JimGiant's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[SPACE INVADERS (beta)]

Nice re-imagining of a classic. There are a few ways it could be improved though.

The original had barriers and I think this could benefit from them too since it seems impossible to dodge everything at the beginning of a new level.

Found a minor bug. If you press x when you're dead it still plays the shooting sound.

Would be nice to have continuous fire, mute buttons, menu screen and leaderboards.

[Overgrowth]

I love the recoil mechanic, not the first time I've seen it but still cool. Nice and atmospheric too. Needs a lot more content though, it's all a bit too simple and samey.

[Catch Me If You Can!]

Unity 3rd person flying collect/avoid game with Up/down/left/right and boost button... Where have I seen that before?

I think you've got the start of something good here and the art is absolutely fantastic, I also really like that you have a split screen mode but it needs a single player mode and or online mode IMO. Some sounds and music would add a LOT to the game. The arrow is a bit all over the place and I believe the concept is copywrited by Saga. It could do with more options too, vertical or horizontal split, different rule variations, different control methods, views etc.

There's a lot more I could say but I repeat you do have the start of something good so I hope you keep working at it.

[Wondrous Lands]

Solid 4.5 Stars by NG standards. Had a lot of fun with this one but that being said it's not without fault:

1. A couple of times loading stopped before fights and I had to reload the page. Perhaps some form of detection for this and reload attempt?

2. Could do with a few quality buttons, faster world map speed etc. I did find it just a tad slow at times.

3. Could do with more shop/inventory options. Organise shop items by price, Sell all, lock item, quality indication colours etc.

4. Got in to a wizard duel when I only had healing/silencing skills and the fight never ended so I had to reload. Could do with a forfeit button, countdown timer or perhaps mages attacking with melee when no damage spells and is alone.

5. Interrupting gameplay to tell me Vorag is trying to escape puts on pressure in a way I didn't like. I don't know if you get a gameover if you're too slow but I didn't want to find out and this put me off from exploration. You're generally better off rewarding players for playing how you want them to rather than punishing/pressuring them for not. Good talk on this subject here: watch?v=7L8vAGGitr8

6. Axes chop, they don't slash and broad curved "sabres" are very poor thrusters/piercers. Probably not an issue to anyone who isn't a HEMA enthusiast but if you are things like this are disappointing. If I was to modify the engine I'd have weapons with multiple damage types do different amounts. For example you could have Rapiers do 100% piercing but 50% slashing, sabers 100% slashing but 50% piercing for example and show the weaker percentage.

7. I wish it was longer and you earned things which could be carried over to the next game.

DLord2 responds:

Thank you for very detailed feedback!

Bugs that you've mentioned (points 1 and 4) should be fixed in the next update. We'll consider the quality of life changes as well if we'll get spare resources.
Update: I made fix and published the update.

[Fish Eat Grow Big]

Fun for a few plays. Would be cool if the camera zoomed out, collisions only counted when small collides with big's mouth and there was some basic AI rather than enemies just swimming back and forth.

RHMGames responds:

Thank you for your suggestions. Zoom can be added as a tool. It may vary depending on demand.

[Metropolis Lux Obscura [Preview]]

The build seems poorly optimised for WebGL, took quite a while to load and after several attempts. Given the ratio of how long it took getting the game to work vs short the game is I had to take off a full star.

Stripping the engine code and asynchronous loading might help things somewhat without compromising quality if it hasn't been done already. Would be cool to have a fullscreen button as well and it's very easy to implement.

Other than that I love it, not many NG games draw me in to the story and the world like this and I love the Sin City aesthetic. Combining match 3 with combat certainly isn't unique but I haven't seen it often enough to be bored with it and it was well executed.

How long is the full game?

abadonna responds:

Thanks! Yep, it was a quick build without any special optimisation for web.
Full version is also pretty short - maybe 2 hours. But we hope it provides a solid and complete gaming experience.

[Mutant Snake]

Fun and addictive for a few games, that's worth 3 stars. I like the art style, the silhouettes look really nice but I kinda wish there was more to it, upgrades, new levels etc.

Also I don't know why all Unity games don't have a fullscreen button, it's trivially easy to implement:
Screen.fullScreen = !Screen.fullScreen;

[Castle Run]

You have the foundations of something pretty cool but in it's current state I can't give it more than 2.5 stars.

The score sign looks really nice but it takes up too much of the screen.
The character moves too slowly left to right.
A leaderboard would give people an incentive to keep playing, I can help you with that if you want.
Fog is too close to the camera.
More variability and detail in the scenes would improve the game a lot.

It's a good start though, with more work I think you could make it a 4 star game.

[Madness Accelerant]

Heath font is ugly especially considering how much care was taken with the rest of the game. Could do with a mute and pause button too. Apart from that it's awesomme.

TomFulp responds:

The health font is actually ugly because it didn't export the font I was using on my end. I really need to update that, I just get scared to because that file was having some serious corruption issues, I suppose due to how much was packed into it - I get nervous about exporting a new version that no longer works right.