Syrupmasterz's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Robo-butcher]

A fun game!
The main focus seems to be getting to 120 kills in a single life, but after doing so, the game just sort of stops...as my character is able to move around still, but no other hostile robots teleport in to pose a threat and keep the game going.

So reaching that kill limit is sort of goal for the player, but otherwise there is no big pay off, permanent upgrade as a reward, or even a victory screen to commemorate the occasion. haha

There was also a bug that'd keep happening where I'd use the rightclick to dash, and then a save menu opened up that prevented me from moving until I x'd it off, but I'd taken a few hits of damage while I was vulnerable and off screen. So using the dash was risky since I knew there was a 5% chance I'd get in trouble. Only work around was knowing that 'P' for pause would help if I was quick enough to react.

Other than that, I agree with some of the other reviews that the only upgradable stat in the game being health isn't the most exciting, and only having one level and one kill limit without a 'You Win!' screen stops this game from getting full marks.

6/10 as it stands, but with a victory screen, bug fix and a bit more polish, I'd bump my score up to 7.5/10.

Keep at it, you have a fun game here! :)

Pitigamedev responds:

Hi, Syrupmasterz, thank you for your feedback.

You and another user experienced the same issue.
When there are no more enemies on screen, and the kills hit at least 120, the game should go to the Win screen. I'm testing the game right now to reproduce the bug. Maybe it has something to do with the Flying robots going out of the screen.

Anyway I will fix it ASAP

Concerning the Dashing bug, I will try to fix that too.

Thank you so much for your review.

[Aurora]

Super unique colour puzzle!
The issue isn't knowing what colours make what, it's getting your brain working hard enough to figure out the turning of the wheels and getting everything sent where it needs to go. ^^;

Very well executed, and the levels I can beat at this time of night show that everything is mechanically sound, but looking at the other reviews, I think the thing that would help the most people would be a visual representation of a level being solved, in conjunction with the in-world instruction manual made by Sasha / the .txt.

Lots of people learn by looking, and some people enjoy brute forcing solutions until they learn how the system works.

Voice acting wise, it's charming and funny, you just need to speak a tiny bit louder so it comes across more clearly in the microphone. Otherwise, I had fun playing the game. :)

Keep it up! :D

crow-seeds responds:

Thanks for playing :^)

There actually is a video tutorial of the first level being solved! It's only in the description of the game since there were people who genuinely enjoyed the extra challenge of parsing through Sasha's "manual"! I've updated the description to make the tutorial easier to find, might add it in-game. The drawn manual is a reference and parody of those incomprehensible robot or machine manuals you'd find in real life haha.

Might also reupload the video on YouTube since people might have trouble viewing an mp4 file on my website, but anyways, glad you enjoyed :D

[The Fall of The Humans]

A fun little RPG Maker game that's good for a bit more than a half hour of enjoyment. :P

The first couple of battles were a little nerve racking, since the tutorial made it seem like I'd have to use every tool at my disposal to stay alive. It definitely seemed like that at first too! In the first battles where Jose gets targeted constantly, he died right away, and I knew that I'd have to revive him and armor him up quick to stand a chance!

After those two tough battles, the EXP then leveled everyone up past the point of being in the danger zone with all of the extra skills. I then knew how much health all the normal bots had, so afterwards the battles were just a normal attack fest until the bots dropped. haha

Having played and made things with other RPG Maker games, using character class presets and using combat is always tricky, because with short games it's really hard to come up with a good balance to keep it suspenseful while also making sure the game isn't too hard or annoying. Keep at it and you'll find a good way to make it work, I'm sure!

Giving all the player characters a wide array of spells to armor up, but then having all the enemies just using a normal, non-special attack makes all the other stuff seem extra and not required. The hallway sequence with the three sets of robots would be a good place to have introduced a 2nd robot type that would use magic or electricity would make the Sp.Def spells necessary to live, and would also keep players guessing when it was final boss time.

Otherwise, the story just seemed a tiny bit rushed, with characters recapping things to each other that just happened. Nothing that couldn't be fixed with a script revision if you ever revisited this though, and I still had fun. :)

tl;dr
Quick'n fun RPG Maker game, just needs combat rebalancing to keep the tension all throughout. Robots are trying to take over the world after all.

I hope you had a good Robot Day!

[Morbsweeper]

Current High Score:
80%
Time: C - 2:38:49
Best Combo: S - 15

A fun fusion of Morbius and Minesweeper, something I didn't know was ever gonna happen :P

The chaos of trying to get MorbMode while also trying to get a good time score almost always leads to lots of review bombs and restarts, but doing good enough to Morb Out*tm* and get the MorbMode theme is a fun enough reward to keep trying.

Having the ability to change the grid size and the amount of review bombs like in regular minesweeper, or other customizing options/bonuses for gameplay would bump up the score a bit...maybe in the sequel? haha
Otherwise I enjoyed it and had fun!

Thanks for uploading the MorbMode theme as well, it unironically bops.

