MLScherbatov's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[SaveOppy]

you should let us move before we click the battery... i was sitting there mashing wasd for like 2 minutes straight while looking directly at the thing, thinking ur game didnt work.
light is broken, half the time the screen is just pitch black whether i have my flashlight on or not
i like the concept but its bugging out and its kind of a chore trying to navigate when my light is just going out for no reason at full battery. i can understand it dimming due to the weather or something but i can barely see a thing. when i walk into a shadowy area, shining a light on it should make it brighter, the shadows here in most places are just completely impervious to light

edit: its better, but it should still never be pitch black while we have the flashlight on

YellowB responds:

Ok, I've made a update and this should improve some of the stuff you've mentioned - you still need to click the battery to be able to move, but you don't have to wait for the text to tell you so it can be really fast; and the dark areas of the storm should hopefully be more readable - hope it helps:)

[Ka-Million]

carrying things on the turtle shell really doesnt work. u cant tell whether its about to snap forwards to follow u or fall off the back
mole shouldnt have to move so slowly imo, er in general it seems like all of them have troubles just not wanting to move sometimes.
the control tips are way too large and intrusive, i cant see like half the screen lol... this isnt a big deal until the digging gets more complicated, but for level 12 im crippled. i just cant see what im doing.
ive been stuck on level 13 forever now. any tips????
anyways pretty good puzzles, i understand u had limited time

[Fall of Darkarus]

settings menu doesnt open in the home base, only during battle

despite a lot of unresponsive/unfinished aspects of the game, it does play pretty smoothly.
after breaking darkarus's base, my units just kept standing there attacking nothing, or walked off the edge of the screen. maybe try to find a way to let them switch lanes in an event like this? cus it doesnt really make sense for that guy to just walk through 12 units while they ignore him lol

items and loot dont seem to do anything or go anywhere.

anyways, id probably play more of this if it were completed. keep up the good work

[E-Elementals]

mute button is kinda strangely placed. i didnt realize there was one for a while. maybe just let us press M to toggle.

i agree that the movement is a problem. we just dont seem to even move at a consistent rate while on the ground and its very slow. sometimes the horizontal movement seems completely unresponsive, yet im able to jump and move in the air just fine. you just need to turn the acceleration up higher while on the ground and lower on ice imo

you should let us press any key to skip through dialogue. i keep trying to click to do it instead of spacebar.

we should be able to just place and remove blocks at will. we arent using any of these keys for different actions when we switch build mode on or off, im not sure what the point of it is other than just something we have to toggle for no reason lol. if you insist on keeping it this way, you should just give us a simple button to toggle it instead of having to click the bar at the top and then press down to cancel it. for instance, boxes could be 1, and later tools would be 2,3,4,5, etc, like switching weapons in a shooter game. as far as i can see, there really is no reason to have a mode where nothing is equipped. for the unequip button though, i think left shift is more comfortable than s or down

the more that i play this the more i like it, but the controls and movement need a lot of work. for instance at the 2nd acid pit, where i have to bounce a block and then jump on it, its really difficult to land properly because i have to account for the time it takes to actually start moving

in its current state, i dont think you should give us a 3 life limit. its just too easy to fall or to mess small things up due to the weirdly paced movement, and the game is not a particularly fast one so i really dont like having to redo a level

"press the s key or the down key to pick up blocks"
when i saw that sign, it was not at all clear to me that i was supposed to throw the block through the purple barrier. perhaps give us a little bit clearer of a tutorial here, because i was ready to go back through the whole level to see if i missed a switch. this is especially a problem because you never taught us to heat up our blocks prior to this, but every other puzzle has pretty much been fed to us. maybe this spot could benefit from the protagonist saying something, like they did with the lifts.

when we freeze water using ice, that block is impossible to get back

wall climbing is a bit wonky. we shouldnt automatically jump upwards when we let go, and theres no button to just drop off, so when we need to descend it becomes quite a chore

we need to have more control while on top of ice blocks. i immediately died 3x within seconds during the laser + ice puzzle because the slightest tap sends me flying but i have to move to add new blocks. i am able to get past it by now but its an incredibly unforgiving puzzle even when i know what to do

EDIT:

ive tried placing ice blocks underneath him, he just crushes them. occasionally id see his foot turn a lighter shade for a second but it didnt seem to have any effect. ill try it again.
also i deleted a few erroneous things i wrote originally lolol (i was just writing this as i played along).
yeah, placing the ice then attacking worked just fine. :)

i think i missed the x key because it only works while build mode is closed.

novusGem responds:

I greatly appreciate the detailed review!!!

