Gario's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Pixelhate]

Fun, but broken

This is a fun game, but if you figure it out it becomes far too easy. If people figure out to avoid the Firepower upgrade after what is visually the highest level they will keep their quick fire rate, if one collects all the shields that player is essentially invulnerable for the entire level, and every 10,000 pixels (EVERY 10,000 pixels) nets them an extra life... considering there are roughly 80-90k pixels to shoot in the levels past 10, that's a lot of extra tries. After a while one doesn't need to try - just collect shields, avoid FP, and kill oneself if they get too many FP upgrades.

Any one of these very simple changes could make the game viably hard in the later stages. Remove free ships after... say, 100k points (or make it something very difficult to achieve, like every 100k points). Keep one's FP upgrades if one dies (that way for every upgrade they accidentally collect they are cumulatively. punished for). Remove shields after a certain point in the game. Any one of these changes (or any combination, for that matter) will make the game into something that will eventually end.

Otherwise, it was pretty good.

[Epileptic Headsmashing G]

If this is spam...

... then I hope NG gets a lot more.

[Amea]

Awesome game

Well, excellent concepts, great gameplay, awesome music, decent story. It's pretty damn good.

The exposition is a bit painful, at times. The length of the conversations are quite distracting. Short and sweet would've been great, here.

The battles are fun, but a little broken with the shield. The game could go with less of a 'Defend like a mother while hitting with small hits' style battle with the bosses and more of a 'Time your chains right and let loose' style, instead. The latter style is considerably more entertaining and interesting than the former. Removing the ability to strike while defending would add quite a bit of depth to the gameplay, imho.

Otherwise this was an excellent game. Nice work on it.

[UFO adventures]

Ahh... finally have the time to review it.

It's not too bad of a concept for a game. Simple and not quite original, but it works well enough for a casual game to burn a few minutes on. There are a couple of issues that should be addressed, though.

First, the difficulty is far too high for the wrong reasons. The controls are slow by design, so incorporating sections with quick, random movement makes the game rely far too much on luck (Levels 9 & 10 suffer greatly due to this). In fact, I nearly gave up completely on level 9 simply because the pattern was completely random (either that, or the pattern was out of sync, which is just as difficult to discern when the level doesn't have any consistency), and the game simply isn't designed for that type of level. Either give the moving circle a consistent pattern or make it move slower so the player has some time to react. The final level (with the moving platform) can be considered either the easiest or most difficult level in the game, depending on where the platform goes. Theoretically, you could just stay in the same spot for roughly three minutes and beat the level every time, but then it's a chore rather than a fun experience. Take out the random platform and that level would be functional (the chains actually were pretty neat because they were random).

The carryover health is a neat feature, but forcing that sort of game upon the players is cruel, especially since the players do not have an option when it comes to the save feature. Essentially, if the player makes the mistake of rushing through the earlier levels there is no way to recover their work except by restarting the entire game. I like the idea of carryover health, but either give the players more control when it comes to saving (so they can backtrack a little easier, if need be) or allow them the option to run through the game while starting with full every time ('easy' mode, or something). Otherwise people will not be patient enough to experience the game (that's actually why it took me so long to write a proper review).

Gotta say, awesome music choice ;)

The graphics get the job done well enough, but they are a bit... oldschool flash with the glaring gradients. A pixel style (lo or hi-def would work equally well), or perhaps a more filled out vector style would've worked wonders for this game, if possible. Some of the effects are neat (like the shading of the foreground of the 'game over' screen - nice touch), but overall it seems a touch rushed, graphically.

Overall, it's alright, but it needs some fixes to be more accessible to the casual audience. Good luck with any future endeavors.

[Gario and Bario bros]

Heh heh...

There's a little bias going into this review, I'm not gonna lie. It really could be pretty good, though - you have the physics and graphics down. The framerate is unbearable, though, and the lack of sound doesn't help.

Meh, you know what needs to be fixed. Go fix it.

[Big Bad Wolf's Difference]

Waste of time

It's functional (a couple of points for that), but a very basic game that's only designed to try your patience. It looks like something ripped from a highlights comic - not impressive. The video guide is a good idea, but it completely defeats the purpose of this game, so why bother with it?

Try to make something a little more dynamic, next time. We can find this sort of thing anywhere, if we wanted to.