qwerty741's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Bird Tapper vs the Krampus Fellowship Clan]

i'm just going to wait for someone else to solve these.
i liked the original one because, despite enemies being all over the place, you could instinctively understand the intended path to perfectly solve a level.
they were spread out just enough to lead you in a pre-determined direction.

meanwhile, you can tell these were user-generated as enemies and bombs seem to be spread out pretty much everywhere.
you know there's SOME path to clear almost everything, but there's no clear direction of where you should go in the first place, to the point it's a hunt to even find the goal to clear the level.

i'm sure they're still good and well thought-out (to an extent), but randomly bashing my head against the wall until something sticks isn't quite my cup of tea.

EDIT: decided to give it a proper try, so here's all i managed to get:
- 1: 1400/1400
- 2: 7800/7800
- 3: 30900/24900
- 4: 9100/6000
- 5: 6300/3900
- 6: 10600/10600
- 7: 14600/14600
- 8: 9500/9500
- 9: 5800/5800
- 10: 17400/17400
- 11: 8600/7900 (apparently skipping the whole level IS the intended way to get gold on this. smh)
- 12: 13600/13500 (turns out there's a gimmick with one of the gun guys; they're supposed to shoot you on sight, except one of them doesn't trigger when you get close to it, which i'm not exactly a fan of. the intended solution also doesn't combo every enemy, which is extra weird)
- 13: 21000/21000 (the only way to clear this without a guide is to cheese the level tbh. jump+uppercut right at the start to get on the wall above you, then jump and mash dive so you bounce off the first enemy and then don't go out of bound. should end up right behind the goal, then punch forward)
- 14: 21100/21100 (this level is just insane even with a guide. every jump is way too precise with little time to process what's going on)
- p1: 2200/1800
- p2: 3000/2500
- p3: 19200/19200
- g1: 9600/9600
- g2: 11300/11300
. g3: 7000/6500
- k1: 2100/1500 (not as bad as it looks, if you know what to do; which you normally don't)
- k2: 4800/800 (there's a pixel perfect jump for extra points. besides the one to reach the goal)
- k3: 800/800 (the nerf made this so much better. i actually had fun finding completely unintended ways to go through, and there's lots of them)

EDIT 2: i would like to formally apologize to the creator of the levels i was missing.
while at first simply watching the intended solutions felt daunting, after attempting them (for a long time) i can say i did have fun clearing them (in hindsight), although i'm not sure if it's because some of them got nerfed.
for future reference, knowing the intended path makes all the difference, because i can't imagine anyone ever figuring out how to solve most of them (14 in particular) without knowing beforehand.

behold! my magnum opus:
https://www.newgrounds.com/dump/item/212ca5050a1ede2fe3851471e0060547
(someone pls make a proper video walkthrough, the filedump really wasn't made to host all these video files, they take so much space)

ProsciuttoMan responds:

I'm glad you appreciate the K3 edit: I agree, the original was far too brutal. With K2, I think its kinda fair to keep the balloon ninja, since it forces the player to learn about The Kid's short hop, but I think the beginning of K3 was way too restrictive originally.
The original level's strange design left room for a lot of unintended shortcuts, and I thought it'd be cool to kinda lean into that aspect more: I feel like it fit pretty well especially with I Wanna Be The Guy being sort of a Metroidvania game lol.
I believe there were at least 3 routes that I assume were unintentional in the original level. I took note of that, and decided to make it more apparent and feasible for the player: so at least 3 of the routes are very much intended haha.

[Super 3D Island]

i see this game is the "speedrun" kind of game so i'm definitely not the target audience for it, but i gotta say the wall jump mechanic is super aggravating.

i'm not sure if it's because the camera moves as you're performing jumps, or adding directional influence mid-jump changes your trajectory, or because it takes a while for the wall slide to register, but i can't count how many times i had to climb the mountain in the middle of the map over and over again, because either i didn't climb on the right surface, or i landed on the wall to the side instead of the one opposite of where i'm jumping from, or i simply didn't stick to the wall and just slid off.
eventually i simply stopped inputting anything else and just kept mashing spacebar between walls, hoping the auto-camera was designed to make those jumps as easy as possible to land, and somehow made it to the top.

minor annoyance is also how diving from mid-air has immense endlag and covers extra distance as you land, with seemingly no control until the entire dive animation ends.
i kept trying to dive after accidentally missing a jump to hopefully recover, and instead ended up throwing myself off cliffs, resulting in a worse position than i would have been in, had i done nothing at all.
though i suppose this part is intended.

tl;dr sticky wall jump is rough. everything else seems fine? to an extent;
though i'm not sure if it works for speedrunning purposes.

