Auz's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Fly Squirrel Fly]

Not bad, but could be better

It's fairly well made and I can see that quite a lot of effort has been put into this. The graphics looked very nice and I loved the music. I preferred this relaxing theme well over the action theme Toss The Turtle uses actually. Also I liked the prehistoric setting and you added plenty of items and creatures you could hit while up in the air. There is still some room for improvement though.

Somewhere this point came where I had a feeling that you could hardly get any further. That point came about when I bought everything of the first upgrade set. Prices suddenly went up by about 5-10 times the price of the former set, but I wasn't earning that much more cash with the upgrades. Sure I was able to get a lot further now, but this did not result in that much extra cash if I didn't hit a whole lot of objects along the way. And so I had to perform dozens of flights where I landed at about 2000m, only earning between $100-200 per flight while the upgrades started to cost around $2000 and way up. You can imagine I start to lose interest after a while if I don't see much progress.

So my suggestion is you either make the upgrades cheaper, make distance a more important factor in earning cash, make upgrades more effective or simply add a few more upgrade sets between the current ones.

Another complaint I have is that while there are many objects up in the air, it was kinda hard to steer your squirrel towards them. So you mostly had to rely on the luck that something gets in your flight path. And once you came down, the chances were very low that a stick of dynamite or something else would break your fall. I think this was mostly due to the fact that the squirrel quickly seemed to drop almost vertically once he went downwards. But once he hit the ground he suddenly went more horizontal again which seemed a bit unnatural. Since there wasn't much that could help you on the ground either, you pretty much knew that once you went downwards the flight was over.

Personally I would solve this by making the squirrels drop a bit more horizontal if he still has a lot of speed. This increases the chance of hitting something by quite a bit. Also you could make the ground items appear more frequently.

Overall 7 out of 10, 3 out of 5. I think this was a fairly enjoyable, addictive game, but it could still use a few improvements. If you work on it a bit more, I think this could easily win a daily first.

~Auz

[Super Stacker 2]

Very nice game

This sure is a very fun and addicting game. First off, the sounds and music of this game were very good. I especially liked that catchy jazz tune you added at the beginning. I just had to replay it over and over again, I loved it. I liked the "boom" sounds the shapes make as well, it sounds kinda funny. Beside the sounds and music, the graphics were also pretty good. Everything looked very nice and colorful, yet very simple.

I thought this game had a very realistic physics engine as well. Except for when the really large shapes came in. For some reason all the shapes below the big shape start to shake out of control while the big shape would normally compress them, increasing the friction making it harder for them to move. So that could've been done better perhaps. But other than that, it was very good and felt very realistic in most levels.

Furthermore I thought the level designs were great. They got very challenging in the end and you really had to think and try a couple of times before you knew how to stack them up right. Then when you completed the game, the extra mode gave an even bigger challenge. I thought that was a very nice idea since it adds some replay value to the game.

Overall 9 out of 10, 5 out of 5. A very nice game like I said. Looking forward to a third version of this game. Keep up the excellent work.

~Auz

TheGameHomepage responds:

Thanks for the great review :)

[Melodies]

Nice, but not so pretty

I think the idea of this game was pretty good. It seems like a mix of several older concepts, but you managed to turn it into something fun and new. I think it´s nice that you made it focus on the music. I like the piano as an instrument and I really liked the music in this game.

What I think this game needs though is a serious graphical upgrade. The grey background, the white and black text and the black squares were a little simplistic. Those are also rather boring colors to use. On top of that I think the colored balls or notes actually looked a bit ugly with the white border around it. What I suggest is that you at least add some more color to the background. I think such a small thing could already make it look a whole lot prettier.

Overall 7 out of 10, 3 out of 5. Like I said, work on the graphics and I think you got a pretty good game here.

~Auz

[Epic Battle Fantasy 2]

Nice work again

Very nice work again Matt. You added some interesting new things to the series.

I thought the ability choosing system was pretty good and interesting. Although I didn´t quite like how it seemed to be based on luck what abilities you could choose. Or at least, there were certain abilities that I liked to have early on in the game. But sometimes they appeared very late for some reason (randomness I assume). And sometimes you could only choose between a bunch of very crappy abilities while sometimes you got some really good ones while you only get to pick one of them.

Perhaps it would be nice if there was always a standard set of abilities for every level. Or maybe you could make it so that you could choose some sort of classpath for your character. Like you could perhaps turn the fighter guy into a paladin type warrior and turn the girl into a battle mage in the end if you only choose certain abilities. With that they could get new attacks and stuff. Like the Seiken ability the fighter already has.

