Ralix's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Mech of the dead]

It's quite good, it's an enjoyable game. I especially liked how you can clearly notice the difference when you upgrade your exosuit; it's not just a cosmetic change or minor stat increase. Collecting a ton of XP and seeing the bar animate across several levels was also nice, at the level progression and introducing tougher enemies felt just right.

My main gripe was with entering and leaving the base. You run to the base, to enter you need to press 'V' and 'Enter garage' (meanwhile enemies pile up) and then leave – however, later in the game I almost always died when leaving because I reappeared in the middle of a crowd of enemies.
You should think about ways to make entering/leaving less frustrating (e.g. kill everything in a small radius around you when leaving, teleport to a completely different place, or limit how often you can enter + have safe zone around, or don't have the base at all and add an upgrade screen you can access anywhere).

I don't know why I need to press a separate button to pick items (when moving with WASD and shooting, pressing 'C' means you have to stop moving all the time to grab something).
Couldn't you pick items automatically? Or is there a benefit to *not* picking an item you encounter?

Inside the building, I encountered a couple of bugs. The exosuit was invisible (I only saw the frontal cannons), and enemies were getting pushed through walls as I shot then (which made it quite tedious to finish them off, as I had to run around to different rooms after a shot or two).

Around the screen edges, XP (and enemies sometimes) tended to accumulate out-of-bounds, taunting you but you couldn't pick the XP up as it was out of the range of the magnet.

Thinking about it, I wish there was at least fullscreen mode, because the screen displays so much information there's not enough space for the actual gameplay which feels small and not clear enough (everything in the actual game has a similar colour and blends with the environment, so the more colorful UI also takes away your attention).
It's said by UI designers players can mentally track like about 7 pieces of information at the same time until they start ignoring parts of what you display. Here with all the onscreen numbers – ammo count, material count, wave information, health, minimap, XP and level, collected XP numbers, damage numbers, kill streak… it feels quite crowded.

Bdjskd responds:

Thank you so much for this thorough feedback. And I agree with all the points you have presented, and I have already had most of them written down, but some I havent actually thought to much about.

Base + Zombie sorrounding:
It really is a huge annoyance to have a crowd of zombies around your base, and ready to attack you at once. The next update coming out in the middle of february will be having base build elements. It will be my fouc for the next month. You will be able to add walls, towers, traps, booby traps, explosives and much more.

Pickip up items:
Regarding the fact that you have to stop and pick up items, seems tedious, I totally agree with this point. I dont have any plans on what direction to go with this, that wont alter the players focus from combat to some complex mechanic. But I will look into adding a creative twist, so it fits with the game loop in a more enjoyable way.

Xp around the screen + invisible character:
These are just straight forward bugs that will be fixed with the next update.

Crowded screen:
I really hate how the whole screen is covered in ui, and not enough gameplay. I will be changing the ui to have a dynamic style. Where the ui that is reacted will be shown, where the ui that hasnt been active in 3 secounds, will move out / be hidden. This will put focus on the important stuff, while also giving the player a better overview.

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Again, thank you for taking your time for this feedback. Means alot to me :)

[Level 9 Access]

This is seriously awesome, and a lot of fun! I have nothing but praise.
I kept thinking of various possible improvements, “I wonder if he thought of…” – and yep, you did, every time.

== Gameplay

The gameplay itself is great. A ton of variety, there are several ways to obtain a keycard and progress that are selected randomly. It's always very clearly presented so you're never struggling to figure out what to do to progress. The individual objectives vary greatly in terms from what's required from you, such as “kill enemy”, “destroy stationary objects” but also “platforming with disabled ladders and jump pads” or “rescuing hostages”.
It keeps you on your toes as to what the next crazy thing the objective is going to ask of you.

Around level 7, I started getting the hang of the game and thinking I may have seen it all and now only the level layout will change… and lo and behold, lava.
It seems it went quite fast (not sure if it just stops rising at some point), but I managed to complete the two penultimate levels in time by dropping to the top of the door and grazing the lava a couple of times, so the timer isn't overly strict, which is good.