EDIT: i don't know what you changed specifically but it feels so much better to play already.
i definitely noticed the change with the dive end animation because i could actually use it to platform instead of a hailmerry.

i didn't realize how much i needed mouse controls for the camera until i had it; it makes walking around so much better because turning the camera as i'm walking now feels seamless, instead of doing hard turns which would mess around with my character orientation.
as i keep holding the same key while moving, turning around the camera at a sharp angle with keys tends to make the character spin around in place instead of going in the same direction, so it's definitely a welcome change.

i don't think there's necessarily been a change with the wall climbing/jumping (which was my personal bane) but for some reason it doesn't feel as unwieldy as before, so it must have been a combination of the camera control change, plus being able to dive with purpose.
even manage to get past the mountain in less than 10 minutes this time, so that's a result.
i wouldn't say it's "good", but it's definitely better than before.
i mean the wall-jump, specifically. the game is good

also, idk if this is just me being bad, but sometimes the jump height feels just a bit too low compared to the platforms?
basically, you can do a full hop to get on top of a platform, but more often than not i end up barely sliding onto its surface just below the top rim of the platform, so i end up stuck in a wall-jumping loop trying to simply jump and land on top of a platform more times than i would like to admit

FCPXAV responds:

I tried to make the slide similar to Mario 64 but i guess that just ended up frustrating people more than being helpful, I'll make it easier to control in the next update thanks! For now you can still jump out of a dive early!

Edit: update pushed!

[Dream Punk]

adding a review for this while i'm here because it's downright criminal how this went completely under the radar.
figured i'd leave a few tips for people that want to play this later using what i discovered on my own so far:

the game has a lot of interesting mechanics and movement options; it's also fairly challenging.
i can think of at least two challenges that require extreme knowledge of how the "ness" ability works, and both of them reward a chime so they're pretty much mandatory for completion.
(the balloon challenge in the top left of the map, where the timing is very strict, and the entire room in the middle of the map, which is already quite difficult to find and is basically a ness skill check, since you can't traverse it in any other way).

for starters, i recommend going to the right of the starting screen where you'll be able to unlock the hookshot ability. this will help immensely with getting some tapes to upgrade yourself early on.
i made the mistake of going to the left first on my first playthrough and that made it much more difficult to make significant progress. once you get the hookshot, you can start going left where you'll be able to get glide.

between bounce and glide, it's possible to adjust yourself indefinitely while bouncing on balloons, and the hookshot will allow for quick recovery and air mobility, which would otherwise result in constantly falling in water and being stuck in the same restricted area for a while.

my one gripe with the game is how the various abilities (besides how to perform them) are mostly left unexplained, along with their upgrades. there's also some controls that aren't explicitly started, and knowing about them makes a massive difference.

for example, you can perform ness using C instead of Ctrl. this will prevent you from accidentally closing the game window with Ctrl+W if you accidentally press them in combination while messing around with the ability.
incidentally, you can only direct the ness ability using left or right, so ctrl up is not even a proper combination, but it's still easy to accidentally input by mistake if you're controlling the character at the same time.
while you can use A and D to control the ability, you can also use the left and right arrow keys (while the playable character itself can only move with WASD)

in regards to upgrades, bounce and glide are the most useful to upgrade, since they increase how high you can bounce and your maximum air time.
investing a bit into hookshot may be useful for increased range, although i never figured out if that's what it actually does once upgraded.
movement speed is self-explanatory, but i personally never upgraded it more than once because i was worried it may mess with my control over precise platforming.