I also didn´t like the new summons as much. Scanbot and Slimebunny were good additions for their abilities, but why remove Registeel and Catastrophe? I thought those were the coolest ones of the first game. And it´s kinda lame that the two best summons in this one could also do major damage to your own party. Because of that I didn´t use the summons for attacking at all because it was too dangerous or useless anyway.

Overall 9 out of 10, 5 out of 5. Like I said, good work again Matt. Except for a few small things it´s deffinatly an improvement of the first one. Looking forward to the third. Keep up the excellent work.

~Auz

matt-likes-swords responds:

Thank ye.
Ion's more useful than ye give it credit for though!
And the skills aren't random, they're based on what actions you take.

[Epic War 3]

Very good

I thought this was a really good game. Graphicwise it was good. Everything was drawn well in it´s own style. Soundwise it was also good, although as with most games like this, the battle music really started to bore me after a while. Would be nice if you added a few more tunes.

As for the gameplay: I enjoyed the card system with the upgrading, leveling up the hero and gaining extra mana to be able to equip better cards. Thought all that was pretty unique for strategy games like this and it added some interesting elements to the game. I was also suprised how balanced this game was. There isn´t a single unit in this game that I would call 'overpowered'. They all have their pros and cons. Sure some units were better than others, but never by much. I thought that was a really big plus.

I can hardly mention any bad points or flaws/bugs to be honest. Only problem I faced was that the game started to lag seriously whenever there were any massive battles being held. But it did not became such a big deal that it was very annoying. Also I thought the diffeculty wasn´t that high. The main game is pretty easy to finish and after that you already have a decent set of cards to whipe out all your enemies again with relative ease. Only the Cave Trials were a bit diffecult, but with the right strategy and decently upgraded cards, they weren´t such a big deal. So a bit more of a challenge would´ve been nice perhaps.

Overall 9 out of 10, 5 out of 5. I really liked it and decided to add it to my favourites. It´s nice that this game got medals by the way. Collected most of them already, and am nearly finished with collecting the last two. You might already be aware of this, but 4MUSKETEER doesn´t work. Just thought I´d mention it. Hope you´ll find a way to fix it someday. Anyway, keep up the good work.

~Auz

[Little Wheel]

Very good

I must say this was very good. I really liked the style of this game. The black foreground and the yellowish background looked very nice and mixed well together. The animation and physics of this game seemed realistic which did impress me a lot. I liked the jazz music at the background as well. Thought it fitted nicely in this game. Also I thought the little robot was a very charming character somehow.

The only bad point of this game, in my opinion, is that it is very straightforward. It´s a point and click-game which usually involve lots of thinking and puzzleing. However, I barely had to think in this game at all. Most of the time it was just: "If this thing doesn´t work, click on the other thing". Sometimes you had to do things in a certain order, but I just bashed the buttons randomly which always got me through it quickly.

Overall 9 out of 10, 5 out of 5. Even though it´s low diffeculty, it was a still a joy to watch all the animations. I´d deffinatly love to see a sequel of this. Preferably a longer adventure because I thought this one was a bit short as well. Got through it in 10 minutes. Anyway, keep up the good work :)

~Auz

[Stamper's Quest For Fags]

Alright

I thought this game was alright. The game looked pretty nice, with good drawings and animation and I thought the bees looked kinda funny. The music was also good. I noticed there were different songs for different diffeculty levels. I guess that makes it a little bit less repetive.

The bad thing about this game is that the hit detection is just awful. Or at least, there is a very, very large area in which you get hit. Too large if you ask me. Sometimes a bee clearly appears above my head or underground (?) and yet it hits me. And to prevent damage from cactusses you have to predict when they appear because when they´re on screen already you are too late and they hit your toes or something... =/ The damage the enemies do seems to be kinda random also, although I guess it just depends on the time you are hitting the enemy. How much health you recovered did seem to be completely random though and sometimes it was so little that an increase was barely visible.

The annoying thing about all this is that there is now a very large luck factor. I don´t really like that in a game that should be mostly based on skill. So I think it would be better if enemies could only hit you once for a standard amount of damage and health packs also healed a standard amount of health.

Overall 6 out of 10, 3 out of 5. Like I said, I thought it was alright. I did have some fun with it and took the trouble to collect all the medals (which were pretty easy to obtain by the way). The gameplay could´ve been better though.

~Auz

Kevin responds:

Bees can swim underground in this game, sorry.

[Epic Battle Fantasy]

Awesome!

I thought this was a really good game. One of the best turn based strategy games on NG in my opinion. It was very FF'ish with a lot of Pokemon, but I like both of those series and you mixed them nicely. I also heard some Zelda in between, which is also one of my favorite game series. Not the best songs you picked, but they were the only ones that would fit I think.

