MLScherbatov's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Stealth Sniper 2]

these loading times are insane. i understand that sometimes flash games can be demanding on the ol processor, but this is ridiculous. when i tried to zoom in, it starts asking me to disable my mouse, and i can barely get more than a few fps in the first place, nor is my cursor even on the screen. and besides that, are these just counterstrike skins? this is just slapped together...

[10 Seconds]

what are the controls??? there is no explanation and all that happens is the triangle moves to the right of the screen and it says ive lost

ParkerBurns responds:

Use the mouse, click/hold. Sorry about that.

[Diseviled]

this is pretty great so far. as many other reviews mentioned, we need a block or dodge function, and tbh i found that until we acquired the fireball, the combat had pretty much nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with spamming attack and relying on the checkpoints. once we have the fireball, it's extremely simple to kill everything the second u see it on the edge of the screen.

i died like 10 times easily on the first level, and yet i still got a an A+. even with every coin collected and every enemy killed, this doesnt add up. if i averaged the scores up (A+A+ B+ A+) to create a GPA out of 4 points, i got a 3.25. that's a B+, not an A+. it's good to make the player feel rewarded and whatnot, but the fact that i can get what is essentially a 100% completion while still having only achieved 3 out of 4 points irked me.

gripping ledges is unreliable. it seems that some of the time the player defies physics and just keeps moving upwards in order to reach the ledge, whereas at other times it's well within reach and the player falls. i suggest either adding a grip button or reverting to the conventional platformer style where we can freely jump up walls and slide down them slowly.

the floor mounted spinning sword trap is totally bugged. i stop moving when i get close to it, so my jumps will only go directly upwards. basically this means that as soon as im hit once, it doesnt matter what i do - i just die. this didnt happen every single time, but the one on the first level seemed to be really bad about it.

the dialogue was great. very snarky. animation was nice as well, and it was very clear what was an enemy and what was not.

i can be knocked back by a bat, an arrow, and even my own attacks??? that doesnt really make any sense and can make getting all those tokens very frustrating

overall, you've got a great game here, but it's held back by all these bugs and strange issues. i hope to see more like this in the future, but a lot more polished and debugged.

[Mr. Splibox: The Christmas Story]

i appreciate the animation and character design in this series, but the gameplay is unwieldy and inconsistently paced, and im 99% sure ive heard a lot of this music before. there is too much delay on creating and picking up the spliboxes for the timers to be this short, and the first few levels were not in any way exciting or entertaining enough for me to be interested in playing it further. the puzzles are extremely simple and the only difficulty lies in managing the inefficacious controls or navigating poor level design. i quit at level 5 and i dont feel any motivation to come back to this because on top of my other criticisms it seems that the interaction with ivan in this level is completely broken. i finally got past him after about 20 tries, but without any kind of a jump function whatsoever and when i can only sit one block above him, the level in general is just overly frustrating.

[Fish Story]

this is cool but it is most definitely miscategorized. this is a skill/avoid/collect game. this is not an rpg lol. the game itself is pretty good tho. good sound and visuals, lots of different fish - it didnt really make sense that the seahorses hurt us, though. they looked pretty friendly. it was also unclear which plants were obstacles. this is an ok game but it got boring very fast and it really needs some kind of a change of pace to keep the player interested. you also lack a pause button which is no good given how long it takes to clear the levels.

BLHull responds:

it does take a while to clear the levels- a minute or two, but in lieu of a pause there is a continue feature, so you can always pick up at the last chapter where you left off. i was trying to make kind of a relaxing sea journey because i love everything about the ocean, but i agree it came out a little slower paced than i intended.

As far as the plants only the ones that move are dangerous- if you sea a loose plant floating around avoid it !

[GENEMON]

pretty cool, easy to learn, nice sound and graphics.
i really wish we could assign hotkeys to genemon so we could more easily switch between them. the fact that the game was so fast paced and that we had to stop spawning for a second in order to swap meant that basically there was no point to creating the 2nd tier at all, and it still seemed like the new units had little benefit besides the visual appeal. it really seemed like everything but tier 1 spamming was a waste of time because a few flies could easily defeat any tier 2 or 3 genemon for much cheaper.

anyways, i look forward to the sequel/updated version. great work

[Halfling Tycoon]

you have some serious issues with the marketplace once the numbers get bigger. i beat all the quests or w/e and got most things maxed out, but towards the last plantation upgrade i started to lose huge sums of money trading. i double and triple checked to make sure i wasnt just making a mistake, but i think there is an issue where if i click the buy/sell buttons too rapidly it sometimes takes the payment and doesnt give me the right number of goods in return. for instance, i was at 3.4x10^11 and bought the max amount of stone at 20. i waited like 30 seconds and the price went up to 50, but when i sold all of it i was left with like 7x10^9 instead of more than doubling my money like i should have. that's absolutely outrageous given the amount of time it takes to save up for the later upgrades.

also i really think you need to rehaul the conquests. every single boss has a move they do every 10 seconds or so that instantly kills every unit on the screen, no matter how well upgraded they are. the fighting wasnt even moderately balanced. it was just a repetitive process of sending in 10 guys at a time so they could do a little damage and then die. srsly i invested like 90 trillion dollars in upgrading the spearmen. i should think that they'd actually make a difference when the payoff is only a few thousand at the end of the fight.

