HerbieG's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Fire]

That description: "Absent! Will be added as needed ..." is truly intriguing ;-)
As for the game: simple, but brilliant and addicting.
This is what I can call an elemental Tetris.
For those for whom it is not obvious:
Air wipes out Dirt;
Dirt soaks up with Water;
Water takes out the Fire;
Fire sucks up all the air - ok, Oxygen to be precise.
Only one explanation would be needed: why sometimes the red line is dropping and some of my bricks get removed even when no brick even reached it yet? For example the game gave me a "game over" at the moment when my Water brick was extinguishing a stack of Fire blocks.

BigPixelLab responds:

If you put a brick above the line, then you lose. The line falls to complicate the game. Bricks are removed so that you are not trapped. It will be necessary to add a destruction animation.

[Biker Rage]

Overall a good game, but with several flaws:
1. As I already wrote you pressing spacebar when you die does not work, nothing happens, so the only way to restart is to reload or collapse the game;
2. The bullets are just tiny, not distinctive enough and hard to spot sometimes, especially when you are throwing grenades. I hoped that the full screen would help, but the full screen mode is not working on Firefox.
3. Are the kills medals related to total amount or you have to fulfill their requirements in one level? If the first, then there should be some total stats included somewhere, if the latter - then it should be included in the medals' description.
4. The controls are sometimes getting stucked, I press the arrow key, but nothing happens. It also takes way too much time to change the line. Also if some of the power-ups are placed between the lines then you should be able to ride all over the place, not just press arrow-one up, one down. The game would be much better if you could just move around; stay between the lines, move forwards, backwards etc. Also sometimes the enemies that are just nearby change the line just when they are next to you, which is not avoidable.

Raeldor responds:

Great review, And I aprecciate all the coments about the bugs and unclear descriptions, I'll fix them one I have the time.

[Pixel Volley]

The controls are absolutely awful. Everything is just random. You got basically no control of whether your characters will jump to the left or to the right and how high will they jump. You could for example make it like this: 1st character is controlled with wasd keys, the 2nd with arrow keys and then the player would have full control of what he is doing.
Besides, you should make some medals re-checking feature. I just won the wood tournament, but the medal did not unlock. I also see that some people already won more than 10 games and they got no medals for this. Thus: create a re-send medals button or something like this.

FM-Studio responds:

Hi there, thank you for playing Pixel Volley. I think I need to explain some points: Tournament Medals trigger when you won the full tournament, that means win 3 medals and cup (basically you need to win all 4 different game modes).
Also, scoreboard points are not calculated as 1 point every match won but it's a combination of court/net/ball conditions (i.e. the more the match is hard the more point you get). That's probably why you see people with more than 10 points but still no 10 match medal unlocked .

[Knightin']

2 questions:
1. Why at some point I cannot buy any more keys while there are still some locked doors?
2. There is a medal related to the big red potions, but I could buy only one of them (then the rest of them disappeared from the shops) and it did not trigger it. What is wrong here?

Wolod responds:

1. You can buy only one key indeed. Rest of them are hidden throughout the dungeon.
2. You need to solve puzzles on the first two floors to obtain rest of the potions.

[Waves of Doom]

My overview of this game: ridiculously unbalanced. And here is why:
1. Too many too hard enemies at too early stage. As I can see even the author could not pass more than 5 waves;
2. You should at least enable the autofire or make it possible to just to hold the mouse button to shoot;
3. Why there is an "load game" option if the progress cannot be saved in any way?
4. You should try to expand the game by adding some perks possible to pick after leveling up.
My advice: change the balance of the game, check if you can obtain all the medals by yourself and then re-submit the game.

Rodycool responds:

I really appreciated your review!

I did 5 waves but i can do much more if i want to (i don't need cheats ;)) You just have to attack and do spells at the right moment.

When you hold your left mouse, you increase the energy ball's area damage and you do double damage when it's full!

This game actually has an auto-save between waves. This means you can exit game at any time and reenter the same wave later using the load game. Note that you will start at the beggining of that wave.

I will do some balance and other gameplay changes. In the meantime i want to see more people's scores and their feedback.

