Auz's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Sonny]

Unbalanced

I thought the game was great. It was put together very well and with the ability tree and all there was quite some dept in the gameplay. Graphics were also very nice and the music was great too. Voice-acting was also good in most cases. only the smaller roles were permormed a bit less sometimes but that was alright.

The only bad thing I´d like to state is that the game was a little bit unbalanced. The ship had the right difficulty, but in zone 2 I could completely whipe the floor with most enemies as soon as I had flame strike, which was easy to get since it only required level 5. Even the boss at the end of the zone barely gave any difficulty and was defeated easily.

Then in the next zone I had great trouble defeating golums. As soon as they had enraged on, it was a certain kill on Veradux and heavy damage on me. Earth-equipment did not protect me from this as not many of their attacks were actually earth elemental. On top of that, I was wearing stuff that I thought was better so I did not want to change armor.

Another thing is that I was suddenly facing enemies with about 700+ HP. It was very annoying that most of them could heal and they used it often (usually at least twice every battle). This made the battles drag on for a long time, even though it was already clear that I was gonna win. You can imagine that after I while I got a pretty bored with the battles. It wasn´t about strategy or skill anymore, it became more like an endurance contest.

So what I would suggest for your next game: More balance in the game. Make the enemies slowly get stronger and have less of them have healing abilities. Also, make users have access to really powerful moves later in the game. Flame Strike was just overpowered in zone 2 and still very effective in zone 3 (it was the only attack that I used actually since my other attacks were about twice as weak).

Overall 9 out of 10, 5 out of 5. The unbalanced thing is the only reason why I did not gave this a 10/10. I still thought it was an awesome game and I do hope to see more of these. Keep up the excellent work.

~Auz

[Poker Challenge]

Pretty bad

This wasn´t a bad game in my opinion. It´s one of those typical time-killer games, which I usually find quite fun to play.

What I didn´t really like was the lay-out of the cards. For some reason I just didn´t liked the colors that you used. On top of that, I think you should make it easier to see the suits of the cards. The game went a little too fast to actually pay attention to them, so I was usually only going for three of a kinds and sometimes made bigger hands by luck.

I think you should also make the game go a little bit slower, since I usually couldn´t last for a minute and bombs did not really help that much either. Perhaps they should blow up more cards or something and make time freeze for a little bit longer.

What would also be nice is some background tune. Adding some music is always good. I would go for some simple, relaxing tune personally. The sounds you have added were good by the way.

Overall 7 out of 10, 3 out of 5. I thought this game had a good idea behind it, but it could´ve been made better. Try to improve it a bit and we might have an award winner here.

~Auz

[Twisted Tennis]

Fun

You really couldn´t have chosen a worser day to upload this than clockday :p I see this game got heavily overlooked now with only 7 reviews and less than 2,000 views. I think it would´ve easily won an award and gained a lot more attention if you had picked any other day.

The game itself was really good in my opinion. It plays really well and is very easy to learn. It´s good that you could adjust the controls, although the default controls were fine as they were already. It´s also nice that you could get those power shots by hitting stuff on the background. Added an interesting little element to the game and the small cutscenes that occured simply made it fun. Also liked the music, reminded me a bit of the summer vacation somehow.

As for the bad parts, the only thing was that I experienced some lagging every now and again. Fortunaly you added a quality adjustment button so that I could get rid of it for the most part. But my only complaint left would be that I wasn´t able to change it during gameplay and there wasn´t a back to menu button as far as I could see. You might wanna add one of those if you´re still gonna make that sequel.

Overall 9 out of 10, 5 out of 5. This game is simply a lot of fun, can´t say anything else about it really. I hope that sequel will get some more attention, because it really deserves that. Keep up the excellent work.

~Auz

[Battle Gear]

Good, but many bugs and dislikes

The good things are that the graphics are pretty good. Everything looked nice and I especially liked the explosive effects, they seemed a bit spritey. The save option was also great since the game was quite long, so that was very handy. I also liked the addition of hot keys, especially the ones to scroll around the battlefield were really useful.

There are quite a few bad points I would like to mention and I´ve decided to list them since otherwise the review would become a little hard to follow.