I really hoped the finale would have something unique… and of course it did, and I loved it.

Masterful work with the game feel, too, all the little impacts, gentle screen shakes, colourful animated text, particle effects and so on.

At first, I struggled to time my shots right when I wanted to kill someone with a gun, and wondered if there was a way to recover health if I'm running low… but soon you'll learn to time your jumps right, and health ultimately isn't as important because the levels don't last as long.

Tape 6 often kept spawning interactable items or high-profile targets underneath the left trampoline, collecting them tended to slow down the pace of the level a bit (since you need to leave the jump pad, but not fall to the pit). So that was the one hiccup in my view.

I'm not sure if you can get the same keycard event twice in a row. I think I saw that (two high-profile targets), but perhaps I simply stood close enough when the next objective spawned and completed it without realizing it.
Either way, it'd be best if you couldn't get the same thing twice in a row, but if it's allowed by any chance, it didn't seem like a widespread issue that could become a big deal.

You even have Newgrounds medals with ingame popups, too!

== Controls

Kudos for using the new input system (or some other smart solution) for controls.
Whenever a developer picks 'Z' as an important key, I always struggle as a Central European with QWERTZ layout (Z and Y swapped), here it seems to be based on the physical key location.
AZERTY users will probably be happy, too – and you can even rebind if that wasn't the case.

But you're still displaying 'Z' key even though I'm technically pressing 'Y' in my keyboard layout.

The arrow key information in Key Binds settings seems needlessly long, and results in tiny font size barely fitting into the button.
Consider just going “Up / Down / Left / Right” or perhaps try icons with actual arrows.

The game doesn't seem to have gamepad support; you could consider that to add the proverbial cherry to the perfect cake.
(At least I think it doesn't, with my Xbox One controller. Movement axis yes, other buttons nope.)

== Sounds and music

They perfectly fit the game.

At this point, let's also appreciate you crediting everyone whose sounds and assets you used, even though in some cases it technically wasn't required.

== Graphics and UI

Let's not forget to mention this.
I love the style, and how consistent everything is. Important objects are clearly highlighted, and impending doom is well-telegraphed. In the Settings, even hovering over the animated menu buttons is fun.

There's rain, a gentle parallax effect on the backgrounds and environments but you can easily distinguish important objects from the backgrounds. The player character has a faint glow around to make this even easier.

When you die, the restart message flashes at you, prompting you to have another go right away.

There are quality-of-life features, like displaying your best time when you retry a level.

The fullscreen button overlaps the keycard count. The other side of the screen seems free if you'd like to avoid this.

If you pause while you're on the game-over screen, the menu appears behind the semi-transparent fader.

== Closing thoughts

Did I mention I quite like the game? I think I did.

It's an amazing game, you've done a terrific job and can certainly be proud.

P.S.: Do you know about Pixel Day next week?
https://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1541117
Since it's been published here and elsewhere before the event, it won't be eligible for the competition, but you can still get added visibility later with the “pixelday2025” tag.

BlueEagle421 responds:

Thanks a ton for your review :)
It was very nice to read it all. I will look into pixel day - sounds interesting.
I'm aware of some of the bugs you mentioned. Some of them are easy to fix, but others are quite complex. The small input button text in settings has something to do with how browsers label keys I think. It looks regular on the PC version.
I will do my best to fix the bugs ;)
Thanks again.
Cheers!

Edit: Thanks a lot for featuring the game!

[Pacific's Journey Legacy: Lost Level]

The opening sequence is visually gorgeous. The main character and her animation, the lava and sparks, and the layered parallax background.

It almost feels like it's a cinematic intro to the game… however, it isn't, really. It's an introductory platforming section which would be okay in itself, but you're also being targeted by sentries quite likely to knock you out of a jump into lava towards instant death, quite soon after starting the game.
You're not very mobile mid-air, and since you occupy a third of the playable height of the screen with lava underneath, it's impossible to effectively dodge anything. The lava sparks are also the same colour as the projectiles harming you which can get lost among them if there's a lot going on.