I'm aware that the movement is a common issue, so I'll definitely change it in a future update.

Your feedback about the spawning system makes a lot of sense. I really like your idea about using hotkeys for the toolbar. The reason for the toggle on/off for spawn mode is because I didn't want the spawn image to stay on the screen all the time. The spawning radius was a design choice, and is used for future puzzles in later chapters. If I changed the radius, I would have to redesign many puzzles. Anyways, I'll look to see what I can do to make that system better.

There is already a button to recall/restore any blocks you've spawned. If you press the 'X' key, you will destroy all of the blocks you've created, and gain energy back. When it comes to freezing water using ice and not being able to get the block back, that was intentional. The ice blocks energy is used for freezing the water. Even so, I understand why it might be annoying. Maybe I'll just have the ice revert back to water when attempting to restore that block.

The laser/ice puzzle is definitely difficult if you attempt to pass it using only one or two ice blocks. But, if you spawn a large number of ice blocks as a small bridge, it becomes very easy.

As for Magnus, I described how to defeat him in another comment. Basically, you just need to place ice blocks under his arms as he attacks.

[Hybreeder]

more expensive animals seem to not really generate any more money than the cheap ones.
game ends up just being a process of clicking on a huge blob of body parts but not selling all of them so u can keep breeding them. i dont exactly dislike these aspects (i dont mind justpaying more for more options, but i think they should be valuable too). music is nice
its not that the game isnt enjoyable, but it seems to fall short of its potential

id suggest adding notifications for the quests so that we dont have to go to the menu to check on them, then adding a little picture in the corner of what is required

[Home System]

seems really interesting. i really did not like the movement during the maze portions though. i understand maybe it was supposed to be metaphorical but i found it really tedious that we were just outright not able to move a lot of the time. making the movement keys take us in different directions is fine/challenging, but for the character to not even move for 20 consecutive keystrokes is a bit much imo.

[Gods' Fall - Ascension of High Kings]

there appears to be no sound.
i suggest that you just let us click to attack with our guardian. pressing shift is weird, especially when we are already aiming with the mouse
i should not have to upgrade my gold just to be able to afford the first worker unit. it takes my guardian like 10 minutes to kill an enemy castle but it appears that i will not be able to build any other units? this is seriously imbalanced

GabrielBalas responds:

Well, as was said in the description, there's no sound yet. About the guardian, you just need to hit CTRL to toggle the auto-shoot function of the guardian (you can see this in the description and tutorial). And about the troops, i really didn't understand what are you talking about. But to build units that you have unlocked you just need to click it during the battle. If you don't have it unlocked yet you just need to unlock it in the 'Troops Level' page. Hope I have cleared all your doubts, thank you for the feedback.

[Home *BLEEP* Home]

took me a while to accomplish anything, but i got it. it seems like it ends just as im starting to get the hang of it, though. great art and sound
i wish the text speed was a littttle bit faster though, also theres a few glitches: i can walk through the wall in the doorway, and some of the text doesnt fit on the screen all the way
i hope you make some more of this/ a sequel or maybe games about other characters in the same scenario but at other houses etc, or maybe just have the player continue to interact with/escape the AI outdoors as well

[Furious Road Surfer]

runs very poorly, its nearly impossible to pick up upgrades because the frame rate is so low that the car just appears in the middle, left, or right of the road, there is absolutely 0 fluidity to the movement. upgrades are outrageously expensive, and are labeled incorrectly (i have 400 dollars, the best car says it costs $200.000 which is 200 dollars. in english/in america we use commas instead of periods, so what you need to write instead is "200,000"

[Doorways - Demo Edition]

frame rate is a little weird, terrain seems to be a little wiggly
its hard to tell whats a platform and whats the background sometimes. maybe consider just making the background stuff a few shades darker?
music is cool, graphics are fun
jumping and movement seems smooth
wall jumping doesnt really work though, its way too tedious to get up even the first wall jumping area in the 2nd level