this is cool, and overall it's well made and engaging, but it's really tedious and when i run into errors like this in a game where literally the only reward i get at the end is a slightly higher number flashing on my screen. i hope you understand how unacceptable it is for me to lose 3/4 of my money in 30 seconds due to a glitch when literally the only reason im here is to make that number higher.

i completed the last mission but it doesnt give me any notification about it. i have all the rare items and still dont have the achievement nor has anything popped up and told me i won or anything. overall i feel that this game kind of trails off towards the finish line. i hope i dont sound overly critical, but i spent all day playing this only to get proverbially kicked in the nuts right when i thought i was about to beat it. its a good game, but you really really need to work on a few things

[PLUMBER'S CREED]

the concept is great, and the art and music are very clean. i strongly dislike the delay for the attacks, though. jumping on their heads really doesnt work on the majority of enemies, (sometimes because i think they were supposed to be jump proof, and sometimes it really seemed like it was just glitching) so 5 seconds seems really excessive as the cooldown on our basic attack. i could understand a delay on the mines, but all you've done by forcing us to wait for the knife is just that. we have to sit and hide somewhere for 5 seconds until we can start playing the game again. why???? lol at least reduce it to 2 or 3 seconds. it was always on cooldown when i needed it.

it's unclear which boxes and buildings actually provide a barrier. multiple times now i've jumped over a building and had projectiles follow through the walls and kill me on the other side. also the mines sometimes blow up without dealing any damage.

i felt like level 8 was extremely difficult but the final level only took me one attempt. maybe consider going over it again to give it a bit more of a climax?

anyways tho. this was a fun game. good work

[Cap'n Currin's Adventure]

what are the pros and cons of choosing different ships? i cant see how much money i have while selecting them, and it seems like everything is so cheap that ive got plenty of extra money to stock up crew/cannons. i see this is leading into some kind of a story, but the game itself is incredibly lacking.
"you encounter the east empire trading company" ok??? so.... are we going to interact with them in any way or are we just gonna see the same sentence every time? ive got a big ass ship with big guns and a pretty large crew, so why is there no option to either trade with them or rob them? there's gotta be a little bit more depth if all we're looking at is a static background of waves. when we run into black sails, it seems that the result is 100% random. after the first few encounters, there wasnt even a battle anymore. i just go back to town immediately. i finally got the "you hear a roar in the distance. are you prepared to fight?" but again nothing happened whatsoever and i just went back to town again.

its unclear to me whether im supposed to be doing anything in particular because i just see the same few results every time i go sailing and there seems to be no more dialogue which might direct me to the supposed treasure. i must have just clicked "go sailing" a few hundred times now and literally the only thing that happens is every once in a while a crew member dies or i find some gold. a grind like that can be an important part of a game, but when there are no upgrades and no awards to collect, i have no motivation to play. im literally just looking at two motionless screens and switching back and forth between their respective songs once every 2 seconds.
idk what the previous reviewer meant about the controls, because there are literally no controls to speak of other than clicking GO SAILING and TOWN. i dont even have to move my cursor for the vast majority of the game.
this just needs more meat on it at every turn. are we going somewhere? are we making some kind of progress? what is the backstory? how did we decide to start sailing? if we arent pirates, then why the hell are we just sailing around aimlessly with no goal in mind? there is no profit motive. the only time im gaining anything whatsoever is when gold randomly appears on my ship, and the only things i can spend that on appear to have no bearing on the game whatsoever.
if there were some kind of a goal set like "you need your ship to be bigger so u can fight assbeard", or for the player to gradually find pieces of the map and/or visit new areas with different people to talk to, then this grind would sort of make sense, but there's nothing. 2 guys talk about a treasure map and tear it in half, and then there is no more story for the entire game. with no development of enemies or environment, how am i to know that this isnt just a pointless clicker game?
as far as i can tell there are 0 signs of anything happening at all and ive clicked and clicked enough that i have well over 100 cannons and 100 crew. they still do absolutely nothing and the game is still exactly the same. this is just a huge waste of time with a teaser at the beginning that makes it seem like there is a point.

[From Sprout to Splendor]

this is really hard at first but once you get to the first growth there is 0 challenge. i feel like it should be the opposite of that. i seriously dont have to even click anything once i get a few upgrades. it's calming and happy tho, and the graphics/music are nicely done. i also had the issue where the game was unresponsive to input, but it worked after i refreshed the page.
you should really think about adding at least a menu/title page so that we arent thrown into it and unable to pause.
i feel that this was more of a glorified animation than a game especially since there really is no viable strategy besides getting ants and then thorns but once you have those two you basically cant die. it was enjoyable and i understand it was a ludum dare but i would love to see an update or sequel with a little more meat on it's bones

Xevozfighter responds:

Thank you for the input. We will probably add a title screen, pause menu, and balance updates after the Ludum Dare judging is over. We only had about and hour left after we got everything implemented to play test it and tweak some of the numbers.