MalTheDestroyer's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Tainted Kingdom]

Nice production values

This game is well-produced: nice graphics, nice interface, good music. I recognized the voice actor for the commander from Sonny. The cut scenes were nice, and while I didn't get a very strong sense of plot from them, they did help add some character to what are otherwise very impersonal missions.

I wasn't blown away by the actual gameplay here, though. I can tell you were going for a deeper version of Age of War with the skirmishes. However, having to physically drag each individual unit to each lane means that I'm not free to keep my eye on what's going on on the battlefield. And because the units move so fast, I end up spending far more time clicking and dragging than I do strategizing.

Perhaps the large-scale troop movements would have involved more strategy, but I didn't get much of a chance to try them. My initial play experience was cut short by a rather nasty bug in the 2nd mission: I won the battle for the outskirts, only to have the game kill my remaining men on the battlefield and behave as though I had lost. Rather than try to conquer the outskirts again with 75% of my infantry units dead, I decided to quit.

Anyway, maybe this game will get better with time. I'll try playing it again later.

[Canyon Defense]

Good, but has some flaws

First, the good. This game has some great graphics and runs very well. I love how the enemies don't just line up and walk in a straight line, but rather move like I'd expect actual vehicles to! It's also nice how you uncover new weapons by unlocking them in little mini-challenges.

This game has some problems, though. First and foremost, missiles that have been fired from your basic turrets need to move faster. Early on in the game, there are enemies (the sped-up versions of tiny ground units) who can actually outrun the missiles, and there is nothing you can do about it, since they outrun shots from your goo cannons as well, and you won't have other weapons at your disposal at this point. This is an issue with balancing, and ought to be fixed. Even with normal tiny ground units, though, on certain maps, they can get far across the map before missiles chasing them from turrrets at the edge of their firing range catch up to them. This adds to frustration more than it does to challenge! I strongly suggest that you speed up the missiles.

The second problem is that on easy and medium difficulties, the game is so short that you go through roughly half the waves before you get a selection greater than 2 turrets. This means that half of the game feels like treading water until the real game can begin. Compared with the immediate selection you get from Desktop Tower Defense, Xeno Tactic, or even Bloons Tower Defense, it doesn't hold up well.

Finally, as a reviewer below noted, the Howitzer is all but useless. It's so slow that it can't even hit a big, slow-moving enemy vehicle unless it's been hit with goo at least twice, and the howitzer doesn't lead its targets. Conclusion? It will never hit the target it's aiming for, and if it hits anything at all, it's only because some unfortunate unit happened to be trailing behind the target by about 10 seconds. Given how sparse the selection of guns is early in the game, it is not good to have one of the first ones you unlock be next to worthless.

In conclusion: this is a good game, but it needs to be balanced some more before it will rank among the top tower defense games.

[Synapsis]

Great work!

Excellent graphics and seamless integration into Flash; great design work; cool, mind-bending puzzles and great atmosphere. This is a near-perfect Myst-style puzzle game. My only advice for next time would have an ending that makes slightly more sense. Otherwise, amazing job on this!

[Climate Revenge]

Nice idea, except...

Nice retro graphics, catchy sound track, funny animations, and pretty good use of a resource management dynamic to make the gameplay a little more challenging. This is a pretty good effort, overall.

I was enjoying it, in fact, up until I reached a level where I wasn't allowed to leave more than a certain number of survivors. Okay, easy enough: I went through the city striking down every car and person I could find. So here's the weird part: every time my storm picked someone up and flung them to their death, the survivor count went UP. As in, by killing them, I had somehow caused them to survive. I just don't understand how that's supposed to work, I'm afraid.

Also, I understand that this is an arcade-style game, but I didn't like that it didn't save my progress so I could just try again from the last level I played after I died. Not letting people save is a holdover from the days where game systems didn't have the memory to save and load games. In other words, it ain't a feature. And not having it kills replayability, since no one wants to have to redo everything just to get back to the one level they didn't beat again.

[Grid16]

Mediocre

Nice presentation, but this is just another Warioware clone, and not even one with original minigames. Vastly overrated, literally.

[Squidgy]

Mindless but fun

I like the way the game plays, and the graphics are really nice. There's only one problem with the presentation here: the enemy bullets are the same color as everything else, making them extremely hard to see (and thus, avoid). Overall, though, nice job!

[Light people on Fire]

Decent

I agree that the sound in this game is really great. The way the music changes when you change forms is hilarious.

However, that's about all that really stands out here. There are already many flash games where you run around destroying as much as possible within a time limit. The rain, while it adds something new to the genre, also hampers the gameplay, since you spend half your time just sitting around as a tree. Moreover, the play area is very limited, the graphics are only so-so, and you quickly run out of people to burn. All in all, this doesn't stand up well against games like Cantankeroustank.

[-Spirit Guide-]

Not very good

Spirit Guide moves at a snail's pace, offering all of the micro-managing frustration of Lemmings with none of the puzzle-solving fun. All you do is select a formation, then wait a quarter century while your "spirit fragments" very, very slowly move into position. Move ten feet, then repeat. Over. And over. And over. Oh, and you're timed, too. Who thought this would be fun, exactly?

[Strategy Defense]

Nice, but could be better

For what this is, it's pretty good. I was kind of hoping that this would be like a single player Tactics Core Demo, though, and it would have been, had you made it possible to use more than one unit at any point in the entire game. It takes a lot of the fun out of a game like this not to have multiple units under your command.
I also found the ammo limit annoying, as well as the way the larger vehicle units obscured multiple squares around them, making proper targeting nearly impossible.

If it weren't for these design problems, I could easily forgive the extremely linear, almost non-existent plot, and the nearly total lack of characters. Cool battle engine, though.

[Panik in Platform Peril]

Not bad, however...

This is a solid game, with a good engine, nice graphics, and cute design. However, I feel like it is a little too retro for its own good, in a bad way. That is, it seems to have missed out on the substantial imrpovements in gamwplay in the platforming genre over the last two decades. To improve it:

--give the main character more abilities. There have been a lot of innovations in platforming over the past 10 years, and it just isn't as much fun anymore to play a character who can't slide, double-jump, wall-jump, or for that matter, even kill enemies.
--speaking of which, give your character some new attacks. It would be interesting to have SOME enemies who cannot be hurt, only frozen, but this game would be far more enjoyable if most enemies could be disposed of permanently. Most of the hazards of the game, after all, come from obstacles rather than enemies. The enemies are merely a nuisance.
--the sound effect for when you take damage is...well, it just doesn't sound like a taking damage sound effect. I'd pick something else. Same thing for the dying sound effect.
--this game deserves a proper intro explaining just why this fully-grown man is running around a dangerous obstacle course in...a bunny suit. I imagine some tough-as-nails marine going to see a government scientist for a new top-secret combat suit only to find it makes him look like a rabbit. There is great potential for hilarity here. :)