Dislikes:
1) There are just too many things to upgrade, and in the end it didn´t even seem to matter that much anymore what you upgraded and what not. Usually I just clicked whatever seemed good, but I did not experience any serious improvements during battles to be honest. I´d say try to keep it more simple.
2) Planes flying into eachother was kinda lame. I think about 90% of my aircrafts crashed that way and often it were a bunch of cheap helicopters that destroyed my expensive bombers.
3) The music got a little annoying after a while, especially during the longer battles. I suggest adding more tracks and perhaps different tracks for different types of areas.
4) The troops and buildings slot wasn´t very well organised. It was a complete mess after a while and I had diffeculty in finding the units I wanted to upgrade. There should be an option to organize those slots. Along with that I thought it was quite hard to see which units are actually my strongest ones.
5) Later on it became pretty much impossible to destroy the enemy base. With like over a million health, I rarely got close to destroying the enemy base. Killing all the units was far easier, but gave you less experience.
6) Just a small point. I was able to buy boats quickly, but only got to use them very late (when I could already buy medium ships if I remember it well). I don´t know if this is any different for China and USSR campaigns, but perhaps you should alter this for different campaigns then.

Bugs (note: I took the American campaign):
1) At level 23, most of the boats I bought were constantly firing at something outside of the screen. Some of the enemy boats were also firing outside of the screen and only the small boats actually seemed to shoot at other boats. The battle took forever this way and the most efficient way to kill the enemy was to buy loads of strikes.
2) Bomber airplanes often didn´t seemed to do anything. In their first flight they bombed but then they only flew over and only served as a distraction or to fly into enemy planes. A bit of a shame since they are the most expensive ones.
3) At level 20 or so, my base was suddenly in the middle of the screen, the enemy base was gone and if I put stuff on my base it appeared somewhere in midair on the left side of the screen. My base did lose life though when it was hit in the middle of the screen.
4) Enemy rockets flew all the way from their base to my base which kept causing damage. Not that it mattered cause they were never even close to destroying my base, but still I doubt that was intentional.
5) At later levels, enemies didn´t seem to have any timers at all. They just constantly spawned new stuff. This did cause me to lose a level once, an aircraft only level, and this was mainly caused by a combination of this point and point 2 of the dislikes.
6) Because of points 5 of the bugs, the gamed lagged a lot later on in the game. Lag is always an annoyance, so I suggest you do something about the enemy timer.

What I could personally conclude is that pretty much all of these bugs occured at the later parts of the game. In the beginning I really didn´t have any trouble, but it became worse and worse after level 15 or so.

Overall 7 out of 10, 3 out of 5. Even with all the bugs and dislikes, I must say that I did still enjoy the game. The battles were quite fun and it became quite addicting. I do hope you fix some of the bugs and do increase on some of the dislikes. I think it would´ve won daily first without all of them. Anyway, keep up the good work and hope to see more games from you soon.

~Auz

[Warfare: 1917]

Good game

It´s a good game. The graphics, sounds, gameplay and all that stuff are well made and implented. What I especially found a good thing was that the game did not have that many different units and just a few upgrades which did not seem to play a major roll in the game anyway. This kept the game nice and simple and made a good strategy in the field far more important than buying the right upgrades.

The bad part was that the game was rather short and quite easy as well. There aren´t that many levels, about 10 or so if I counted well and with the right strategy and a bit of luck you could finish every level within 5 minutes. Even the last level was a piece of cake actually. Just a tank, a few man and a gas attack was all that I needed.

Overall 8 out of 10, 4 out of 5. Would´ve given even higher if only it was longer and a bit more diffecult. Other than that it was enjoyable and a nice time killer. Keep up the good work.

~Auz

[Castle Clout]

Quite enjoyable

This was a fairly good game.

The graphics were pretty nice, except the castle could´ve looked a bit better. But on the other hand it must be hard to make a castle look realistic when it gets destroyed, so I guess it was okay to make it as simple as you did here. The sounds were also nice, but I really missed some background music here. Some good music can make it a lot more interesting you know, the silence gets boring after a while.

Another problem I had with this game is that it starts to lag easily. The game itself started to lag a bit at times, which was still okay. But as soon as there was anything else moving on my screen, such as an animated add, it started to lag a lot. This especially became annoying when I was about to swing another ball to their castle. Happened to me pretty often that I thought the game didn´t respond and pressed it again and my ball was dropped. Or that the catapult was already swinging back so that I also had to drop my ball.

Overall 7 out of 10, 3 out of 5. The game was quite enjoyable and I did kill some time with it. Nice that it also had a high score list by the way, gave it some more replay value. Anyways, try to improve on the stuff I mentioned above and keep up the good work.

~Auz

[Pointless Platformer]

Simple and entertaining

At first I wasn´t expecting much of the game. You´ll probably agree with me that it doesn´t have great, mindblowing graphics and it all looked a bit unproffesional to me. But it was suprisingly entertaining I must say and it kept me amused until the end of the game. All those things you wrote at the background were lots of fun to read and I think that´s why this game kept my attention. The music was a bit weird, but a nice tune still. I think it suited the game well.

