RaIix's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Playing With Letters]

This is quite amazing. Not just the brilliantly matched creepy music, which is still calm enough to let us think, but the slow-paced writing style, the clues and how they are all bound together. You give us an advice in the first clue and we have to use it in the last. Great. Also, thanks for the hints in the titles.

I can only imagine actually being there, all alone, in a dark room with a note scrawled over with letters; and using them to decrypt a final message, to have a final moment of realisation. Creepy - and awesome.
Also, I've just noticed your note about the secret ending - this kind of interesting easter eggs is something I love when they appear in a game - although sadly I wouldn't find this one if you hadn't told us about it. I will definitely be more cautious in the sequel - and yes, I do look forward to it. Good Luck :)

LucidShadowDreamer responds:

Your review is quite amazing ;)
It makes me happy to hear that the music fits well, while still not being too distracting. It's also cool that you realize how much the game is connected to itself. The hints in the titles are pretty necessary I think, and there's even a hint in one of the medals :p

Awesome! It's splendid that you can imagine yourself as the detective, as that is what I was going for. The secret ending is very important, and I think it'll be the intro of the sequel once I get to it. And it was very ridiculously hard to figure out by oneself, so I kinda had to put such a link there XD

Thanks for the great review :3

[Freddy Nightmare Run]

Pretty good game. It's good the difficulty was slowly rising and that was a new element introduced in every level (well, except the fifth one). What I noticed:
- The Soul Catcher going from behind seemed like needlessly added difficulty. If you don't jump at two exact moments per level, you die, no matter how many lives you have left. That's why the first level was also the most repeated one for me - the scythe swipes somewhere in the middle (not close to the ground), so at first I didn't know I have to avoid it by jumping. A tooltip "Jump!" at least in the first level might be handy.
- Sliding takes a while to take effect, so you can still get hit by swinging axe even after pressing down arrow
- The reload time of fireballs is too long to dispose of the two skeletons next to each other AND to collect the coins that are above them
- Similar problem; you can't collect some coins blocked by the "rolling in the ground" saw
- "To be continued" - I hope so, because the last level was a bit unsatisfying (no boss battle, as long as the others, no 'ending')
But those are all just minor things, the game is fairly enjoyable as it's now.

adytt responds:

Thanks for the review, the Soul Catcher is the most easy to avoid enemy by them all, you need to jump once he arms the scythe and you escape without getting hit. Prepare to shoot imediately after you escape the Soul Catcher as you will always encounter a skeleton.
Before starting the first level an instructions screen is displayed showing you to jump in order to avoid the Soul Catcher.
Keep Down arrow key pressed longer in order to avoid rising to soon an get hit by the balancing axe.
You don't necessary need to kill the two skeletons that comes together in higher levels, destroy just one and then jump to the higher platform and avoid the second one.

[Eyebleed Hypnosis]

Really interesting idea. Although my eyes probably do bleed as I write this review, I enjoyed the game. The music matches it very well, movement speed is just fine, the background moves fluently. And there's even a fullscreen mode and a scoreboard.
What might be an interesting thing to try (or as a 'hard' game mode) to make the white balls speed up and slow down accordingly to the music's pace. Also, do your secret medals work? If there's some additional trick you have to do, then they're ok, but if it's just about getting 5000 (10k, 20k) points, they might be broken.

And, is it just me, or do I suddenly want to support jupitron as our supreme commander and world leader?

jupitron responds:

Im at your feet, my lord.

[THERE IS NO GAME]

This has to be the best, most original nothing I've seen in a long while.

[CopterDrop]

Pretty simple game, but I added half a star for the awesome copter design.
As for things that could be fixed: make us able to start a new game also with 'space' button, so we can replay the game faster; hide the "-1 flybys" every time we start a new game and possibly make sure the orbs don't appear immediately at the beginning of the screen, because those are almost impossible to hit.

marknashproductions responds:

Thank you for your advice i fixed your issues :)

[Seesaw Squirrels]

Quite interesting idea. Moving with arrow keys is quite unnecessary because the branches are too short and there's just a little time. Also, the coins look more like flying eggs, but that's just me.

[Dragon]

Sorry, but this is bad. The main problem is the dragon. When you change direction, you change shape and you crash. When you flap wings, you crash too. Did you test the game before releasing it?
If you made the dragon flip just between looking forward and looking backward (with wings still up), it'd at least be playable.

[Match Star]

I would rate this game as "Okay, I guess". There's nothing wrong with it – technically flawless; zero bugs, has a neat menu, continue button, background music, submit score etc. Technically flawless.

But what does it have we haven't already seen in games similar to these? What makes us play further aside from bigger score and level number?
What could be added to improve it - any new element once every few levels (just ideas - "black stars" which can't fall on top of each other or they will subtract points; "gold stars" which will match any colour; special abilities once per level etc.). Anything.

Like this, the game will easily entertain, and easily disappear in the crowd.

[Escape]

This is actually a pretty good idea, needs more work though.
- First of all, please turn off that siren. I understand that's a prison alert, but every sound loop gets annoying after short while. Some sinister ambient music on the other hand…
- Secondly, textures. That's mostly what will make your players vote less. Even just basic ones like ground/wall/ramp/stairs could help. Just don't keep everything white.
- I got stuck once (between a pillar and a wall just before the stairs) and had to restart the game
- I really liked the continuously adding difficulty when going up the stairs
- The hovering text can't sometimes be read (e.g. the first ramp up)

Everything depends on your decision whether to work on the game further or not. I think it has much more potential. If you wanted to continue, here are some tips:
- More slides. With curves.
- Narrow "through" type of slides
- Jumping (and obstacles related to jumping)
- Other ways to display text (e.g. appear on screen only if you are in certain area)
- Greater maze complexity (it's not really a maze now (more like platform-platform-stairs-slides))
- Menu
- Checkpoints (if the prison gets bigger)
And so on; I'm sure you have plenty of your ideas. Good Luck.

omazing16 responds:

Thank you i really appreciate it, I was thinking about adding first person, would that be a good idea?

[Swag Clicker]

Don't let the low rating discourage you, it's better to start small, because you have actually created something now. Many people just start an unreasonably big project and stop working on it pretty soon, never trying anything again. And if you want an actual serious review, here it is:

- The major problem is that there is no goal. If I needed like 1.000.000 swag points to kill Justin Bieber, well, that would be an encouragement. Now you just mash buttons until you get bored.
- There is no graphics (images of leather jacket, gold chain, etc.). If you don't want to draw stuff by yourself, there's plenty of free images on the Internet. If you decide to work on this game further (not that I'd recommend that :P), you could even add a figure reflecting the number of swag points you have (e.g. 0-1000: normal guy image; 1000-10000: guy with a baseball cap and gold chain etc.)
- No sound (but that's still better than a highly annoying bleep played each time you click)
- If a game consists just of buttons and the buttons do exactly the same thing every time, the fun factor is gone. In this game I can imagine something like a 'swag-meter' (a sliding bar) filling up the empty place on the right, which would go constantly up and down (big swag bonus × no bonus), forcing players to click at the right time (because the need of rapid clicking is something you want to avoid).

With those added, I would probably push the rating to like 2, 2.5 stars; but I'd rather recommend you to start working on a new game. Small games, even from game making beginners, can be great, they just need an original idea. I hope at least some of this will help you improve. Good Luck :)

CubedPlays responds:

I agree with everything you said. I had intentions of just putting the game up here and adding other things in the following day. However, I accidentally deleted the file from my computer. With that said, I hope to have another game up soon. Hopefully it will be much better.