RuneChart's Reviews

[STARBARIANS - Episode 3]

Awesome! Been waiting for this for so long. I immediately signed up to be a patron as soon as you opened the patreon, and I'm happy to support your work.

As far as the cartoon, the art and animation is gorgeous as usual. I can't help but feel like you're retconning the character of Hogstrong a bit, though. Through most of the series he's been just as sociopathic as Killgar, so it seems weird for him to suddenly be showing a conscience. If it's the setup for a subversion, it wasn't very convincing.

Still, loved it and looking forward to the next!

[Girl Gamers]

Good animation. However, I liked the humor of the first one a little better. I don't usually give negative reviews, but I can't get over how irritatingly smug this comes across at points. The blue sweater girl annoys me. You have a wacky, potentially entertaining situation going on, but all that girl seems to do is point out that the situation is, in fact, quite wacky. If you explain the joke, you ruin it, and that's exactly what she does. She's too underplayed to even work as a straight man. There's no need to insert an audience surrogate just to say "We're so much better than these idiots, am I right, guys?" As I said, it just comes across as irritatingly smug. Just let us laugh at the foibles of the characters and the absurdity of the situation, and let the comedy speak for itself.

[Lil King]

Simple and entertaining. As others have said, the difficulty curve makes the game unplayable way too fast.

It would be nice if stomping on an enemy gave more of a bounce than it does. That way, you wouldn't be completely screwed when you were facing a huge line of enemies. You could just bounce from one to the next, and that would extend the playability of the game. Also, I wouldn't make the ladders hurt you when coming up. I feel like that's a pointless annoyance.

beepyeah responds:

the king used to have more bounce and people also complained about that. personal taste, i guess.

i like the pointy ladder bit!

[Valhalla Bound]

It's pretty fun. Kind of takes the dignity out of that funerary ritual (I'm aware it's not real, but the idea has dignity). I like how Odin cares more about the ships than the souls.

I think this game does need tutorials, but there's a lot of room for improvement. The ones you have are slow, non-interactive, over-explain some things and under-explain others. Most of the things in the tutorial could have been explained in-game, with a "shoot here" crosshair the first time you encounter a specific monster. I had no idea what to do when it was raining until I saw your explanation in response to another review.

I don't think you're getting complaints because people don't want things explained at all, but because your tutorials are tedious and completely break the pace of the game.

Avizial responds:

This is great feedback! I think you hit the nail on the head.

We have plans to completely overhaul the automated tutorials in a future update. However, for this current update (1.3.7) we implemented a help guide in the title screen that briefly and concisely informs the player on how to play the game.

We originally created the tutorials for the mobile market in mind. Especially for the casual gaming market. We now realize that many players on Newgrounds are skilled enough to understand basic game mechanics without so much hand-holding.

Thanks for playing our game! We hope to hear from you in future titles.

[Guild Dungeons 2]

A really interesting idea, but room for improvement.

I played the first game, and this one is an improvement over it in a BIG way. It provides a lot more information than the first game did about, eg leader and unit abilities, the difficulty curve was smoother, and I experienced far fewer total party kills.

That said, some of the problems from the first game remain. The city-building part is pretty poorly designed. Even the layout makes it very difficult for a new player to tell which buildings are "low end" and which are "high end". The resource rates are way too slow at the beginning of the game, and building a hundred hovels right away works too well. I suggest you consider dropping the city game entirely and focusing on questing.

The quest system is a really original and fun concept. However, I think the after-action reports in this version are a little too brief. Ideally, they should read like a story. I think a greater focus on the quest system with more special events would be a nice way to expand on this concept.