Wastelander's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[goodbye, doggy]

He's a good boy.

[Boombox 2]

Still lots of room for improvement

Well, my first thought about your game was: Either you intended the game to run totally sluggish for some artistic reason, or you weren't able to optimize it enough even though the graphics are below average. Worst of all, there even isn't any obvious way to lower the graphics quality. I then lowered the quality via the flash context menu which was completely unaltered and thus allowed myriad ways to mess up the game completely.
Furthermore, even on "low quality", the game runs extremely slow, whilst, as already mentioned, providing mediocre graphics at best. And that's not even taking into account that a puzzle game doesn't need ANY nifty visuals to be good.

Which leads me to the game itself. Well, the idea isn't too unoriginal, but there are some design decisions which I simply can't understand. First and foremost, BOTH the control options have serious flaws. While the keyboard controls suffer from AND add to the overall slowness of the gameplay, the mouse controls are inaccurate due to the lack of a "helper line/beam" which would show where your block is to land.
Also, I found the lack of a true combo system pretty disappointing. Instead of letting "unaffected" blocks drop, um, "up" onto the rest of the stack, they simply disappear. This, IMO, leads to a pretty flat gameplay and disencourages any planning-ahead.

Overall, most of these issues are such serious fun-killers, they also killed more than half the rating score for a game that, even without those issues, wouldn't have gotten more than a 7. After all, it still is only a "match X" puzzle game which doesn't provide anything that exceeds this concept, f.e. some kind of meta-game.

In conclusion I'd like to soften my harsh-sounding review by honestly saying: I see a lot of potential, but it's not used as of yet.

Wishing you success in your future game developing career!

Best regards
~W

[Knights of Rock]

Interesting idea

As the title suggests, I find your idea interesting. The concept of combining a rythm-game with action-packed animations reminds me of Donkey Kong Jungle Beat which I found very fun to play.

BUT that was not as much the case with your game. The most annoying thing about playing the game was the combination of fast moving symbols and low framerates, which was the biggest - if not the only - challenge in getting the rythms right. On top of that, the symbols seemed a bit off-beat to me, which was probably a result of the low framerate. As a long-time player of the fluidly animated DDR arcade-machines and O2JAM, this was very hard to get used to.

Apart from that, I also had wished a bit of actual interactivity in the background animation, for example your character getting wounded when missing a symbol. After all, this resulted in the animation being just a distracting background.

Lastly, the music didn't fit my taste at the very least, although I am a fan of fast-paced rock and heavy metal. That however is just a matter of taste.

Still, this was one of the more innovative and interesting submissions I saw recently and after all, if it motivated me to write my first review in a long time, it had to be at least decent, somehow. :P

All my regards and keep improving as you do.

~Wasty

[Core Salvage]

Great game!!

Okay - the main concept of the game isn't original. But what you made out of the old concept is simply great!

- Great graphics
- Great comic strip storyline
- Great variation of the known game concept of keeping the ball inside the screen boundaries

All in all, I give this 5/5 and 10/10 (which is VERY rare) because of its innovative game concept (though not being 100% original), beautiful graphics and the overall professional appearance. This game's quality is higher than that of most commercial titles out there!

Regards
~Wasty

Youdagames responds:

Thanks Wasty,

You are absolutely right it isn't 100% original. But nowadays it seems that every console developer has left the good old 2d style graphics. But there was still so much good stuuf to be made in that field. We believe in exploring those 2d area were the concole developers have abandoned them.
That why we enjoy the work of Tom on the Consoles. He is also a strong beiever in 2d, And So might i say are we!

[reaction time]

I love reaction-games

Yeah, cool game, hang on to this idea. I think this would be really fun with more levels, more enemies and perhaps a storyline and a few cut scenes ;)

Regards,
~Wasty

Phantasmagor01 responds:

Again to let you know. this was just for science i will be realeasing a more full version with heaps of stuff later!

[BurnIn]

Not bad

It's better than any game I have made up until now, and at least you finished it... ;)

But of course there is plenty of room for improvements. I found the handling a bit strange and the adrenalengine-thingy didn't make any sense imo, 'cause the car doesn't steer faster, it just is slower.

[De-Animator]

Very good!

Great job!

I love H.P. Lovecraft's stories and it was very cool to see a flash game based on one of them! By only showing the silhouettes of the undeads, you also adapted Lovecraft's technique of only giving limited information to the reader (in your case the player) and thus making the 'horror' exist more in the imagination of the player than in the bare depiction of itself.

Regards
~Wasty

[Newgrounds SIM v 1.2]

Not bad...

... but I really think this is overrated.
The idea surely is good and you made a good game out of it. But still it is IMHO not half as motivating or thrilling as games like Motherload, Stick RPG or Starfighter. I hop though, that this game survives the first hype.

Regards
~Wasty

[Orbox]

GREAT!

Hi!

I really like this kind of game. It reminds me of the days when I was VERY young, playing those old games on the Commodore64 where you had to place mirrors and other gadgets to get a laser beam to be reflected into the goal from a certain direction.

Your game was very challenging and I played it through completely. It was really fun and there's not very much you could change to make it better except for some catching background tune.

Perhaps you'd also like to check out my game project Beyond Fallout. Just search a topic by author "Wastelander" and you'll find it immediately. But beware, it's very complex and even more UNFINISHED! ;)

Regards
~Wasty

GameBalance responds:

I have a look at your game. It's so UNFINISHED that it's not a game :)

[Metal Freaks Xtreme]

Nice game

One of the better DDR/Donkey Konga-Style games on NG, but PLEASE make the buttons remappable ASAP, because I think I'm not the only person who lives in a place where y/x/c/v doesn't work properly.

Anyway, why didn't you use 1/2/3/4 in the first place?

Regards

~Wasty