ShadowWhoWalks's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[German Tram Simulator]

my favorite author continues to enrich newgrounds with high quality content

[Extinct 2 [Retro Revival]]

The aesthetics feel great, and the multiple layers of mountain gives a good depth of the arena. The dinosaur sprite is very cute, and the color palette made it look almost 3D. I think it looks great, especially if played on a phone.

Some design problems:

You chose very bright colors for the background and the objects, a lot of the things meld into the scenery and it isn't pleasing to look at. I would recommend a different color set, check the 'color wheel' on google and choose opposing colors for backgrounds and game object

The dinosaur moves too slow in contrast with its size. A more appropriate movespeed would be 5x ~ 7x its width per second.

Objects spawn too close to each other. A minimum distance of 0.5x each object's width is recommended.

Other than that, I'm looking forward to checking out that source code. I have no idea you coded this, I think it'd be great to learn.

Happy Pixel Day!

RobbieSkater responds:

Awesome response, was intended for mobile but I'm not quite there yet. I coded the whole thing through DOM html elements w/ JS. I didn't use canvas, it was more to learn general front end html design and teach myself the concepts behind looping and runtime game engines.

Hoping to work in either unity and or swift in the near future for more detailed projects.

[World's End Chapter 2]

This game, man, this game.
Chapter one destroyed my many nights with its innovative challenges and map mechanics, and chapter two did not disappoint.

I carried my flawless save over, worried that it might've made the game more trivial, but nope! Still hard! I restarted many battles and saves in order to 100% clear chapter 2 as well. I can't imagine what it would've been like if I started fresh new - without the massive gold and exp advantage.

The game's difficulty spiked to its hardest right out of the prison segment - Episode six is perhaps the hardest, the officer and grenadiers were incredibly difficult, especially as I tried to pull a flawless run. I was expecting some kind of height advantage against downhill units, but there really weren't much, so my party was shot into a beehive before they got to position.

The difficulty died down again when I received the extra party members in chapter 8, enrage, mockery and lewd glance is overpowered - even against the final boss.

My only suggestion to this amazing game - is to offer a re-spec option.

I think a lot of players might play themselves into a corner if they didn't learn some of the essential disabling skills. For instance, I spent 90 skill points getting Casimir's plague dart, and I really regretted doing that after a while.

Please continue this great series!

[Super OpenWorld Retro RPG]

I laughed and then cried
why must you trample upon my hopes and dreams, friend?
I can't even criticize the game in response because it was made shitty on purpose.

[Job Search Simulator]

the dishwasher job didn't require 3 years of experience, not realistic enough 7.5/10

also there shouldve been a hint and tip section organized by Bill the boomer, offering useful tips like "you just need to ask for the manager and shake his hand, be assertive be yourself!"

on the 60th day I realized all job openings are auto fail because there's too big of a gap in my resume, good thing I decided to wear a wig and make video game videos on twitch, now I'm rolling in bitcoins.

[Radioactive-Decay: Day1]

source engine dos edition confirmed
faithful addition to the half life series

[GitGirl: Battle Rainbow]

it has all the makings of the great game; hand drawn sprites and backgrounds were beautiful, every stage has unique enemies and innovative physics: I mean, hell, you somehow got move-able block physics, slopes, moving projectiles, and wall hopping combined into one game, I cannot even fathom how you managed to get it all together and have it work.

But like what the others said; controls were hard to get into. I finally beat tankie girl; but not because I was skilled, but rather cause I collected the heart and armor in her stage to out tank most of her attacks.

Here are some major beef I have with the controls:
1. gitgirl has momentum, making it hard to change directions mid-run. If I want to take a sharp turn to dodge a missile, or take an U-turn to land on a platform, it's very difficult to do. This made platforming and dodging a lot harder than it looks.
I mean, Megaman didn't have this kind of realistic physics, and everyone agrees he's smooth as silk.

2. Gravity is too low, jump-dodging takes a lot of time to get used to. Also if GitGirl runs down down a slope she'll start floating off the ground and become unable to jump. I noticed this problem in Tankie-Girl's and Chea's stage with their sloped platforms.

3. GitGirl can't wall jump until her vertical speed is negative. This coupled with low gravity makes it sluggish to jump walls. This really bothered me during tankie-girl's boss fight, GitGirl couldn't cling onto wall fast enough to get out of harm's way.

In the end I was using happy star to bounce through a lot of the platforming segments, but I can't help but feel this isn't the way you designed the stage to be.

[Judgement Gear]

I don't know how such a great game got overlooked
good graphics and game feels all around
very hard - until you learn to advance slowly and carefully instead of just going in guns blazing, which is most people would rather do if they got their hands on a sweet ass gundroid like this one

Jantaaa responds:

Hey, thank you for the review, Im glad you like it. Im still working on the game adde new features. Still there is lot of work, especially new levels etc.

Im glad you like it and stay tuned for new info & releases :)

[The Wizard]

wonderful game, great balance of humor, arsenal, and strategy, and there are plenty of secrets to be found! For I second I recognized the graphics from Dungeons of Trogdar and thought you were the same author, but I guess I was wrong.

I did have to put it down from time to time though, dying near the end and restarting all over got a little tedious.
I wasn't able to step through level 2's learning curve until I realized that I can shock enemies two squares away by accident, maybe a bit more hint on the shock tooltip can avoid further frustration.

What else...
The secret invisibility spell is overpowered, but it sure saved me in many pinches between lv2-5. It puts the shield, haste, and alacrity spell to shame, especially since we get it so early. On the other hand I'm glad to have this lifesaver so I don't have to repeat certain stages from one fumble. I'll try another run without invis sometimes.
The spell casting gestures feels a little unnecessary, it was cool at first but bothersome near the end, plus some of the spell-ready sound clips tend to repeat if you hold the mouse button a certain way, this happens quite often by accident.
I still couldn't figure out what kind of buff the dark elf swordsman is using.

HypnoticOwl responds:

Thanks for the extensive feedback!
The sprites are from Oryx' 16-bit fantasy spritesheet. There are actually a bunch of games using them. However we have added new animations.
Understanding the reach and behaviour of the Shock spell is indeed a little hard. It's just not very intuitive. We have tried our best to clarify it on the hints, but we also didn't want to annoy players with too many hints. Most people get it now, but it always takes some tries ;)
The secret spells are all kind of overpowered, but you'll have troubles without them on Master difficulty.
Regarding the sound repetition, do you mean they looped endlessly?
The dark elf swordsman use Acceleration to boost how far they can walk :)

[P-Bot Has No Hope In NG]

came for the joke, stayed for the game

Game is really well thought out; from all the movement mechanics and scaling difficulties (I think trollface is harder than youtube, though), everything is working, and easy to get into.

My only complaint is that the game doesn't have the *oomph*. P-bot moves like a squirrel at 8x his width per second, I feel like a badass like P-bot should be packing 16 years of heavy weight blamming. Maybe reduce his speed and jump-strength by half, and have rocket boost activate when he's falling a bit, instead of immediately.

Oh and thanks for reminding us that the golden flash age is far gone.