Monkius's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Tiny Escape- Forest]

Yiss, a webgame that's worth playing! It's been awhile, especially on Newgrounds... The combination of movement puzzles and crafting is a neat idea; I think the "movement" part would benefit from a grid-based system, though. On level 4, it looks like there is enough vertical space between the stump near where the character starts and some tall grass, but actually it's a weird half-space and the player ends up screwing themselves over and having to restart. Small bit of needless frustration.

It's also not very apparent that the "?" menu scrolls, at first. I clued in when I realised that "gathering" was slightly cut off, but it would still be worth it to add in a scroll bar.

I'm currently stuck on level 4; I somehow ended up with just one single shovel-strike too few to complete the level. Argh! I'll come back to it. Probably.

But yeah! In spite of the minor flaws here and there, great job on this game, d00ds!

DarkryCZ responds:

Thank you very much! :)
I'm working on a mobile release and I am still fixing up some of the bugs and flaws, so I hope I will repair as many as them. In some levels the "mid-space" is intentional, but I fixed many of these spaces after the release.
I am still comming up with changes, so your review is very helpful :)

[Spooky Music Machine]

Haha, cool! When I was playing around with this, I inadvertently discovered that sound effects people (very probably) achieved that classic "whoop-whoop-whoop-wheeep" sound of a cartoon character fleeing the scene with an "unduloid" pattern on a theremin.

KittyhawkMontrose responds:

Yup, they most definitely did. It's quite an interesting instrument, esp the real one. I'm glad you enjoyed it!

[Space Tower Defense 2]

Leaving aside the absurdity of a maze in space, this game is amazing. There is a strategic element to the turrets and the enemy wave difficulty ramps up nicely. There is also a good "winging it" element, once you figure out your strategy. As someone who enjoys planning a little bit, but gets burnt out with too much of it, this scheme is perfect for me. The "wave health" bar is a nice, subtle touch (as is hovering over towers to see info on them, instead of having to click.)

I like that the game pauses when you place a tower. This way, you can leave the enemies on "warp speed" when you have just barely not enough defense. Then, place a tower in just the right spot and get rid of the rest of them.

There was a weird problem with lag when I had it set to the highest speed, from wave 40-something. It had nothing to do with my hardware, either, since CPU and GPU utilisation were at 10% and 5%, respectively. Enemies were also showing up where they shouldn't be (on top of towers and outside of the maze.) The game got sort of boring after that, but I played through to wave 75 before deciding to quit.

Still, this makes me want to try making a tower defense game for programming practice, even if it takes me hundreds of hours... Probably won't be anywhere near as good as this game, either, since you seem to have been at it for 3 years.

Wombart responds:

Thank you for the feedback, really appreciate it, help me a lot !

I also was bored around the wave 50 since the player supposedly have all the upgrades, so I cut the total wave number from 100 to 50, better keep the game shorter than leaving the player with a feeling of being bored with the game

I am aware about the highest speed issues where the enemies start to "teleport", I think it's because of the low frame rate after the wave 40.
I didn't find a good solution so I just reduced the highest speed from x4 to x3

I worked on this project "only" for the past two month but yeah this is the first game I have published in 3 years :p

[Shard Cavern]

AAH! Don't ever blink! You'll get hit by an ice shard :/

Priddygood, mm hmm heeh.

TsucchiDev responds:

Hahaha bet you did!

[DinoZ City]

Jump key doesn't work for me

RHMGames responds:

Upss, sorry! We wrote the key information wrong. Now we have fixed it. Thank you for your notification.

[Lobster Clicker 2.0]

Ah, yes. Good ole Lobster Clicker.

Right off the bat, the "windowed"/in-browser mode had cropping issues and the music--great choice, "Still Alive" is one of my favourites--was really loud. As in turn-my-earphones-down-to-4%-volume loud. I eventually muted it; a separate music mute button would be nice, since I see you've kept the obnoxious air horns from the last iteration. Going to full screen fixed the cropping issues. If I click and hold, the red number below the lobster goes up, but the score does not. Intentional? The red numbers also get cut off once they reach a certain amount both on the lobster screen and on the battle screen (enemy lobster health.) After a while, I left the battle screen and came back to see that my lobster had died. But I can still attack the enemy lobster and even get it into negative health, lmao.

