Score: 3

"yay perm-invulnerability. . . . yawn"

submission: First Real Shoot em Up

date: November 19, 2009

No instructions, immune to anything except colliding with bosses. No risk == boredom.

Otherwise, an ok "coffee break" time-waster.

Score: 7

"nice little game"

submission: -Starcom-

date: June 18, 2009

It would be really nice if you could review what your current mission is and if there was a system wide map to help you get where you need to go and, more importantly, get back to your station.

Score: 4

"meh."

submission: Squish Tower Defence

date: June 8, 2009

negatives: simplistic graphics, only 2 types of enemies, no way to check current turret stats,
positives: a variable "tech tree" similar to "Antbuster" ( http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view /378646 ) had potential

"I'm a doctor, Jim, not a $BLANK" is not a valid excuse. You can get help from an artistic friend or you can always use public domain sprites. All you need to do to win is put a missile launcher that covers both entrance and exit and upgrade it to nuclear launcher and maybe hit the "increase damage" button a few times. I'm sure you figured level 15 would be the "impossible" level that all tower defense games have, but my nuclear turret (backed up with fast power turret) is cleaning up the flies right as they enter the maze as I type this.

Score: 1

"age means nothing"

submission: Over 9000!!!!!!!!!

date: May 31, 2009

If you whine about your age, I rank you 0-2 not 0-5, no matter how good your flash is. There are young submitters here who submit awesome flashes.

You are not one of them.

There are rough looking flashes that have an awesome idea or unique humor that transcends their roughness. Like "Demented Cartoon Movie".

This flash is not one of them.

Score: 8

"played it mostly on armorgames"

submission: Orbital Decay

date: April 20, 2009

I agree that the difference in difficulty between easy and normal is too great. It's almost impossible to lose on easy unless you're doing absolutley nothing. Normal is very challenging. A little too challenging, but I have beaten it, though not consistently.

Upgrading the main cannon pays good divedends. Swatting fighters out of the sky with one shot prevents them from causing any damage in the first place.

I do repair drones next, starting with maxing total number of drones.

I tend to shy away from using a lot of missile turrets. They're the most expensive turret, the missiles aren't very agile and they aren't "smart" enough to go after non-agile enemies.

I've been loading the entire front of the ship with flak cannons to clear mines and asteroids. Don't know if that's a good thing or not, I'm still experimenting with defensive loadouts.

Speaking of those, mines and asteroids cause a crap-load of damage, make them high-priority targets. Mines will chase fighters. I've had fighters that were close the ship slam a whole butt-load of mines into the ship, killing me.

Warning on reloading: If you die and restart, you restart with no fighters and no repair drones. The bays need time to produce them, so at the very beginning of the restart, you've got zero repairs going on.

I'm ambivalent about fighters. Sometimes they help, sometimes they don't. Remember that upgrading an existing bay from 1 fighter to 2 fighters costs 100 RU, building a brand new level 1 bay cost 150 RU.

Score: 7

"great game"

submission: Bunny Invasion: Easter

date: April 12, 2009

Same sort of gameplay as #2, except you start from round 1 with assistant Jim.

Didn't play it long enough to explore the "weapon class" system this game uses.

The bunny bios doesn't work.

Score: 8

"last boss needs some tweaks"

submission: Fifi's Fury

date: March 17, 2009

First, I'm not the least bit ashamed to say I used the infinite life cheat. I'm not much of a twitch gamer.

Monty is nigh unbeatable because he hardly ever backs up. Which means you almost always get crammed into the left side of the level with no room the manuever and no mid-level platforms to attack monty from. Also he makes (by my reckoning) 20 to 30 attacks before he pops his head up.

The jump you need to make on 2nd level to unlock Lola is a worthy task for an unlockable. However, all the jumping you have to do on 3rd level is ridiculous.

The end animation is a bit of letdown, but that's just me. You might want to have the end gallery include, or have an option to show, the assistants getting "done."

Much more smoothly animated and responsive than prior games. Could use more enemies, and also distinct enemies on each level. Fighting the same old crew throughout the game gets boring.

I got the cheat codes from another review (probably page one, by now.) I didn't see where the cheats for this game were on the website.

Score: 4

"squandered potential"

submission: Cargo - Prologue

date: March 13, 2009

First off the whole "reverberating gunshot" effect near the beginning when you start the actual game is fricken' annoying.

Animation is rather stilted. Gameplay is slow. Would have been nice to have combat mechanics explained sometime before you get into combat. The game doesn't do anything to make the plot understandable, let alone interesting or compelling. Clunkey interface.

Excellent voice acting. "Aliens" drop-ship for the win! A persistent character you can take from game to game to game is a great innovation (if it actually works.)

Overall, it looks like you spent most of your resources and effort on the cool-rooney drop-ship cutscene and hardly any on the actual game. Which makes me think that you wouldn't be having a problem with the size limit if you hadn't concentrated on eye-candy cutscenes so much. Remember, great game-play trumps pretty graphics and audio (most of the time) on newgrounds.

Score: 5

"I miss the global command button"

submission: Arachnid Wars 1.5

date: March 4, 2009

I understand why you changed the controls, but the way you implemented it now makes the game very cumbersome.

You can't give any units any "ongoing" or "persistent" commands. In most strategy games, when you give a unit a command, it will keep doing it until given a new command or a situation change has rendered the old command null. For example you tell a unit to go attack some enemy unit. In many strategy games, the unit will automatically spend its subsequent turns traveling to the enemy unit and attack without further instruction from the player. The way your controls work, you have to micromanage each of your units and you have to input new orders each turn.

Individual unit control is a great thing, but not when it completely replaces persistent orders.

Score: 7

"can't get past level 5"

submission: Arian Starfighter

date: February 6, 2009

Your own fighters are very sluggish and weak compared to some of the enemy fighters. Kinda hard to win against fighters that can both out-turn you and take you down in just 3 hits and take two missiles to go down.

Generally speaking, it's expected in games like this for small and fast fighters to be weak and big and slow enemies to be strong. In this game it's the opposite!

Some suggestions would be multiple types of player fighters. Patrol missions in one type of fighter and assault mission in a heavy fighter or bomber, etc. You could also include upgrades like an increase in armor, more powerful weapons, better damage regeneration for example after research and development makes a breakthrough.