This section mainly seems to want to get you comfortable with the controls, and teach you about attacking and blocking. But to achieve that, I don't think you need *that* many sentries.

---

The environments in the boss arena are (visually) very plain in comparison, but at least you clearly see what's going on. It was wise to scale the character down.

The combat itself felt a bit weird. Your only way to attack is to slightly graze the boss – by moving closer but not too close to avoid getting hurt. Since the boss is a lot faster than you, it's difficult to time it right. Sometimes you get slammed against a wall and hit multiple times, and it's quite frustrating to have to start from the very beginning of the game, not even from the start of the boss arena.

On the other hand, kudos for designing this many boss phases. That was pretty cool.

The boss phase with the splitting in four with the parts gradually starting shooting projectiles was conceptually the best part, at least to me. But in my experience, it took *an eternity* to get through. The boss is out of reach so you're bouncing the flying tiles towards him, but more than half the time you won't do it right so the tile stops just before the boss. And when you manage to pull the attack off, it knocks off like 1/20 of the total health.
I was in a hurry the morning and genuinely wondered if there was a way to pause the game somehow, because I was already maybe fifteen minutes into the phase and if I died or had to leave sooner, I definitely wouldn't care enough to replay the game from the very beginning again.

This phase is very good, it just mostly could be more lenient with deflecting the tiles and definitely shouldn't have as much health. I had the most trouble with performance during this phase, the game ran quite slowly up until the end of the boss fight.

The final phase felt a bit unnecessary because it seemed like you should have won already.

---

After leaving the boss arena, I understood I should be running away, but didn't know what was chasing me and I stopped midway to consider if I was perhaps meant to investigate first. Soon I saw the rolling rocks and managed to escape with a split second to spare. If I died there (either from the wall of doom or the lava) and was sent to the very beginning of the game after successfully beating the boss, I would be quite annoyed.

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Overall, I believe the demo is nice, has interesting visuals, and the intro and epilogue almost have a cinematic feel to them. But it definitely could use checkpoints (at least entering the cave and leaving, perhaps after the boss splits, too) and better balancing at times (enemies around lava, length of boss phases).
The main mechanic is the attack/block which can also prolong your jumps. As a block and a poor-man's double jump it's awesome, but as an attack it's not very fun to use, but that's what you do for the majority of the game.

Hope that might be useful, and best of luck if you decide to continue development past the demo!

EdgyWedgy responds:

I greatly appreciate the feedback! There is definitely some imbalances and parts that are agreeably frustrating. I was a bit iffy on releasing this old build to the public, fearing that people might see it as too 'scuffed'. But, I may consider going back and make a full fledged game out of it.

[The Block and The Parkour]

There isn't much going on here, unfortunately.

It's a single static level consisting of several platforms going up. You cannot lose by falling, and winning is not as satisfying as it should be (a small fixed text thanking you for playing).

In a game like this one, usually, the screen slowly goes up, falling offscreen kills you, there's some kind of score count and the game tends to be endless and procedurally generated, possibly with checkpoints that change colour scheme, speed up the pace or introduce new element like special platforms.
Not to say it absolutely needs to be like that, you can definitely come up with a ton of different ideas that are as enjoyable, but what you have here right now is somewhat underwhelming.

The art as simple as possible; the level is quite wide even though the entire game takes place in the middle.

I wouldn't mind most of the issues highlighted above if at least the platforming aspects felt good, however, they don't. The gravity is quite slow and if you fall from a great height, the camera has trouble catching up.

And I'm missing two things common in platformers that make the controls feel good – coyote time (accept jump a few fractions of a second after the player leaves a platform), so you can reliably make a jump from the very edges of the platform); and queueing jump (if a player about to land presses the spacebar fractions of a second before falling and touching a platform, trigger the jump instantly as soon as you touch it) so you can chain jumps reliably.
Without it, the controls sometimes feel unresponsive, because you often trigger an action a tiny bit sooner/later and nothing happens.