The click effects are great. It's hilarious that you're reiterating this game and this one is as fun, silly and weird as I remember the last one being, in spite of all the glitches/bugs/errors. In fact, the glitches sort of add to the sense of "this game does not take itself too seriously" that one gets while playing, while at the same time not affecting gameplay.

EpicNarwhal responds:

Thanks for the genuine review!!! I kinda just made this game to be obnoxious and weird so I'm glad to see someone shares my awful tastes and enjoyment of terrible game design!!!
Edit: I went back to play the version I posted on NG, the WebGL build was giving me issues and the glitches are way worse in this version, It's a work in progress I guess...

[Red Skull Reef]

Buttons for "pause" and "next wave" would have been a nice luxury, but even without them it still wasn't terribly frantic.

There isn't any sort of data on the towers or attacking ships; that's okay though, because strategically, you can ignore the outer two forts and use the island space for spamming treasure chests. Then, build a bunch of skulls on the middle track. I got to wave 40 on my second run through with this strategy. Nothing too complicated, but a fun game for a few dozen minutes; certainly beats the hell out of most of the other games available for free.

RobotRage responds:

Thanks for the feedback! I do agree that Next wave and pause could have been a nice addition. Regarding the outer towers, balance was definitely an issue, i didn't want to debuff the towers too much so as to make you loose instantly upon loosing one so i decided to lean for a smaller debuff. (maybe not enough penalty)

[A Grim Chase]

Lol, the "save bunny" level (third ending) was a proper pain in the ass. But in a good, "wow, what a clever puzzle game" sort of way.

I can't figure out ending #1; I thought it may have been getting the thief with a purple skull on level 20 while they are splitting up, but after like 20 attempts--if this is the solution, you have to time it reeeeally tightly--I think it finally touched him and did nothing, so I gave up. The solution is probably something really simple and obvious, but a short "endings walkthrough" may have been a good addition for the completionists among us.

Rambling aside, great game and great puzzles!

jronn responds:

I'm glad you enjoyed it. As for the ending #1, it's definitively less obvious and harder to find than the other two, and does require a bit of tempo (nothing close to pixel precision / ms timing though). You were on the right track, but purple skulls will only hurt purple zombies.

***Spoiler*** solution: https://imgur.com/a/eTO6fiY

[ANIMEMOS]

I got really annoyed with it until I took the advice in the author comments and played easy mode. Maybe just have everything but easy mode greyed out at the beginning and the harder modes can unlock as you progress.

Really cool how it jumps back and forth to try and throw you for a loop. It almost did on hard mode, but I made it through with 1/3 hearts/lives. "Super hard" was just hopeless, lol; it certainly lives up to its name. Especially difficult on "counting sheep."

It wasn't immediately obvious what I had to do in each level when I started on medium, but I'm sure this could be solved by the greying out of everything but easy at first. If not, maybe some succinct descriptions like "watch the line order" instead of a title like "waiting line." Other levels, like "jump order" had this already.

xmatos responds:

Thanks. I thought about it, but I didn't want to make the player have to restart from the easy mode, in case they played the game in a later day(it doesn't saves progress), but I could've make it more clear that easy is recommended, maybe I'll add something, thanks again!

[SPACE IS HAPPENING]

Got 0 first time around;
76 on the second.

I think it would be nicer if the score were more out of the way in a corner or something. As it stands it freaked me out a little the first time I moved the "dot" over the score, since it is the same colour as the line I'm trying to avoid.

That's a minor gripe though and probably doesn't bother everyone... Fun game, though! Oh, and a pause button would have been good. As I write this, the dot is just getting crushed over and over and all I hear is BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. Lol

ROCoGames responds:

That's the highest score I've heard so far. Thanks for the feedback i'm glad you had a bit of fun with it :P