Thank you!

[Knotty story]

The graphics is surely awesome, but graphics is not all. Unfortunately, the game is buggy. And in some cases it does not give enough clues of what to do. Some remarks:
1. A bug: when you try to jump up the pipe at one point the cat fails to do another wall jump and just falls down with the part of the pipe;
2. Another bug: If you fall down at the beginning of the second string you may get stucked on the edge of the platform below with no possible move and all you can do is restart the level;
3. Yet another bug: If you fall down during the boss fight you may have problems to go back up. The clouds are going up, but you don't know where exactly are you and from where to jump on a cloud to get back on the roof;
4. A question: what is the rule on when does the crow drop a collectable feather?
5. A remark: the boss fight isn't so well designed. You got no idea when the crow drops its feathers on a platform and when not, it is dumb that you get thrown out of the roof every time you just accidentally touch the crow, another thing: while luring the crow sometimes it reacts immediately but sometimes it is just flying around no matter how many times you try to attract him.
A strong advice for the future: hire some testers among the players to check your game before release.

CrounchyBrothers responds:

Totally agree with you HerbieG, a videogame is a game at first... Good graphics are more like atmospheric bonus (but also important feedbacks).
With Knots Story we wants to tell a story at first, this demo just introduce you to the character and environment around. We use classic platformer gameplay mecanics.
But it has to be confortable so be sure we take your feedback remarks in great consideration! ;)
We will check out all the bad issues you are reporting.
For your second point we cannot afford to reproduce it maybe you can send us a screenshot in a private message ?
The rule for the crow collectible is: 1 stack of leaves covered with feather = feather 1
2 stack covered = feather 2 etc...
It isn't localised per stack consider it like lighting 5 spots.

We will try to put more feedbacks on the boss but we also want the player to be granted by finding out by himself... We'll find the right balance.

As it is a demo we also count on our first players to be testers.

Thanks again for your good comment.

[MazeBot]

Interesting game, but please add also an ability to move with the arrow keys. Not everybody like wasd, for me it is -1 star for not being able to choose the scheme.

dynamitewhale responds:

Hey HerbieG,
thank you for the feedback. We will definately consider it, would you keep the UI-Interactions on Q/E though?

[Puzzzled]

I admit that some of these puzzles were brilliant! Keep it up! Maybe make something even harder and without a walkthrough? Something like an expert level :-)

selfdefiant responds:

Thanks! Good idea. :)

[JustAnotherSnakeClone]

The game is very good, keeps you playing it, but... those medals unlock issues ruin it totally. I made an over a million score 5 times already, from which only 2 registered on the highscore list. I just made a 1,2 million score, hoping that this time I will get all the deserved medals-but NOT again. I noticed that the medal for 400 length finally unlocked, so I was happy that finally I will get the one for reaching the score of a million, but to my total disappointment this medal did not unlock for the 5th time for me-is that medal even still working? 3 questions:
1. Why this game cannot just check the NG scores and unlock the medals that a player deserves?
2. Why the game simply cannot store information about the player's achievements?
3. Why the game cannot simply re-send them when I reload the page?
There are many Unity games on NG that have such features.

nitinkumar25195 responds:

I will look around to fix this issue. I am still getting the hang of the new API which is slightly confusing(at least for me). I am really sad about the medal issues and we did have some chat about that. I will fix this. Thank you for your honest opinions.
Edit: Medals and Scoreboards fixed.

[Madness: Nevada Hotline]

Several things suck here. On one of the levels I could not proceed to the next level, although I eliminated all targets. The exit was inactive. I had to reset the level, but the targets counter was back to 0. Then I finished the game, the medal popped up, but did not show up on my account. Now how can I get it? Make sure to make a medal re-sending feature of some sort.

io3creations responds:

The game does have a medal re-sending feature. It saves the medal info in the "Flash cookies". So as long as those aren't erased, refreshing the webpage (or re-opening if you already closed it) should re-send the medals.

Yeah, I know about the bug where some enemies get "stuck" between other enemies that you killed and it sees like all of those are dead. I have a general idea of what may cause it and will look into it.