It's a good start, I simply think it needs a bit more work before it's a game people would enjoy playing for more than twenty seconds.

[Slope Game Xtreme]

It's a good game.
The movement is enjoyable, it's visually appealing, and plays smoothly. There are various obstacles introduced as you go on, and there are even quality-of-life features like marking the spot with your previous record.

But my biggest issue by far is not being able to see where I'm landing. Countless times I missed the ramp or bumped immediately into an obstacle because the ramps are obscured by the ball or the cyan trail behind you.
And since you don't have extra lives or anything, and even the initial area is not a safe zone, missing a jump or bumping into an obstacle is fatal. And after roughly fifteen tries and at least eight early deaths, I sort of lost interest.

Also I initially opened and tried the game on your website on a phone, and while it allows you to start and play and the controls respond to taps, it is definitely not playable that way (you're too fast to react well on a phone, and the launch key still mentions the spacebar).
If it's not meant to be played on a phone, consider showing a warning / disable the game when somebody reaches your website and is not on a desktop computer.

Edit:
Yes, it's genuinely much better now! I played a few rounds, and no death felt “unfair” and I was able to get much further. I updated the rating. Thanks for listening to feedback!

(Also, just in case you didn't know about it, Newgrounds has a built-in achievement/scoreboard system you can use to lure more players in:
https://www.newgrounds.io/
https://github.com/PsychoGoldfishNG/NewgroundsIO-Unity/wiki )

m9think responds:

Thanks for your detailed feedback! I've made some adjustments to improve the gameplay experience based on your comments. Hopefully it feels better now! 😊

[Bonefields]

This is a really fun game, and quite well-polished for a prototype.
I love the gradually expanding ability pool based on abilities you've already collected and all the new enemies introduced along the way.

I would overall increase the size of the UI, the tiny pixel text is hard to read, but the icons are small, too, so I didn't really pay attention to the UI at all with the exception of level-ups and health.

I wrote some comments during my first playthrough, and then my second playthrough contradicts a few points, but it might be useful for you if I keep the first-time player experience up.

FIRST:

I suppose I'm missing some kind of emergency abilities, something to use when you're in a pickle to either escape quickly or clear enemies.

I'm spending most of the game running in circles to control the crowd – the best AoE damage dealer seems to be the poisonous breath, but to use it effectively, I need to get close enough to likely get hurt.

And when I know I'm in danger (low health), or the path is blocked, I can't do much about it (like dash through enemies, temporary invincibility, defend block, a health item marked on the map, manually-triggered powerful attack with a cooldown etc.).
I see "roll" mentioned on the stat screen, so perhaps that's the ability I was missing, just wasn't lucky enough to get.

3:40 minutes

SECOND:

I didn't read the controls properly the first time (I started the game and there's no time to reread stuff during the game) and didn't know about the dash.
It is of course a game-changer, now I can get out through tight spots and avoid being hit by projectiles if I know something unavoidable is coming.
That allowed me to survive much, much longer (11 minutes).

I thought it always seemed better to pick new abilities instead of upgrading the existing ones (five attacks spinning around you is going to deal more damage than three strong spades), but having five strong spades + two sheep made me change my mind.
What do you think about introducing bonuses that might combine two of your abilities? It might bring your replayability from finding cool new combinations.

Forget about wanting an ability to defend myself. I have the dash.
I instead thought it would be really satisfying to dive into the ever-increasing crowd of enemies with a powerful AoE attack and slice a few dozen. But none of my abilities seemed capable of doing that, and with half of the enemies shooting random projectiles, coming close was always a gamble.
So I had to accept I'm never going to out-damage the enemy spawn rate if I can only control the direction of attacks, not frequency. So I ran around, trying to survive as long as I could.