upgrading ness increases distance covered when launched, and at max level it also increases your speed (reduces time necessary to cover that distance).
however, sometimes covering more distance is detrimental (specifically for the dedicated room in the middle of the map, which is designed with a specific distance covered by the ability in mind).

in regards to the grind ability, it may be because it's unlocked way later when you've already gotten used to your other abilities, but i never found any real use for it.
it was also difficult to figure out where you can use it or not; you need to be holding shift while overlapping "wires", which are specifically the ones that usually lead to buttons. (one example is freefalling on the starting screen while holding shift. you'll automatically grab onto the wire that passes through the whole screen).

above all, fully upgrading recall is a boon. aside from allowing you to teleport back to the starting area, when maxed out it allows to freely fast-travel between any area.
you need to hold E until only the map is shown, and while holding E you can use arrow keys to change the highlighted area on the map where you want to fast travel to, then release E.

back when i played to completion, i managed to amass a total of 22 upgrade points, so there should be at least 22 tapes you can collect, for those interested in upgrading their abilities.
in any case, you can always re-spec if you talk to the npc in the starting area (you can view your current upgrades at any point by pressing TAB, but you can only re-allocate them by talking to said npc).

additionally, the last time i played there was a bug which unlocked chime medals even without collecting all of them.
i never figured out how it works specifically, but my guess is that chimes collected over multiple playthroughs count towards the "overall amount" in regards to medals.
that is to say (unless it's been patched since), it's likely possible to get the medal for "collecting all 9 chimes" by collecting the first one repeatedly over multiple new games.
it's still possible to collect all 9 chimes legitimately in a single playthrough (as i've done it before), but as mentioned the last 2 or 3 are extremely difficult to get

bokononyossarian responds:

Thank you! We are happy that some folks have enjoyed it!!!

[BETON]

is ascend timer-related? the best i can do is barely above 2 minutes so if it's sub 2 that's real rough.

i was thinking it may be related to the platform at the top, but the problem with that is the platform already starts at "ground level", and it begins rising as soon as you collect the last collectible.
even if you were already near the platform it would be difficult to make up the height difference considering the jump height, so there's no way to make it up there in time even if you leave the highest collectible for last.

additionally, the game could really use a proper reset button. something that doesn't force to refresh the page if you want to restart from scratch

EDIT: i've circled the border of the entire map way more times than necessary, and moved the camera to look through walls hoping to find something hidden.
after throwing myself off the map an innumerable amount of times, i've concluded there's absolutely no hint whatsoever in-game anywhere.
aside from the itch.io page for the game itself and soundtrack, there's also no other resource related to this game anywhere on the internet. so i got nothing

EDIT 2: ended up having to get help to "figure it out" (and by that i mean they pretty much spelled out how to) and now that i see it, i kind of hate it?

for one, it feels very gimmicky: there is absolutely no indication anywhere if you're looking for it "normally".
in fact, the only way to see it feels completely unintended, rather than part of the game.
moreover, once you do get it, it completely invalidates the entire core of the game, which is platforming.
i'm not sure how that affects timed runs, but i reckon it must be very frustrating for someone playing the game normally, then realizing the best way to approach the game is basically cheating

Fe26 responds:

I can tell you it is not timer related. And it has something to do with the platform at the top but there is something you are missing. Perhaps you could start looking "outside of the game itself".

But if is it speed what you want, there is a speedrun.com page that might help you.

[Disguise and Conquer]

nothing particularly elaborate, but i had fun mixing and matching.
the end screen dialogue is pretty funny.

been trying to figure out the values and i gotta say some of the items i thought were "obvious" for each disguise ended up actually giving less points than others.
either they were really well thought out specifically to make it difficult to get S rank, or the exact opposite of that lol.

also for some reason i can't see the buttons for story mode and free play on the main menu; it's just 2 black boxes.
it's at worst a visual glitch so it doesn't really affect gameplay, but i wanted to mention it in case it's only a problem on my side

currently making a guide but there's a lot of trial and error involved so it may take a while

EDIT: fixed
https://www.newgrounds.com/dump/item/1614bc47bb5aa5fa6703ab78254cd824

AhWham responds:

Thanks for the review! On the topic of the scores and getting S rank, they were specifically thought out but I should've done more to help players understand that better. I tested a bit with the main menu and I haven't encountered the black boxes glitch you mention, could be a issue with the file path to the texture sprites.