The game plays really nicely, with plenty of options and attacks to choose from. And I found that none of the attack options were useless. In these sort of games you often see a lot of attacks that you´ll never use anyway, because there is always one attack you´ll spam because it´s simply the most efficient one to kill enemies with. In this game, there was no such attack since most attacks did about an equal amount of damage. You really had to go for weaknesses and think of strategies to maximize your damage. Also, the few abilities to restore MP added a nice extra diffeculty factor to the game. So I really had to play this game differently than how I would normally play these games which is a plus.

The game had great drawings as well. I´m still amazed how you went to a completely different style from Black Mages 4 to Black Mages 5. BM 4 was not all that impressive graphicwise, but BM 5 had very clean, cartoonish drawings which were very nice to look at. You continued that style through your later submissions and I could even see some slight improvement since BM 5.

As for the bad parts and stuff to improve on: I read your post about changes for a sequel and most of the things I would suggest are already covered there. Lower HP for enemies would indeed be nice since battles took very long. Hard mode took me over an hour to complete. And as for status effects, indeed be carefull not to overdo them because I personally find them annoying as fuck in most RPG's. Positives ones like Regen and Auto-Life are okay, but stuff like Berserk, Confuse, Paralyze, Blind etc. are just lame. But maybe you can put a system similar to FF9 were you could select skills against certain status effects and have an option to change skills between battles. I think that system had quite a lot of depth and I think it would solve the "making other skills completely useless"-problem.

Overall 10 out of 10, 5 out of 5. Very nice game like I said. Added it high up in my favorites list. Also decided to add you to my favorite authors since I really liked your work so far. Keep it up and good luck with the sequel.

~Auz

matt-likes-swords responds:

Berserk can be a positive one!
Say you want to tank weak enemies that are unlikely to kill you without wasting MP.

>>change skills between battles
Possibly.

Anyhow, thanks for da review.

[Deliver That Fulp]

Nice one

I thought it was pretty hard to get started in this game. It took me about half an hour to finally figure out the first right commands. But once you´re on your way it won´t take that long to beat it. It´s not so diffecult actually. The only annoying thing was using the right words. Synonims or words that are very similar sadly don´t work which made it much more diffecult. Perhaps it would be good if you also would add words as 'softly' for gently and 'get'/'pick up' for take.

As for sounds and graphics: I thought everything looked very nice, I liked the pixely style of the game. The music was also pretty good. Not too spectacular, but a nice tune that suited the style of the game. Same goes for the sounds which were also in 8-bit style.

The medal additions weren´t too good in this game in my opinion. I thought they were too easy to obtain. By just completing it normally you already get 8 out of 11 or so. Even for losing the game you get one or two. Confuzzled was the only one that took me a bit of time to figure out. But all in all, I think this was one of the easiest medals game yet. Would´ve been nice if there were a few more secret, harder ones.

Overall 8 out of 10, 4 out of 5. I thought it was an interesting puzzle game. Short but sweet. The idea behind it was pretty good too. I´d deffinatly like to see more of these. Keep up the good work and good luck with any future projects.

~Auz

[Best League]

Nice

It´s a pretty nice football game in my opinion. It has a nice pixely style which reminds me of old gameboy football games. The little cutscenes that occured after a goal were really typical for those type of games :p Anyway, I thought the music was well done, although there wasn´t much music in it. The sounds were alright as well, but they could´ve been better. Personally I thought the "Goal" sounded a little bit lame. There were also few other things that need some improvement in my opinion.

My main complaint is that the ball moves too slowly during passing. I could pass the ball and immediatly run after it to pick it up a bit further. Also, the only way to pass the ball seems to be through the air. I had a feeling every ball I passed went a mile up before landing a few meters up ahead. Why can´t I pass the ball over the ground? It would be nice if you could add that and make the ball go a little bit faster. This would certainly add a bit more realism to the game.

Also, you might wanna make the players a bit faster as well. Or make a button that allows us to sprint. I thought the players were running pretty slowly, which made the action slower and made the game a bit boring.

To add even more realism to the game, it would perhaps be nice if you added fouls and cards and stuff like that. I mean, I made a few red card tackles and they all went unpunished here. Perhaps you should make it in such a way that every tackle from behind is a free kick and perhaps a yellow card.

One last thing, broadening the field might be a good idea. It was weird that when I made a diagonal shot from the corner of the 16 meters line, the ball ended all the way at the other corner flag.

Overall 7 out of 10, 3 out of 5. A fairly enjoyable game. If you improve on the stuff I mentioned above, I think it could become pretty awesome. Keep up the good work and good luck with the production of any future flash games.

~Auz

EasyRetro responds:

Hey Auz,
Thks for this in-depth review. The overall game is probably not running fullspeed on your computer for some reasons. Could you please PM your processor and Web-Browser name that would be really nice.
~EasyRetro