RuneChart's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Nefarius - The Last Wizard (Updated)]

Has potential. Pretty fun time waster for a bit, but it definitely needs more work.

After a few playthroughs I noticed that the only real challenge came from the first phase of the round, when the slimes were spawning in. They keep spawning in your path and can be hard to avoid.

But once they've finished spawning, they're no threat to you. Just run in a circle blasting fireballs until you win.

The boots were the only thing that *sometimes* seemed to help you evade spawning slimes. Which means they were the upgrade that made the biggest difference, but a lot of the time it felt luck-based.

The wand made finishing off the horde after it was done spawning less tedious, which isn't without value, but doesn't make a huge difference in game difficulty. I tried to use it to blast a path ahead of me, but the slimes are bullet-spongey and come from multiple directions so it was better not to bother.

The book was useless. It chips away at the health of the slimes chasing you, but as I explained the ones behind you are no threat. Only the ones spawning in front of you.

The laser was worse than useless. It seems designed to kill a large horde, but again the horde chasing you is no threat, only the individuals in front of you. The fact that it froze you while it was working made it dangerous to use.

More enemy variety would probably improve the strategic depth. The only VS-like game I've played is Survivor IO, and in that one, the hordes WERE a threat. You could get cornered, or caught between hordes and some enemies could outrun you, so you couldn't just run in a circle forever.

I have a suggestion for an upgrade for the future: a spyglass that let's you see more of the playfield at once. Let to have more advance warning of slimes spawning in your path.

Anyways, I clicked on newgrounds hoping for a fun distraction, and this has been it for a couple of days, so I'm happy. Keep it up!

Snow-Hex responds:

Thanks for your comment RuneChart, believe me it's very useful this kind of comments and I'm glad to know that the game has been fun for you, we are aware of some of those points, we will make sure to fix/improve them to make the game more challenging and entertaining, again, thank you. 🥐

[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.