Also, if you need help with the guide: I can provide the specific numbers for each costume if you'd like!

[A Light Maze: Beezlebulbs Gambit]

the game is ok but it desperately needs a better explanation for all of its mechanics.
i'm making a review for this specifically to add what i managed to find while playing, for future reference.

game starts with a (seemingly) unskippable cutscene and a whole pseudo-minigame that is wholly unnecessary imo. you need to interact with the e-mail you get and confirm to get started with the actual game.

you're the small lightbulb, and you move with arrow keys or wasd. it takes a while for the character to start moving, like there's some sort of friction on start-up.
spacebar is used to toggle the light on/off, which is the main mechanic of the game.
you have 2 separate bars to keep track of: you energy bar, which depletes overtime while the light is on, and your actual hp.
there are lightbulb boxes scattered around the map: these are checkpoints; when you die, you respawn to the last checkpoint you touched.
if you die due to your hp depleting, you should respawn with 3 hearts.
if you die due to your energy depleting, you respawn to the last checkpoint with the same amount of hearts you had.

the main objective of the game (i think) is to roam the map and collect lightbulbs.
while the light is on, your energy is constantly depleting so you need to turn off the light otherwise you'll "die".
while the light is off, you can walk freely but you won't be able to see any walls. it's also difficult to see in general so you'll want to walk around with the light on most of the time anyway.
while the light is off, you can press X to drop a "night light". these are supposed to be markers but they don't do much besides telling you that there "isn't a wall where you dropped one". they don't really illuminate your path in the dark in any way, and dropping one also consumes energy, so you're better off just walking with the light on. basically, they're mostly useless.

you can recharge your energy while standing on a battery. batteries can be found around the map, and are likely limited in number.
while the light is on, you can press B while standing on a battery to collect said battery; collecting a battery costs one heart. if you have only 1 heart left, you cannot collect a battery. you can hold up to 3 batteries at once.
while the light is off, you can drop a battery on the ground. this costs nothing, and you can drop a battery anywhere as long as you hold one. this means you can walk around with the light on while holding batteries, drop one when you need to recharge your energy, then trade one heart to pick back up the battery until you reach the next checkpoint.
while highly annoying, it's still the preferred way to move around the map rather than doing it blind imo, which invalidates the whole on/off mechanic;
not because you can do it, but because having the light off is so annoying and not worth it, it's still better to juggle your energy and hp with the lights on than to deal with that.

now to the main issue, and the whole reason i made this. to get out of the first room at all, you need to open doors. to open a door you need a key. to get the key, you need to bring it 3 "eyes".
the "eyes" are those red ball enemies that you can find around the map.
they will follow your position while the light is on, and will not follow you with the light off.
if they touch you, they will also drain your energy, which makes the whole endeavor extra annoying.
you need to lure 3 eyes to the key so that the key will follow you, then lure the key to a door to open it. the key will follow you regardless of the light being on/off.
the eyes also seem to not be able to cross batteries in their path, so if you dropped a battery and are unable to pick it back up, you'll need to do a whole lot of backtracking until you get an extra heart to pick it back up so you can continue luring them.
this whole system is not explained anywhere and honestly is one of the main problems of the game.

another problem comes with the level design: once you're past the first door you're met with spike traps and spider? enemies. if you touch them, you lose hp. i can't tell if the spider enemies also drain your energy, but they will follow you regardless of the light being on/off. fortunately i've found you can kill them by dropping a battery on your position while they're onto you, otherwise they'd be extremely irritating to deal with.

