Gerontius's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Binary]

Couple of frustrating things

Cool graphics, although the animation jumping between planets could do with a little work

Some great puzzles, but the circular ones really need clockwise and anti-clockwise. It's just frustrating to have to keep on going all the way round when you've overshot by one!

[Time4Cat]

Pretty good

I was doing well, but then went to get a bit of food from the edge of the screen and a pedestrian appeared. Sad to lose by bad luck - perhaps some advance warning of where the pedestrians will come from would be an idea, or making sure the food doesn't appear too close to the edge of the screen would help prevent that.

[Epic War 2]

Not much of an improvement

OK, there's a lot more to this game than there was to EW1, but more doesn't necessarily mean better, especially when the old problems are still there.

Main problem: it's way too easy until you get to the boss, when it becomes way too hard. I got through the entire game without even coming close to losing my castle, and then didn't even drain the frog boss of half his HP before being wiped out. And where's the fun in firing volley after volley of arrows at a boss with so many hit points? Where's the skill?

Solution to this is to test it more: adjust the difficulty so that you can't quite fend off the monsters with only your arrows and have to try balancing summoning creatures with upgrading your weapons. Basically, you need to test and tweak it a lot more.

The other problem is the story. Oh dear. Favourite "bad" bit: "we were like a snake without a head, fangs but no poison". Since when did a headless snake have fangs? That's just one example of many where the writing tries to sound impressive and just fails by making no sense. Cut it way WAY back - no more than a page per battle - and there's probably a good story in there somewhere without the laughable prose. And try to come up with some reason why YOU are so important within this story. Why are YOU the greatest general of them all?

[Alien Planet Driller BETA]

Finish the game

Don't upload something so obviously unfinished - it makes it look worse, not better, to have lots of "coming soons" everywhere. If you can't do it in the game, get rid of it

The game as a whole isn't great anyway. No fun factor, no skill.

[dave cee's pool]

Sigh

How is this different from the 101 other almost identical pool games except for the music that just bloats the file size?

Is the .fla file for this pool game going free somewhere, so everyone's making their own versions with slightly different graphics or sound? Shame the underlying game is so poorly done.

[Ring Game]

Hmm

Either your instructions suck (and they should be in-game anyway) or matching all of the colours up isn't possible. If it were possible, it wouldn't be a very difficult or interesting game. So either way, you lose.

Oh, and the snap control on the rings seems a bit buggy, so you lose there, too.

[River Crossing]

It's alright

Not a bad take on an old idea, but it's buggy.

I clicked on the chicken just before the boat reached the far shore and the chicken got dumped on the near shore where I'd just come from. This left chicken and beans/corn together and I lost the game Suggest fixing that by making sure things can't be clicked while animating.

Making the river crossing faster would be a good idea, too.

Oh, and putting adverts on such a short simple game is silly.

[Flash Quest (:]

Bit silly

nicely drawn, bu the design is a bit silly. Casting lights to reveal objects in completely visible locations.

This would be a good idea if the room were dark. Why no try that? Could give the game a better atmosphere, too.

[Journeys of Reemus: Ch.1]

Gorgeous to look at

Great style, graphics and music. But the interaction is rubbish. There's no real logic to most of it - you just click the hot spots until you get the one you need for the next step in the linear puzzle. That's fine for a short game like this, but it wouldn't sustain interest for very long.

The two endings is a nice touch, and it would be good if you could create something with that level of non-linearity throughout.

Basically, think bigger. Don't make one a month, work on one significant effort. The graphics deserve it!