes are fairly generic. I liked the jester's cap and some hairstyles were cool, but all the clothes with only nominal differences or colour swaps seemed dull and pointless. Give us some crazy fun stuff!

The basic character model was kinda sloppily drawn, with overly long torso and short legs. Having a mask as a face seems pointless - if you're gonna seperate out the face, have different expressions etc.

Ultimately, dress-ups tend to be dull and as a result, if you want one to stand out it needs to be really polished. Yours has some good elements but you need to work on your drawing skills before they can stand on their own, without gameplay or a joke/narrative to support them.

[Windows Errors 2007]

Can't deconstruct humour well.

Error 22 was my favourite, as well as the one about memory failure.

A lot of these joke errors seemed to follow a bit of a pattern and felt a bit old-hat. I'd like to be able to deconstruct the humour and explain why, but I'm not a skilled enough comedian.

One thing I can say - the buttons were atrocious! You need to sort out the 'hit' frame - maybe use a rectangle so we can click anywhere in that area, not just on the actual text.

Also, on the last frame you should remove the 'next' button.

The fact that you listed it as a 'game' did give me false expectations and I kinda hoped it might be a windows simulator with loads of errors plonked in. I understand it's not really a movie though...

Found this a bit tiring generally, but unfortunately, I'm not able to explain why.

.:Review Request Club:.

[Mouse Avoider #30]

still a lot of rough edges

Mouse avoider games are close to my heart, as my first game (rol-ovir) essentially followst the same rules - touch this, avoid that.

The level 8 idea was fairly fresh and I did like the fact that you had a bunch of different obstacles. I liked the spinning wheel level (5?) though I was disappointed the centre part really didn't affect us - as we could just stay in the outer ring. There were a bunch of varied ideas and that's always good to see.

I played through the levels one by one until failing level 10 3 times. What really annoys me about your game is that after each mistake we need to go through the menu again before we can retry. Also, some of the obstacles seem more focused on being difficult than interesting. I'd just prefer the latter, whereas it seems you aim for both, but lean towards the challenge.

Level 10 seemed a bit dull too. I don't know if there's a bonus 11th level after completing it, but...

It seems a good effort for your first game. Maybe clean up the mazes a bit by using the subselect tool (A) to clean up the paths and have some straight sections, rather than just using a square eraser and making it a tad messy.

Also, losing whenever we clicked was annoying - I use a pen and there's just no need for that sorta 'cheat prevention'. Instead, use mcs and use a 'hittest' function, rather than having buttons.

Out of curiousity, is the number a vague approximation of how many were released on NG in the past month?

Great first game, though there's still a lot of rough edges - mainly pushing us back to the screen selection - to overcome.

.:Review Request Club:.

[The counting game]

An over-used idea badly implemented.

Even if I hadn't read a previous review, I would've known what was happening, simply because the text box wasn't selectable. Something that actually functions as it should - for example the mouse-maze game from a while back - would have worked a fair bit better.

And rather than something that asks us to do stuff quickly, getting us pumped up anyway, something that asks for care and patience (like - again - the mouse game) works better as a contrast for the 'shock'.

In any case, this genre seems stupidly tired and that was the case even in 06. It's a simple prank and we don't need more examples of it - there are already enough floating around.

I wonder if this strengthens or weakens our hearts?

[Pushies Plus 2]

I just didn't enjoy the mechanics as they were.

The game kinda felt a bit random to me. I managed 124 seconds on insane with power-ups, 48s without. I kinda just felt that the basic action - with blocks flying faster than our mind can really comprehend and our avatar moving through blocks that are meant to push it - kinda often feels like 'push and hope. Sure, I understand that the optimum strategy would be to move towards sparser areas, move around obstacles... but having stuff move through us kinda makes a mockery of that and I guess I just felt the gameplay was a bit shallow.

The graphics were cool though and I liked the way you had various designs and colours. The general aesthetic and music was cool too.

I just didn't enjoy the mechanics as they were.

ETERNALGAM3R responds:

The game isn't for everyone. Some people like it some people just don't and I respect both sides evenly.

Although I would like to disagree with you on the 'shallow' gameplay. I think its what you make of the game that really brings it out. Its more the experience that you have when you play the game that I was looking for and I seemed to capture it with most people.

I would agree with one thing though. Its pretty basic and does get boring. I'm trying to add more player engagement and more diversity in the next one. Hopefully I'll win you over, lol.

Thanks for the review.

[Turf war]

Fantastic graphics, horribly unbalanced mechanics.

I liked the graphics. Music was cool enough, but got a bit monotonous on the 2nd game. I liked the way you had black and white, with colour used for highlights.