the spike traps however are terrible: once you walk over a spike trap, it triggers and hits you for one heart. unless you're walking straight over it laterally without stopping, you will be hit. if the trap is much bigger than your character, you will be hit regardless. once a trap is triggered, it will not reset even on death, meaning it becomes an impassable wall which deals damage to you if you come in contact with it again.
this is problematic for a number of reasons, due to some checkpoints being surrounded by these traps, meaning you'll be hit almost immediately when respawning, and also locking out some paths once triggered even accidentally. spike traps won't trigger if you're walking over them with the light off, but you also won't be able to see them until you turn the light back on.
once the light is on, spike traps which have been stepped over even in the dark will trigger regardless, and become an impassable damaging wall.

i've only managed to explore the right side of the map so far, but i can say that the rooms layout is kind of all over the place. specifically, the first room on the right has a whole lot of very narrow corridors surrounded by spikes, which also happen to be unnecessarily long.
the room right after, which is the middle room that can be accessed from different doors, is entirely too big and difficult to navigate (i got completely lost).
also because i used the key to enter said room from the top right, it seems i soft-locked myself as i wasn't able to locate any other key to access another room, forcing me to refresh and lose my progress.
between the keys issue, and spikes locking path, there's no soft-lock safety measure.

the lightbulbs you need to collect are fairly noticeable. they have the same designs on the medals, and likely accompanied by some npc characters or at least something that has not been seen before anywhere else. you need to interact with either the npc or the lightbulb itself with X, which if done successfully will get you the corresponding medal, and the lightbulb will start following you.
it seems you need to trade a certain number of hearts of held batteries to get a lightbulb, so it's possible interacting with not enough resources will not work. the specific currency necessary is written on the ground next to the lightbulb.

there are coins scattered across the map, but so far i'm unsure about their purpose.

explosive barrels deal 2 hp on contact. eyes can also trigger explosive barrels, upon which explosion they'll die. it seems eyes can still walk over triggered spike traps with no issue.
there are eyes spawners in the left and middle room that look like space wormholes or something, and are triggered upon standing over them. one problem with these is that they'll spawn infinite eyes as long as activated, and i somehow managed to almost cut myself off from going through the top left corridor due to the room being completely filled with eyes which constantly drain my energy even with the light off.

this is only a first playthrough so i may edit this information as i find stuff, but so far this is all i got

EDIT: soft-locking due to a lack of keys is unlikely, as there are extra keys to access the whole map regardless of which door you open first (not actually confirmed 100%).
they're simply difficult to find because of the map layout, and borderline impossible to get because of all the exploding barrels and rocks killing the eyes and respawning in the worst possible location.
if you happen to go left first, the "flip the switch" prompt boots you into the final boss room with no way back.
it's a point of no return, which would explain why it was previously difficult to achieve getting every lightbulb in a single playthrough.

what's actually possible is soft, locking the bottom right side of the middle room. there's a whole "spike trap maze", except it's not a maze and it's just spike traps.
i can't figure out why sometimes they don't trigger even if i walk over them, but the point is it is possible to trigger all of the spikes at the entrance of the floor. there's also rock enemies which block your path and shoot at you (which seem invincible) meaning dying there is actually extreemyl likely. once you have triggered enough spikes, you are effectively softlocked out of a key and a few other rooms.

honestly the one change this game desperately needs is a revision of how spike traps work. either reset them to the inactive state on death, or at least don't make them a wall. i'm not sure how many invincibility frames there are on hit, but if it's long enough it may still be possible to get past the wall with at least a bunch of hearts, otherwise it's really impossible to deal with.

can confirm all medals work, at least on multiple playthroughs, though some of them sometimes aren't awarded but that's not due to the game.

SuperSomethingGame responds:

Congrats on collecting all the medals and thank you for seeing it thru + reviewing :D

I understand where a lot of that is coming from and appreciate the feedback. So much of what you identified are byproducts of the game having more systems, scale and scope then time to make those things works as well as they could have lol.

Consequently, this will be improved upon this in future projects!

If this was a project that was in active development I would be really eager to implement some of this feedback, but this was intended as a one and done for a Game Jam + Learning.
This project was built in less then a week as my first project for the game engine GDevelop.

Not so long ago, I was considering switching engines for future projects and came across GDevelop and noticed the company was in the middle of its own fairly big game jam, so I decided to use that as a reason to speed run learning and trying out the engine + a new project management system that was also entirely new to me (Miro, having used Trello and all the sticky notes+notebooks in the world before)

I had 6 days at that time to work on the project and have it summitted, I also worked my normal job during that time, I missed a fair bit of sleep trying to wrangle this one in haha.