[tiratore]

A fine game to kill about 15 minutes or so. :)

Interesting concept, with getting to the being to get the goal but a move counter is forcing you to think more cautiously about your steps. Game starts off with easy tutorial levels, then gets a bit more complicated, however, towards the end you relied a little too heavily on the 'shoot a skeleton while it's right beside you' gimmick that the game pretty much turned into only doing that in order to progress.

Larger levels with more possible paths to take and perhaps different colored keys to release different groups of skeletons would bring back the strategy element of the game and get back on track to your 'flight or flight' to save moves mechanics.

Tile based movement seems to read just fine, but the character movement is perhaps a little bit too slow for people playing the game more than once. You could have the character move at the speed they do now if the directional button is clicked once, and is sped up if the player keeps pressing the button, just to make the game faster if a player was trying to get back to a certain level.

Aside from that, a bit more polish and maybe some cutscenes or an intro would be a nice touch. 'Why' does the player only have so many steps per floor? Why are they exploring in there? Why are unsolicited skeleton smooches so undeniably lethal? Inquiring minds wanna know. :P

A couple more songs to choose from would also be a nice touch for people playing the game for a little bit longer than most...

And lastly, the game has no 'Play Again?' button after it's beaten. So I had to exit the page and come back in order to replay it after I beat it. Just little improvements like this would be nice and helpful.

Good start, but there is always room for improvement. Keep it up!

[Tomb Chess]

Rediscovered this game just in time for the Halloween season. :)

I dig this!
Sometimes you get really unlucky with piece placement due to the random nature of this game, but when things are perfectly scattered, the game can get genuinely intense and I find myself actually trying to utilize higher level strategy and long drawn out thoughts about piece sacrifices. haha

Good game!

[I Wanna Be The Magi! V2]

Where's the safety inspector?! Who allowed this library to get built? :P
Not bad, but there are a few issues that kinda take away from the fun factor.

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-The biggest issue is that the jump button doesn't work all of the time. I'll try to jump to the last platform of the second area, I hear the jump sound effect, but then I fall straight into to the abyss.

Same thing happens when I try jumping on the spot. Most of the time it works, but it won't just often enough to cause a pitfall. Since I've no experience in Construct, I don't know how the programming works. However, I can mention the details that cause non-jumps to occur.

-Whenever the character tries to jump from a quick pivot to another direction.
-When trying to jump off a platform moving up and down.
-When trying to jump while running on a platform

-The game is a little bit empty in the sound department, which sort of hurts the atmosphere of the game a little bit. If you wanted there to be no music to help the player focus, then you could add some sound effects to help give the player useful context. Such as...

-A sound effect for a restart back at the beginning, 'cuz BOY did I die a lot. :P
-A sound effect for the fireballs, as they almost blindsided me each time. Just something to act as a 'HEY THINK FAST!', y'know? haha
-Unique sounds for falling or landing on spikes. Something to let you know you made a mistake. Nothing loud of course, as that'd get obnoxious after playing too much.

-Another problem is that I walked into a wall after getting through a section, and then immediately died and restarted. I'm assumed that there might have been a trap that was GOING to come after me, but it hadn't come out of the wall nor was there any indication that something was there. The reason I went to check the wall was because in previous sections I had to go through a fake/hidden corridor to flip a switch, so I felt kinda ripped off.
I know now that there was a fireball that was going to come out, but it should only have killed me if it was launched. A way to fix this would be to have it spawn after reaching the middle of the corridor, as opposed to just coming out of hiding from the wall.

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Just make sure you can smooth out the controls to prevent faultless deaths. Those kinds of deaths are especially frustrating in a platforming game where control is the focus of the game.

Best of luck! : D

[Vaporwave Pinball Soap]

I gave this game a chance after thinking it could be funny, but due to bugs and numerous design issues, I'm not really playing a game. I'm just kind of along for the ride as nothing I do has any impact on the soap.

The bar bounces off areas of the playzone and gradually gets smaller, but it's usually in areas I don't have any control over.

While I have no idea how serious this game was supposed to be, I've made a list of bugs, design problem and suggestion that will hopefully make a much better version if you ever decided to remake this one day.

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-The main issue plaguing this game is that I basically have no control. The soap does it's own thing and just when I think I can hit it with the flippers it fly off to the sides and falls down after one hit. Other times it just hits the bottom of the bumpers and falls right down the middle.

During early game, since the soap is fresh; it is so heavy the flippers can't even lift the soap and hit it up. Instead after any nudge, the soap slides up the flipper platform and drops right down the side. There's no point of me being here, I'm just here for the show.

-The soap respawns at the top whenever it falls down at the bottom of the screen (which is unbelievably common). As the soap is always in a state of frantic rebounding and spinning, it bounces everywhere, but will almost always bounce to the sides and fall down again.

At one point the soap had fallen 15+ times down the sides before I even had a chance to hit it once with the flippers.