I played this game twice. First time, I ended up winning with both rats (barely) alive. The beer keg seemed to stop my opponent from retaliating and with that weapon, the whole game seems unbalanced - as soon as we knock one opponent out, victory is virtually guaranteed.

Obviously inspired by worms etc. this just seems kinda unbalanced and too easy.

If you want to teach folk about managing finances, maybe make running out of cash a real possibility. Each time I used the bear keg, I seemed to make a net gain of 10! Maybe you could've had more targets, had more expensive things do more damage (instead of stuff like cats/dogs just doing damage to yourself if you're unlucky and increasing RNG effects) and kinda encouraged folk to only buy something as expensive as they need - buy something to deal more damage than you need to and you'd be guaranteed to run out of dosh for at least a couple of turns.

Enh.

It looks cool and the explosions in the intro made for an auspicious start (unlike the buttons that don't tell us if we're over them) but the game mechanics didn't really live up to that.

.:Review request Club:.

[Faith Fighter]

entertaining while it lasted

For me, the best joke was the 'censored' version. Having lost a few times, I then played the censored version to see the change... hahaha. As if that makes a difference.

What I also found funny was Mohammed praising god after beating him up.

Not really as thought provoking as you maybe hoped for it to be - it's an easy joke and doesn't really raise any issues. I thought maybe having the dieties kill each other, then the universe or something (so they're destroying all of humanity in the process) might be a more vivid metaphor, but it still wouldn't be a novel concept.

Graphics were decent and I did like the voices. It'd have been ncie to hear all the winning cries - maybe as we select them, they could cry so we'd hear the jokes without having to go through the rigmarole of picking each character.

The game mechanics seemed good enough and I imagine this is one of the hardest genres to get to play well in Flash. However, it's not really balanced or novel enough to make me want to play on the higher difficulties or various other characters I still haven't played.

It was entertaining while it lasted though, which seems about right.

[Bubble Schmubble]

I just don't enjoy the mechanics that much.

I like the twist this game brings to the core mechanics - I imagine that big fans of these types of games would enjoy the way they can keep the game going on infinitely with all the blocks sliding in from the left to fill in gaps.

I personally never got to a standard with these games where I could predict moves far enough ahead to actually clear a level so I'm not sure if I"m within your target audience.

Having said that, something about the mechanics rubs me the wrong may. Maybe it's the uncomfortable straddling between luck-based and skill-based play, the arrangement of the bubbles coming in playing a big part leaving us unsure as to whether to blame the RNG or our skill.

Maybe its the fact that to play this game optimally requires me to forecast ahead more moves than I'm willing to do - something that always put me off the original mechanics.

However, I do like the graphics. I love the way the creatures wiggle to show you what will be deleted and the actual shapes and colours are all easily distinguished, whilst conforming to a pleasing aesthetic.

Overall though, I just don't enjoy the mechanics that much.

[TD: Destroy the Toy]

A cheap knock-off of Bloons Tower Defense.

This game, overall, seems like a copy of Bloons Tower Defence.

I found the slant towards statistics and unlimited upgrades made for a slight change, but really - there's not enough to distinguish it.

The graphics aren't great. The big advertisement on the bottom makes the whole thing seem overly cheap and the rough red line over the speaker and the simplistic graphics (with darts/rock towers being easy to mix up) don't really don't help. Regardless, my main issue is with the game mechanics.

After a while, I really found I had enough money to just buy enough turrets, with a healthy supply of gold building up. You obviously need to balance the numbers.
It seems that the levels are 'procedurally generated'. I'd suggest that you take a step back, consider some ways to distinguish your effort a bit more from Bloons', then balance the numbers to avoid easy stockpiling later on.

One other issue I have with the game is the lack of any info about what stats your building will have when its upgraded. I did like the fact that stats were displayed, but you need to follow through and show them for upgrades too. Also, maybe explain the '5' and '7' for speed. The range is presumably a radius, the damage clearly a linear number, but how does speed work?

I think you need to do a lot of work and a fair bit more thinking before it's more than just a cheap knock-off.

.:Review Request Club:

[Cubefield]

Impressive 3D effect and gfx design.

The artificial rewards in the form of the graphic changes do give me a strong desire to carry on playing.

The various skins were actually well designed - I liked all 3 that I saw and the 3rd certainly seemed to amplify the feeling of speed.

My only complaint is the requirement of repetition in order to 'get back to where you were', let alone see new content - something I have an issue with in general. I think I would have preferred the game if there were some options menu to select a starting skin.

I understand that withholding graphical rewards can encourage longer playings, but I just feel that allowing access to more stuff is more compassionate of players' time.

Anyway, the 3D effect rocks and playing this game full-screen on another site, the effect was awesome.