Auz's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Portal Defenders]

Kept me entertained for hours

I think this is a really fun and addicting fighting game.

I´m very positive about the diffeculty of this game. Beating the game is already quite a challenge, but with characters like April Fulp it´s getting really hard. Still, it´s doable with a good amount of practice and determination so I might say the diffeculty is just perfect. Not too easy, not too hard.

Graphicswise the game is also very good. The drawings and animation were quite nice. The only downside was that the game often started to lag a bit, but fortunatly I could solve this by lowering the quality.

The music in this game was interesting as well. Nice selection of tracks which suited the game well in my opinion. P-bot´s theme was especially nice I thought.

As for what to improve. Well personally I can not think of much. I didn´t always liked the fact that bossed could sort of trap you and counter faster than you could attack. This was mainly the case with second, third and fourth boss. Often when you were building up a combo on them, they somehow countered in between your strikes. With Mindchamber this was quite annoying since he had such a long reach and could attack you a couple of times quickly. Still, while this was a bit frustrating, I suppose it did add to the diffeculty of the game so I don´t think it needs any adjustments.

Overall 9 out of 10, 5 out of 5. All in all I think this was really good. Well made game which kept me entertained for hours. Especially with the additions of medals, and personally I still consider this the best medal game yet. Keep up the good work and good luck with any future projects.

~Auz

[Alkie Kong 2]

Nice platformer

It´s a nice platformer game, very similar to the old Donkey Kong game. Which is logical since that is were you got your inspiration from. Graphicswise the game was alright. Nothing too impressive, but nothing looked really ugly or anything. The music and sounds were pretty good in my opinion. I already heard the main level theme many times, but this seems like a slightly altered version for some reason. Anyways, it sounded very nice. The voiceacting was also done quite well, which is suprising since this isn´t really a type of game that lies a lot of focus on dialogues.

My only complaint is that it´s frustratingly diffecult at times. Level 14 took me about a whole day to get past. Fortunatly level 14 was not a very long level, but I got pretty pissed sometimes at level 9. That level just takes ages because it involves a lot of running around the level and waiting for the right moment to go. Kinda lame if you fall into a pit in a very unfortunate way. So I think it would be good if you would´ve slightly shortened that level a bit.

As for the attached medals: I think it´s too bad that in order to get all the medals, you are required to play the game at least 3 times over again. I´m already having a lot of diffeculty getting the survivalist medal and it´s really crap if you for some stupid reason get dropped into a pit... =/ So personally I think I would´ve prefered other medals which don´t force you to play the game all the way from the beginning until the end.

Overall 8 out of 10 4 out of 5. I think this was a good and fun game. Just a few tiny bad points, but all in all it´s well made. Hope to see more stuff from you soon, keep up excellent work.

~Auz

[super sweatshop mastar]

Not so interesting...

Not such an intestering game in my opinion. Graphicly it was nice with pixelated style and nice effects. I liked that. The music and sounds were also okay in my opinion. Sounded a bit gameboyish which brought back memories. But the game itself is a little boring and repetive in my opinion. It only involves dodging stuff and a lot of doing nothing actually.

You could make it a lot more interesting I think. It would be nice for example if you had two degrees of freedom instead of just one. Like you can move to the left and right, as well as up and down. Probably good to also give the player the ability to move forward faster, to speed up the game a little. You could make it a bit more diffecult at the same time as it´d now be easier to dodge. Adding power ups, shooting or whatever could also make this game better.

As for it´s medal additions: The medals were fairly easy to collect. It seems a bit weird to me to add medals to a game like this, since there just isn´t much stuff to do and I couldn´t think for any more achievements than the current either. But it´s nice to see another game with medals I guess and a fairly easy 175 points are always welcome.

Overall 5 out of 10, 2 out of 5. The pluspoints were mainly based on the style of the game. I think that was the best part of this. For the rest it is not so good in my opinion. Try to make it more interesting with the suggestions I mentioned and I think this´d become a pretty awesome game. Keep it up and good luck with your next project.

~Auz

[Thing-Thing Arena 3]

Nice

I think this was a really good game. Graphics and all looked very nice and all the options you have are pretty good. It´s nice that you can adjust your own character and there are plenty of arena´s, weapons and types of enemies. A lot of variety in the weapons as well, which is great. I would say the diffeculty is also perfect. I remember in your former Thing-Thing games I had lots of trouble, but this one seemed a bit easier but not too easy.

It´s nice that this game got medals too, even though the medals are a bit repetitive as they basicly want you to play at least 20 matches of killing 100 enemies. It takes quite a long time to get them all and it basicly involves doing the same over and over and over again. But they´re just an extra so it´s not big deal. And I got them all anyway.