I vastly overestimated how much crunch that really was lol.

This new engine is parallel in a lot of ways to the engine I use but wound up a lot different then I expected, and this kind of got in the way of a few things I would have normally included like save states which was a planned feature but was cut due to time. I ended spending a lot of time scoping out the project, (over?)planning and building out the features and systems I had and got bogged down in the systems building.

Finishing the systems I scoped out took me easily 25-40% longer then I expected due to some unaccounted knowledge gaps in this new software, and I wound up short on time to balance the core loop and map, I spent literally half a day being able to test the full game loop after completing the whole map. 97% of the testing done was for feature testing along the way + implementations, that left very little time for polish, which I regret because my usual design philosophy would have been more iterative and focused on the moment to moment stuff that would make it way less annoying to play while maintaining a challenge.

I finished with all my key goals checked though which included having a
* Build from a fresh project + ground up to better learn the software
• A complete story, coherent theme/style/setting with a lesson, even if simple & silly
• Can be completed with low chance of game breaking issues.• (ie, minimum viable product)
* Gamepad, Touch, and Keyboard + Mouse Control
* Complete Pause Menu, with newgrounds login + at least music, full screen toggle, and link to my work.
* One continuous play session ( no hard pauses in gameplay after the pre game introduction)
* Newgrounds API = leaderboards + achievements (first time trying this too) (this missed the deadline but I added it along with some other "zero day" fixes, making for a total of 7 days, even though 98% was done in 6)

+ Ultimately learn GDevelops/ Miros core systems in a sprint, so I can decide if it was worth using in the future for other prototypes, jams, full projects etc.

I unintentionally put features/ game feel mechanics ahead of the UX for a lot of the project while I was focusing on testing a range of things inside of GDevelop and this cost the gameplay + onboarding a fair bit.

I have a lot better sense of how to scope out future projects thanks to this experience haha.

Despite its flaws, I hope you found some real enjoyment or meaning

Again, I am truly grateful for you sharing your time with my weird internet art project and you taking the time to write up your detailed review post :D

+PS I got rid of the cost on dropping the "night" lights, because that just took deleting one line of code and might help future players more ^_^ ( or cause some unintended knock on effect >.>).

I had to at least address one of these issues otherwise I wouldn't be able to sleep lol,
Then I started on a save system, got about 20minutes in and then remembered that this is closed project for me and reluctantly put it back down.

[World chaser]

i came to this expecting nothing and found myself pleasantly surprised.
i really like the gimmick of the gameplay loop, and i feel if this got a proper overhaul the result would be pretty unique.

the game as it is in its current form is fairly unbalanced, as proven from the fact not a single person seems to have cleared it (going off of medals).

the main offender is probably the extremely low chance of actually landing into the final world, since it's only a 6%, and to even get there you have to go through literal hell itself at least once lol.
one solution would be to increase the chances of getting to circle 4 slightly every time you reach a circle 3 world.

the second problem is the high variance caused by the sheer randomized nature of the gameplay: there's no real difference between easy and hard mode, since all it boils down to is getting lucky by landing in good worlds, and especially not ending up in the 3rd circle 7 times in a row.

the controls are somewhat slippery, so it's real easy to just slam into enemies and take a bunch of damage; the fact you can bounce off walls if you walk into them is especially annoying.
ironically i found myself more comfortable moving with the actual slippery modifier than normal controls, and that's saying something.

the rate of fire is also a problem, as enemies spawn at a much higher rate than you can shoot any of them down. their hp also seems inconsistent, as sometimes i can defeat the same enemy in different amount of hits on the same level (regardless of world rules).
it ultimately boils down to how many screen wipes you manage to luck out in a row, but it would be nice if there was something like piercing already built in, like in the sniper level.

boosts stack, which does help if you somehow manage to survive long enough in a single run to get more than one of them, but the overall control of your character still ends up being somewhat poor.

i also learned that pressing R at any point resets all your progress (awards, worlds album) , so heads up on that.

t4upl responds:

Thanks for the comment. Glad you liked it.

