gameworm's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Labyrinth - Can you reach the end?]

This needs a lot more before you can call it a proper game.
First of all, it needs some music. Even if you improve the game you won't get good ratings without any music. It is really easy to cheat by either right-clicking, or just holding down the mouse button and dragging the cursor to the end. Maze-games are done before and there are plenty of ways to cheat-proof your game. I haven't done any research on maze games myself but maybe you could try to make it so a line between your new cursor-place and your old cursor-place can't touch any walls.
The game doesn't look good either. The shapes are too simple and static mazes get boring quickly.
I'm not saying it's a bad game, I'm just saying it's nowhere near finished at this point. Try not to rush the game just to submit it.

[FlapyBlock]

This seems like a pretty typical flappy bird clone, but it has an important flaw. As it is the character 'flaps' when you let go of the up-key. It should flap on keydown, not keyup.
The music is kinda bad and flappy bird is a bit overdone. The graphics are good enough for a flappy bird game. I also noticed a small bug were the game starts before your first jump, but I can't reproduce it whenever I want, so I'm not sure when it happens.

[MikaLand]

It's super short, the noise when you beat a level is very annoying and loud, the graphics are just pictures. Still, I don't get all the zero bombing. All levels are passable, you just need to drop off a ledge to flip yourself so you fit. The idea is actually not bad, just kinda poorly executed.

[Greetings from Potato Island]

Gee, I wonder WHY his house needed renovating.
Good as always, this one seemed to have better puzzles then your other games. I liked it.
Good job!

[Midnight Hunter]

Nice game. Usually I don't like these kind of games because they involve so much grinding, but I felt like I was able to get cash at a fair rate in this game. The missions were often luck-based, but that didn't matter too much since they could be bought out. Too bad you don't unlock anything after killing the boss, like another character or some fancy upgrade.The music is great, the graphics are great, and I actually like the mouse controls. Good job!

[Zombie Society - Dead Detective]

I really enjoyed this game. Good music, nice graphics and an interesting game mechanic. I like how you are able to make deductions. When talking to people there only seem to be a few options which start a conversation, the other options are a standard line for each character. I think it would be better if the characters had lines for every note, even if they amount to nothing in the end. For example, it would make sense for a detective to ask where the people where when the crime happened, so the time note could trigger 'where were you that night?' for every character. This way some characters could have aliases. It would also make sense if notes could be reused with other notes to make other deductions, although this could make things complicated.
Overall it is a great game and I look forward to more games like this in the future.

Muja responds:

Firs of all, thanks a lot for your nice review! :)
Secondly, I think all your suggestions are very good ideas.

The reusable notes is something I thought about, too, but I came to the same conclusion: too complicated. Not only for me, design-wise, but for the players too.

More variety in dialogues and in interrogations, that's certainly something I need to consider.

Thank you for your nice review!

[Traps Tower]

All this effort... to get to a spelling error? lol
Overall the game is great, it has a good difficulty. The main problem I had with the game was the slowdown. Whenever the character 'explodes' (eg spike death) there is some severe lag. I took a break for a while and paused the game. After the break the game felt even slower. Gameplay wise I really liked the game. There were some manouvres that seemed near impossible at first, but you just had to figure how to perform them properly. For example, when there is a sticky wall with two spikes above it leaving only one gap in the middle, you need to jump of the wall without holding left or right, and double jump through the gap. Figuring this out was hard, but I eventually got the hang of it. The music is great for some reason. It gets a little repetitive near the end, but that is probably because the game has decent length.

[Mini Crossword Genius]

It's pretty good, but there is one thing I would like to see in this game. It seems all stages have only 2 words, making it a bit repetetive after a while. I think it would be a lot better if later stages had more words in them (3, 4 or even 5 words?).
Another small thing is the fact that an entire word can be filled out during generation. It would be better if there is a maximum percentage of each word that can be filled out during generation.
Some music would also be nice.
Overall it is a fun and relaxing game which I might revisit every now and then.

[Trueshot]

This is a very good game.
At first I didn't realise it was your first game, that makes it even more amazing.
It reminds me a lot of touhou, the bullet patterns are great. Sadly I didn't see all of them, the sword boss is really hard to me. Maybe I just need some more practice.
The music is also great and fits well.
Overall the game is very good but some things can be improved. A first thing to improve is the hud. As it is now it looks really boring, just some text and numbers floating in space. Use some icons instead of text, for example a heart instead of 'lives'. The enemies seemed a bit weird at first, it feels more like I'm fighting abstract shapes in space. The bosses have a rectangle around them, I think it would look a lot better if you lose the rectangle (visually). The sound changing when a boss is almost dead is a great touch, and using the rectangle to know how much health the boss have seems unnecessary and looks a bit unprofessional.
Overall the graphics can be improved, but the gameplay and music are great. However, a practicemode with unlimited lives (or just a lot of lives) would be great, maybe consider adding one, and make it so the highscores for practice don't get saved.

brokeman11 responds:

Wow, thanks for the detailed critique! I completely agree about the hud, as it stands, anyone who hadn't read the instructions wouldn't have know what half that stuff even was. I'm working on separating user interface from the game area in the next one so I can show more detail w/o cluttering the play area. And the graphics...I'm definitely getting an actual artist to to do that next time. Found out REALLY fast that I'm no artist. Funny thing, I HAD a practice mode; then I scrapped it thinking "no one would want that..." Now I know better, heh. Thanks again for the feedback, it's reviews like this that help us devs (especially newbies like me) get better! Edit: as for that midboss you mentioned, if it's the 4th (last) wave that's giving you trouble, I find it easier to stay in one 'lane' until it's almost vertical, then switch to a lane further to the right. That way, when they're horizontal again, you'll be towards the back of the screen already instead of in the boss's face. Hope that helps!

[Apple Worm]

This game is awesome.