As for bad points, I can not really think of anything. I did not find any bugs, the game worked very smoothly so that is another good point. The only thing I might say is that I did not always like the music. But I could turn it off if I wanted to, so this was also not a big deal.

Overall 9 out of 10, 5 out of 5. A nice game overall. Had a lot of fun playing it. Hope to see more from you soon, keep up the excellent work.

~Auz

[Fear Unlimited Issue2]

Unplayable

The artwork in this game is nice. Drawings, graphics and special effects all look very good. The music and sounds are also good. Even though I am not a big fan of that type of music, it suits the game well I think. Upgrade system, ranking system, boss battles and a storyline are all good additions as well that make the game much more interesting.

But my problem is that the game is very buggy and glitched. I'll just mention a few bugs I encountered, I am sure you've already heard of some before:
-At the start of the game, sometimes I fall through the floor making my character invisible. Before I can move I have to attack, but an enemy also spawns immediatly who sometimes slashes my character.
-After all the button mashing, I have a feeling the game stops to respond after a while or responds very slowly. What mainly happens is that I am unable to use my D + down attack while in mid-air. This is very annoying because I use it very often. This could also be caused by my own keyboard, but it´s working fine while typing this review and playing other games so I think it´s an ingame problem.
-Medals added to this game do not show up in the game itself. On the list it still says I have 0 medals, while I have 5 in reality.
-Saving a game often does not work. I notice a lot of times that after making upgrades, saving the game and restarting, the game did not save those upgrades. So every time I restart I have to do all the changes I did before again and pray that it works. This is also very annoying.
-It does not save changes I made in the equipment section. I always have to make changes again after closing the game and opening it. Perhaps this is something that still needs to be implented, not really a bug. But it would be nice if you implented it someday.
-The camera stood still a few times after jumping from a wall. Usually the game fixed this if I jumped into the camera again, but sometimes the camera stayed on top of the screen and my character became invisible.

A bad point I would like to mention is that the actual fun part of the fighting, building up massive combo´s, kinda gets ruined by the fact that most of the enemies are not hindered by getting hit and will slash you in mid-combo. Also, you often pass by them while performing a combo so that they will stab you in the back. Because of that, the main and almost only strategy for the game is just "run and gun" and spamming helldrive like an idiot on tougher, boss enemies. Run and gun really isn´t that much fun, so I hope you will make some changes in the fighting engine of the game. Like making enemies fly as fast as you when you hit them, and always make them go in the opposite direction of where they get hit.

Another bad point that I would like to mention is that the menu is very unorganized. There are so many submenu´s everywhere and usually there is only one way to get somewhere. This makes it kinda like a maze and I was a bit lost the first few times I played this. Perhaps it would be better if there were links to all the menu´s at the top or bottom of the screen.

Overall 4 out of 10, 2 out of 5. Because of all the bugs, glitches and the fighting engine kind of ignoring the laws of nature in many ways, the game becomes almost unplayable in my opinion. Therefore I can´t say I really liked it. My advice is to work a bit more on the playability of the game and spend less time on artwork. I prefer a game that plays well over a game that only looks nice. Hope you´ll improve this game one day, because it does have a lot of potential.

~Auz

[Get Off My Planet]

Too much defending

I think it was a good game, but not the most fun defence game I´ve ever played. Graphicwise it was all really good and the backgroundmusic was awesome in my opinion. That Ben Leffler guy did a really good job here. The whole idea of invading a planet and keep it from aliens who attack from all sides was quite interesting too, especially the way how that concept was put into this game.

But the bad point of this game was that I was constantly busy with defending, even on nooblet diffeculty. After a while I barely had money and time to do anything else because the waves just kept coming and it was hard to keep my head above the water. In the end I usually lost the game because of too few powerplants. And the bad part with that was that buildings got more expensive as you bought more of them. So I needed to get like 1800 cash for one more powerplant, which was way too expensive.

So what I suggest is that the buildings do not start to cost more as you buy more of them. Just have them have a fixed price. I think that will take away the "constantly keeping your head above the water"-thing.

Also I think I found a bug in the game. When I lost and started over, sometimes I was unable to build the base city. It just didn´t show up when I moved my mouse over the planet, so I had to restart the game. You might wanna take another look at that.

Overall 8 out of 10, 4 out of 5. The diffeculty of the game ruined it a bit for me to be honest. Still it was good and well made and fairly enjoyable too. I do hope you´re gonna make a few more adjustments, this could really be one of the best defence games on newgrounds.

~Auz

[Boxhead: More Rooms]

Very addicting and fun

It´s a really addicting game, and a lot of fun too. I could really play this game for hours without getting bored. Getting killed after a long game was kinda dissapointing though, so that´s when I usually felt like quiting.