-On my second playthrough to see if pretty much everything I noticed at first stayed the same, The bar of soap got fairly small and bounced itself to the far right of the screen and got stuck on his left arm. It started to disintegrate rapidly, which made me think "Oh hey, at least I'll win fast now". Instead the soap got stuck and the game never moved from that point on.

Adding something that respawns the soap after a certain prolonged period of inactivity would stop people from being forced to reload and restart themselves.

-The soap is a force of chaos, bouncing everywhere. In a pinball game that is pretty much the whole point, but due to the design of the playfield, the gaps to fall into are so large the soap spend pretty much most of it's time falling down a re-spawning somewhere at the top. Numerous chains of falling and reappearing before I even get a chance to do anything. Either having the vaporwave man change poses after a drop or changing the area as a whole, the stage needs less space to fall into or at the very least more to keep it in. Otherwise players will never get a chance to actually play in any meaningful capacity.

-After a 10+ chain of not having any input, the second I used the flipper on the soap and it instantly phased through and fell to the bottom, resulting in another long chain of inactivity.
With pinball games, being able to use a functional flipper would be greatly appreciated.

-So much time is just spend staring at the soap with the determined hope that I'll be actually be able to contribute something or be able to actually play, only to find that the soap is pretty much beating the game by itself. I'm pretty much just a spectator watching an un-moving vaporwave man take a shower. Either by a redesign of the playfield or the addition of extra bumpers, anything to keep the soap from falling the minute it appears would make the game worth playing, as opposed to just listening to an 8-bit loop as soap just keeps on falling and reappearing.

-The bumpers don't really bump, they're pretty much just an extra surface for the soap to deflect off of. As well, the bumpers are unevenly spaced in front of the flippers, to the point that they often get in the way of most if not all shots and cause the soap to fall down into the bottom.

-When the soap is pretty much used up, it is unable to be seen. Even with the focus of wanting to actually do anything, my only indication that anything is happening is seeing to soap appear at the top of the guy's head. Maybe instead of having the soap decrease microscopically after each hit; having it decrease in size in numerous stages after a certain amount of hits so the player can continue to see it toward the endgame.

-When you beat the game, all that happens in the soap disappears, the water stops falling and the music shuts off. There is no 'Shower Complete!' sign that shows up, no victory jingle, no animation, no new image...the man doesn't walk off screen happily or anything. I got a metal, but since the game isn't approved yet not even that appeared. I'm just left staring at man in the shower. There isn't a restart button or anything within the game itself to play again, so I'm just clicking the flippers and nothing else happens.

Adding anything to make the end of the game more rewarding will make the game feel more complete and less anticlimactic.

-The vast majority of the 'damage' done to the soap is when it falls onto the vaporwave man's right forearm on the left of the screen. It will keep chipping off from his arm, before eventually getting knocked back and falling into a small hole and falling off the screen. This is the most common occurance in the whole game and the least involved. I just watch this cycle happen 12+ times for 2-3 minutes, then I get to hit the soap once and then get forced to watch it all over again.

Having a funnel that the soap frequently falls into after spawning only adds to the frustration factor, especially once the bar of soap reaches it's smallest sizes. At end game the little soap falls so fast it barely takes any damage anymore as it hits the walls and bumpers, but still keeps landing into the funnel and getting led to the bottom of the pinball area.

Having the funnel lead to the bumpers so it'll be the player's fault if it falls, or doing anything to prevent the funnel from being instant soap death will make it so landing in that area isn't an automatic fall process.

-I could tell that hitting the man's head with the soap contributes to the enlightenment meme stages, but since I have practically no control over the soap I'm pretty sure I'll never be able to fully activate it. The closest I got was when the soap spawned directly on top of his head and kept bouncing directly off of it, resulting in extra hits. To my disappointment the soap pinged off the right when I got extra close, and then pretty much never hit his head again, save for when it spawns on it.

Anything in the name of more control or bumpers can make this game 20x more enjoyable, but I'm only just watching at this point.
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So while you were able to get a functional physics system going, the play zone is definitely going to need to be reworked if players are to actually be able to play.

Good luck. :)

[The Pirates]

After several attempts I was able to get this game to work, for some reason after clicking the instructions menu it makes it impossible for me to click "Play" and start the game.

After switching browsers I got the game to run, where the game was alright. I could move around, switch cannons and fight the ships until I blew up. Unfortunately though, I couldn't get the game to start again afterwards.

I have no clue what is causing these problems, but fixing the menu will make it so people will get a chance to play and enjoy it.

Other than that, the game just needs some polish. Making the menu a bit more lively and perhaps level selection or difficulties could certainly help. As well you could adjust the enemy A.I so they sail in different ways as opposed to always heading directly in a straight line to your ship to try and ram you.

All of that would help to make things more enjoyable.
So I wish you luck, and hope that an upgraded project will result from this. :)

juanman29 responds:

Thanks for the feedback and sorry for the problems, this is my first game and I still have a lot to learn yet.