[Pizza Tower Defense]

spent way more time than i'd like to admit trying to figure out an optimal setup on the second level (thinking having walls already placed at the start gave me an advantage on the early levels) only to be absolutely demolished by the last wave due to sheer lack of DPS.

then i realized everyone else had cleared the first map instead:
https://www.newgrounds.com/dump/item/d5aea8500da6b4c93d4ddbd446c7a536
ahah pizza tower go boom.
even this can probably be optimized if you upgrade some of the towers in the middle instead of adding the top layer (though you still need to place at least one near the spawn so they don't just hug the top wall)

my only gripe with this is the weird balancing issue (you never want the jalapeno tower because you need the money to set a path first, and on later levels more range = better damage overall), and the difficulty curve caused by not having a set path to follow.
personally it's the first time i've seen something like that, but with no in-game explanation for it i would have never figured out why the enemies seemingly picked a path at random every time i started a new game. gotta thank other reviews for that.

P.S. i'm assuming the scores are the highest wave reached.
honestly i have no idea why i got 40, since i only cleared wave 20 with this setup and then submitted score there

clarkiagames responds:

Jalapeno tower is good if you couple it with slow tower to optimize splash damage. Yes that’s the point it’s hard to optimize difficulty with creating your own winding path but that’s what make you want to go back to the game and try to find the BEST optimized path i think. The best path i think for the first map is creating a spirale. For the score i fixed it on the api side. Thanks for your feedbacks, much appreciated.

[SQUADADDLE]

did anyone even playtest the "harder" levels at all?
i understand that the game is supposed to be difficult, but i had trouble even with the early levels tbh; the difficulty seems to be all over the place. (this was on easy mode)
i figured i'm just that bad at it, so since i wouldn't stop dying i went with training mode to see if i couldn't figure something out.

i went all the way up to 25k points, until i could not clear a single level anymore.
i've been stuck on the same 10 levels loop for at least half an hour, and went all the way back to -1500 (yes negative points) before i just gave up.

for starters, there is simply not enough time to figure out which level you're on, and then execute everything flawlessly just to barely make it to the goal. even if the timer was double the current one it would be difficult, but the way it is now makes it almost impossible.
the air mobility and hitboxes seem to be all over the place, especially with the long jump.
i understand it's supposed to follow your side directional inputs, but it's way too sensitive considering how little room for error there is, plus the insanely short timer.
given this, having to hold down and a direction at the same time to perform it is also a bad idea, because you will be holding a direction while performing a jump when most of the time it's going to get you killed. having to hold down doesn't help either since you'll probably have to climb upwards right after a jump not to fall into spikes right below.

i've had my fair share of controls accidentally "not working as intended", but i reckon that's probably just the combination of game mechanics clashing against each other so i can't really say it's due to "unresponsive controls". might just be that the gameplay loop itself is too demanding to even realize if you're making a mistake or it's the controls not responding.

i would honestly like to see someone clear every level at least once with this time constraint. this would be even ignoring the bonus fruit on each level, since i personally wouldn't even try bothering with those considering how difficult the base game already is.
i liked the previous games so i feel like this one just happened to be a miss, or i'm simply not the intended audience for these types of games, though that's how i felt about it.
even then i probably ended up rating it lower than i would have normally due to the frustation i just went through. i'll see if i feel differently about it after taking a break; sorry about that

kaiakairos responds:

review is completely fair, my other games have been much slower paced but this one is a hard 180 in the other direction. every level is possible, yes, but it was definitely made for an audience that prefers a brutal challenge. Another reviewer said a “free play” mode to try any level at any time would be nice, I think i’d agree.

[Faces Of 2022 Collab]

https://www.newgrounds.com/dump/item/19262f1fcac48ba2750de11dfb2d6859
made this around the time the game came out but i forgot to share it so i'm using this chance to do it now before i forget again.
dunno if the game has been updated since, otherwise it should still be accurate

Intrapath responds:

qwerty741 out here doing God's work! Great stuff!