But anyways, I think it´s a really good game. The score system was very good in my opinion. It´s fun that after a while you get thousands and thousands of points by just shooting one zombie. Yet it was still diffecult to get your score up to 10,000,000 points. Often I could hardly imagine I got such a small amount of points after a long game. It was also nice that you needed to make combos to get upgrades, although after the fastfire shotgun with max damage and 80 ammo most of the upgrades didn´t matter much anymore. That was really the best weapon in the game I think. Rocket Launchers and all that shit were way to dangerous to use when the field got crowded and the Rail Gun was kinda dissapointing.

There´s not much to improve about this game, except that I would´ve liked some backgroundmusic I think. Sure, I can turn on music of my own but that doesn´t mix very well with gun and explosion sounds. Also I kinda disliked the fact that if you were close to one of those devil creatures and they started throwing fireballs, it was hard to get out of their combo and that was usually the way I got killed. That was kinda frustrating.

Overall 9 out of 10, 5 out of 5. Really good game, I really liked it. Added it to my favorites. I haven´t played any of the other Boxhead games yet, except the Zombie Wars I think. But I liked this one better to be honest. But anyway, keep up the excellent work and I hope to see some more of these.

~Auz

[Floor of Irritation]

Nice timewaster

A nice little time-waster game. The idea behind it isn´t very original, seen plenty of games like this. But it was well made, and deffinatly a good version of it. This one was very challenging too. The levels were quite diffecult even early on and sometimes I noticed it was better to just run instead of standing still to think.

I thought the lay-out was especially good. I liked the digital text, which gave it kind of a high-tech feel. The password system was also a good idea, better than a save function in my opinion cause I lose those files all the time when clearing up my internet files. The music was okay in my opinion. It was kinda on the edge of not getting on my nerves, so perhaps it could´ve been better.

As for what to improve: Well, I think the game is fine as it is now, but you could always add some stuff to make it more interesting. It would perhaps be nice for example if there was a death counter somewhere or/and a timer. Those might give it more replay value as players might start to try and beat their old scores. What could also be nice is certain upgrades. Like being able to move faster/slow down time, stuff like that. Those kind of things always make a game more interesting.

Overall 7 out of 10, 3 out of 5. Nice little timewaster like I said. Did get a little bored with it after a while, but oh well. Anyways, if you keep going like this I´m sure it won´t take long before you win your first trophies.

~Auz

AntoArts-Admin responds:

I don't know if upgrades would really work...

A death counter is planned (if I make a sequel), but you gave me an idea, a personal high scores list.

I shall add a mute button

[Willy Wonka Soundboard]

Good for a soundboard

Not such a big fan of sound boards, but this was fairly good one. Agreed that the older movie was better than the new one. Although the newer one was better visually, it had a lot of weird scenes and dialogue. So I´m glad you used sounds of the older one.

The lay-out was made fairly well in my opinion. It looked nice and colorful and everything was easy to find and read. The sounds were of a very good quality which is a must in case of soundboards. It was just a bit strange however that some of the sounds were implented twice. Contract had the same lines at the end as You Lose, same goes for Scratch and Reverse and Contract and Chocolate. Perhaps you should´ve just split these up, especially Chocolate since that one was incredibly long.

By the way, I also missed the Umpa Lumpa song, would be nice if you added that somewhere.

Overall 6 out of 10, 3 out of 5. It was good for a soundboard. Did actually enjoy listening to it as it brought back memories from the movie which I last saw a looong time ago. Keep up the good work.

~Auz

Frenzy responds:

Awesome, thanks for the long review Auz! And about the sounds that appear twice, they are there so you can listen to part of the clip instead of the whole thing, since you can't fast forward through clips. Thanks again

~ Z

[More Avoidance!]

Nothing too special indeed

Indeed there is not much special in this game, if you can even call it that way. The scripting that you used is interesting and I suppose it all works well, but everything looks quite ugly in my opinion. You should really work on your drawing skills. Try out some drawing tutorials. And if you can´t draw, then use sprites or something. They´re easy to use and usually look nice.

I thought the music you added was good, I kinda liked the tune. But I believe it is poorly optimised looking at the file size. I suggest you go find a tutorial on how to optimise music, there are plenty of them on NG I believe. You can easily cut the filesize in four and barely lose any quality.

I also experienced a lot of lag on the first screen, even on low quality. You might not wanna add so many of those circles and stuff on one screen.

Overall 4 out of 10, 2 out of 5. The actionscript worked well as I said, but playing around with it in this game quickly got boring. So I´d like to see you turn this into an actual game. If you focus on your drawing skills, then I think you could be able to produce something nice.

~Auz

therealmoomoomoomoo responds:

I will never be able to draw well m'afraid... I guess using sprites is a pretty good idea, and yeah... The first screen does lag a bit for some people it seems, even though it doesn't for me... And i didn't even know about optimising music, i will make sure i do that in future creations. :p TY for the review.