TheWanderingShadow's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Con 10 Sedi]

It's a charming and clever take on the theme, but it's a bit like an uninteresting whack-a-mole game.

[Pull the Wire]

It can be a little *too* difficult to distinguish the wires in the later levels, and it would have been nice to see a few different groups of people surrounding the bomb defuser, but it's an interesting idea pulled off pretty well within the time constraints.

JokerDenFromMR responds:

I wanted to make different people but had not time.

[Stick War 2]

DAMN THOSE ARCHERS!

But in all seriousness, the archers are definitely overpowered. It's not possible to beat them on hard mode when they don't have to stop to fire. While I like the more straight up RTS mechanics, I also certainly miss dropping the ability to take personal control of a unit. I also miss not having to micromanage miners, I wish they would start out mining so I could send them to pray if I needed to. I think it's fine that the speartons have been nerfed, as long as the archers are less overpowered. The game's still great, though. I'll have fun playing through on normal difficulty.

[Ode To Pixel Days]

It is a well written, well designed game. I can say I was touched by the story and enjoyed the clever way it was implemented with the shrinking mechanic. However, I'm not so ready with my praises.

The game falls under the same category as Braid and Dys4ia, in that it does not give the player a chance to easily experience the emotions of the story for themselves. Instead, the story is spoonfed to them through narration. The player has to either personally relate with the story or have a strong sense of empathy to really be affected by the story. It is arguably more important for the game mechanics to reflect or inspire the emotions that the plot intends to evoke, and I just don't really feel like this game did it too well. The final puzzle and confrontation was the worst case of this. The gameplay during that level was just jarring and didn't mesh with the powerful themes that the game was throwing at me while I played through it.

It is possible to have your game tell a story through gameplay instead of words (Limbo didn't need words, did it?), and I feel that is often more effective. There can be a balance between the two (The Company of Myself did this well, especially in one moment), where the gameplay fully reflects the narration, and I see a bit of it here. But it's done a little ham-handedly most of the time, such as Hans stomping on his own "ugliness", and the other times the puzzles don't really correspond to the story.

Let me reiterate, I enjoyed this game. The puzzles are well designed, the writing is clever and humorous at the right times, and I genuinely liked the story. But the the narration is so present and the game so linear, that I feel this leans a more towards interactive story than an actual game.

I hope my review doesn't offend, and I hope you continue making games in the future! :)

talhakaya responds:

thank you for your very thoughtful comment. I can easily say that I agree, sadly. I'm trying to find better ways of incorporating the story to gameplay for my future games. I'm not really fine with the puzzles in this game, it still feels like forced challenges to me, not very much to do with story at all. I've tried my best to actually give some meanings to the puzzles through narration, yet it's not enough.

I don't think Limbo had a proper story, it was too vague for my taste, even though it's a fantastic game. It just didn't need a proper story to back the game. Like QUBE. If you want a proper story told without words, look out for the upcoming game, Monochroma. Although it's early to tell, I think they will do it well.

Company of Myself did storytelling perfectly. Hotline Miami did pretty good. I hope I'll do it good one day, I'm definitely working on it. Thanks a lot for the very kind comment, glad you enjoyed the game :)

[Go Farm IV]

This game is more boring than Farmville, and that's saying something. There's no save feature, the tutorial is strangely cut off and incomplete, and the gameplay is boring and pointless as heck. The only thing that would make this somewhat interesting would be if the animation and art was fun to look at, and that is nonexistent. I see very little redeeming value to this game. Perhaps next time.

[Mad Princess]

To draw an unnecessary comparison, it feels like an extremely watered down version of Orcs must die, which is by no means a bad thing. The premise is amusing, and I absolutely adore the sound and art design. I'm not against uncomplicated games, but when each item serves such a single-minded purpose and each level is such a small area, the game feels so simple that it becomes a little boring to play.
That said, each item *does* serve its purpose well, making the game feel very tightly designed. Each level, small and standard as it was, was clearly built with a specific purpose in mind, and made good use of the limited elements in the game. All in all, a pretty good game.

[Halloween Beatdown]

Kudos for making a flash game with a relatively complex combat system that actually feels satisfying to play! And on a technical side, it runs beautifully, and way more smoothly than it should on my old computer. How do you do that thing where you rasterize your vector graphics?

For some criticism, the difficulty is a bit high. By the third level, I had to rely on running around with the fighter aura on to survive. It would also be nice to have another button for regular combat like the guy below me said (like last year). Also, both the gameplay and the music gets a little repetitive rather quickly.

Minor complaints aside, it's an amazing game, and deserves more much more attention than it has.

[Madness: Project Nexus (Classic)]

Gosh, even knowing how to kill the GO3LMs doesn't help when they telegraph their melee attacks so little!

But anyways, this is still an amazing game. It amazes me that it's well built enough to actually run on my computer, however laggy. And there's nothing better than tearing through crowds just like a Madness character.

[FreeRunning Anarchy]

Certainly impressive for a 2 week project. The colors are a little strange, but it gives it a nice "old painting" look, though I'm not sure if that was the intended effect. The jump controls were a little stiff, but what little controls there were came naturally. It might not really be freerunning, but it's a cool concept nevertheless. The level design did a good job of using the mechanics. I hope to see you guys develop this further!