As for what to improve. I can´t think of much personally. I mean, sure the graphics aren´t good, but improving on them would only make the game worse I think. There are only a few minor glitches, like I was able to stand halfway in certain platforms and when I hit the ceiling it seemed like I was floating for a while. These weren´t big problems though and I don´t think they really need to be fixed.

Overall 8 out of 10, 4 out of 5. I guess this game proves that games don´t need awesome graphics and great gameplay to be entertaining. It was very simple and yet a lot of fun too play. I´m glad to see that a lot of other NG´ers agreed with me and gave you a daily second award. Congrats with that, and keep up the excellent work.

~Auz

[factory balls]

Nice

Interesting game. Required some thinking, but wasn´t too complicated. The lay-out was decent, but there´s still some room for improvement there. The music was alright too.

I think the game should have a few more features though. The only game mode right now was: Just see how far you can get. And since the balls weren´t picked randomly, you can beat the game in just a few tries since you´ll remember what to do in each level by then.

I think it would be nice if there was some sort of score system. I think time-based would be alright, you could make it something like you need to create 20 balls as fast as possible. Also, you could make a game mode were you have a certain amount of time to create 20 balls and the amount of points you get is equal to the amount of time you had left. If the timer runs out it´s game over. Kinda like a survival mode. Or, you could do something with the amount of steps needed to create 20 balls.

As you can see, there would be a lot of ways to add a score system in this game and it would certainly give the game some more replay value.

Overall 9 out of 10, 5 out of 5. All in all it was a nice game, been a while since I last played a good puzzle game like this. Keep up the good work.

~Auz

[Space Wing]

Pretty good

I thought it was nicely made, although I've seen better versions of this game. The music was a bit typical for these sort of games, but it was nice. The graphics were okay too, but I´m not a big fan of things that are build out of 3D-shapes. What I liked a lot was the experience, HP and MP system which made it feel a bit like an RPG. What I did not really understand was those 2x, 3x etc. that appeared above those green things sometimes. It probably was a multiplier for your points but I did not know how to increase or decrease that multiplier. It just seemed random to me =/

As for the bad parts; The first thing that annoyed me was the white stripes in the background. In the beginning it looked a lot like enemy fire to me, so I kept trying to dodge it and then I found out it didn't do any damage if I got hit by it. It seems like I'm not the only one who got confused there, looking at the review below me. I suggest you turn them into dots or something instead.

Secondly, later on in the game the field got a lot busier which made the game lag a lot. I don´t know if there´s anything you can do about it, but if you can please do.

And last, I think stage 6 was supposed to be the final boss battle, right? This guy had WAY too much HP in my opinion. I was kept firing at him for ±15 minutes and got his HP down to about 55% I think =/ And it wasn´t even diffecult to dodge his attacks, even after he went through his attack pattern 3 times I still had about 80% of my own HP left. The most diffecult part there was actually to have that much patience and I guess I do not have that cause I decided to let myself die.

Then I found a bug, after I got myself killed the game just continued... The boss kept firing, the screen still moved, but my ship was gone and nothing happened. You might want to take another look at that.

Overall 7 out of 10, 3 out of 5. I think it was a nice timewaster and I kinda enjoyed it until the last boss. It could use a bit more improvement though. Perhaps you should take a lot at RaidenX to get some further ideas for this game.

~Auz

CLOUND responds:

Thanks and sorry about that.
those 2x 3x are score multiplier for item (not xp pts) If you move yourself to the enemy fire close enough, it will increase and it will decrease over time or getting hit
Maybe I should reduce the last boss's HP??

[Hedgehog Launch]

Great game!

It´s a great game, it´s quite addicting and lots of fun to play. Graphics are good and the music is pretty awesome. The story behind "trying to launch a hedgehog into space" was kind of funny too.

But what I think this game misses is a free-mode in which you can´t launch yourself into space, can fly as many times as you want and can get as high as you can. I think trying to gain a large amount of money in one run is more fun than actually trying to beat the game. You could make it so that money is changed into points after you have bought all the updates and you can compete for a high rank in a highscore list. In that highscore list you can implent many seperate lists such as: "highest amount of total points in one run", "highest elevation", "longest runtime" etc. Just an idea/suggestion.

Overall 9 out of 10, 5 out of 5. I had lots of fun with it like I said, but I really don´t like beating the game. It forces me to start all over again which makes it kinda feel like a game over :( I hope you´ll add those features I suggested. Keep up the excellent work.

~Auz

jmtb02 responds:

Thanks for the lengthy review! Will definitely think of free-play mode in the next version. Thanks!

-J