It was becoming somewhat monotonous towards the end. The enemies all walk the same way (no one for example goes towards you along a curve, with a dash, teleporting behind you, slightly faster to force you to treat certain enemies differently). You can't clear or thin the enemy horde too much as I explained above. So you run in circles, chipping off at the edges, and collect radishes from time to time.
I would love it if there was some goal you have to do from time to time, to make you move to a certain spot on the map instead of running clockwise along the edges for five minutes.

And could the chicken do something interesting to help?

---

As you seem new to Newgrounds, note you also have the free option to introduce medals & scoreboards which tend to drive more people to your game – and more importantly for this stage of your project will give you a gauge of how far people get before losing.

That, or "Events" (= custom analytics) can help you prototype and balance.
https://www.newgrounds.io/
https://github.com/PsychoGoldfishNG/NewgroundsIO-Unity/wiki

Thanks for this, and good luck with further development!

rumyoonomicon responds:

Wow. thank you for the playing the game. Tho yeah it really is a prototype and some stuff that is really a QoL that supposedly be there in the first place is missing, I'll have those change be added for the you and other players as well. And yes I'm new to newgrounds. I kinda want to post my game here as well. I'll look up to the links you provided with heartfelt. Thank you! :>

[Pool Smith]

A game about collecting leaves, but unfortunately, the core gameplay mechanic doesn't work most of the time (and that's not an exaggeration). The clicks don't register.
Rarely do I manage to collect a leaf – sometimes I'm lucky, but most of the time I'm walking around a leaf in circles, trying to find a better angle, yet no amount of clicking works.

That's the most important flaw which completely overshadows everything else I could say.
And there are many other potential problems:

– Presentation. Collecting leaves should feel satisfying (the entire game is about it), but when you do collect them, they simply vanish out of existence without a sound, visual effect or anything.

– When the game is over, you cannot ‘Retry’, you can only Quit. Wouldn't you rather want people to play the game again? Furthermore, quitting a web game simply causes the screen to freeze which is almost never a good idea.
‘Return to menu’ would be better, but since there's not much you can do in the menu, ‘Retry’ is the better choice.

– The leaves may land on their edge.

– When the leaves fall outside of the pool, they hover above the ground.

– I would expect the leaves to cause small waves after falling into the pool.

– The water doesn't feel like water, more like a mirror. It's not translucent, you cannot see the bottom of the pool. It's completely solid (but I understand it would be complicated if you couldn't reach the center of the pool where most of the game takes place).

– The reflected parts of the pool in the water look wrong.

– The ‘white’ leaf doesn't look much like a leaf.

– When the protagonist is a capsule (which is perfectly fine), disable the shadow so it's not obvious.

– The UI elements in the game are weirdly stretched, with blurry edges. Check the documentation about 9-slicing, it could help you:
https://docs.unity3d.com/6000.0/Documentation/Manual/sprite/9-slice/9-slicing.html

satovamp responds:

Thank you for the feedback. I am trying to sort some of those issues. The restart only restarts during gameplay which I'm not understanding and something seems to be messing up the colliders for the leaves. The build definitely came out buggier than the solution. I will update it as I fix it. ;-)

[Lightkeeper]

It's definitely a well-made puzzle platformer.
If you created it for a game jam, it's all the more impressive because it actually feels finished. You could add some polish here or there, but there's a beginning, a sense of progression, and a conclusion.

The puzzles are fine. I thought they were harder at the beginning of the game, but it's mostly because it's a similar concept all the way through, so once it all clicks in the underground section, you can repeat the same with multiple colours.
By the end of it, I started feeling like I could use a new puzzle mechanic because the approach stayed the same for the past few rooms – but the game isn't too long for this to be a big deal.

I like how you explain the puzzle mechanics with visual cues, meaning you don't have to show a popup with a wall of text. E.g. when the line crosses a wall, it will play a rejection sound and flash red, when you don't connect the required nodes, they'll let you know with sparks once you reach the finish line.

And separating the lighthouse in an underground and above ground level with the finale at the top is an awesome touch.