Score: 3

"Tutorial needs to be a real tutorial"

submission: Armored Corps: Deluxe

date: December 21, 2009

I am never a fan of games where the tutorial isn't actually a tutorial. You can't actually play with the controls until you are in battle, and then you can't get help walking through the controls. I also hate WASD games that do not also accept direction arrows as an alternate. Just too many fussy controls and not enough of a playground to get to learn how to use them to be enjoyable. Sorry.

Score: 6

"Eh... Ok."

submission: World of Pain RPG: C3

date: December 8, 2009

A couple of good things:
%u2022 Depth of play is decent. There are a lot of levels, equipment and so on.
%u2022 Pretty simple interface.
%u2022 Graphics are fairly good. Not "Wow!" but nice.

Now for the not-so-good stuff.
%u2022 The music is annoying after the first five seconds.
%u2022 The quest log does not tell you where you really have to go (what person do you need to turn the quest into), so you can fill up your log with a lot of quests you can't figure out where or how to complete. You should be able to pop open a window to see who gave you the quest, who you need to turn it in to, and so on.
%u2022 Magic seems very, very feeble compared to the simpler combat options, such as getting a nice sword. Other than "heal," I didn't use magic much at all.
%u2022 A heck of a lot of "grinding" is necessary to level your character. Always good for chewing up hours, but also gets annoying.

For all that is wrong with the game, there's definitely some good basic game play here. I gave it 6 of 10. Fix the music, and make the quest log more friendly, and you can get to 8 of 10 easily.

Score: 3

"Makes no sense"

submission: Dawn of the Hulker

date: December 6, 2009

I can kind of get what the game was supposed to be about, but it made no sense. The font is hard to read. The instructions are minimal. The music is intrusive and way too short of a loop to be enjoyable. The game commands are confusing and opaque.

Score: 10

"Well-Done!!"

submission: Ge.ne.sis

date: November 9, 2009

Good game play, though I find it a bit difficult to keep up with the increasing threats without being able to level up against random encounters. If you fall behind early and get your characters killed off (thus, I believe, depriving them of XPs and leveling), you'll be paying for it throughout the game later. Which means that you'll likely replay the game at least once to "get it right."

Score: 6

"Difficult control with WASD -- prefer arrow keys."

submission: Juggerdome

date: October 25, 2009

The mech was difficult to pilot. It kept sloshing around. Also, splitting the fire between the space bar and the mouse button was annoying. It would be better to have two side-by-side keys, or keep everything on the mouse button.

Targeting was difficult, and the mech kept slewing left-and-right even when those buttons were not being pushed. Was there a sort of recoil or just some random movement?

Not really very enjoyable, though I stuck with it for a few levels to see if anything was interesting.

Score: 5

"Couldn't figure out the path-puzzle."

submission: Life Ark 4

date: October 24, 2009

The puzzle with the paths was rather non-sensical. The walkthrough didn't really explain what was going on. The numerical sequences didn't have any correlation -- least cost path? Odd/even numbers? If there was a pattern, it was rather subtle and non-intuitive. So I just quit.

Score: 8

"Keep getting an NaN travel time."

submission: Frontier

date: October 3, 2009

Other than this bug, it's a good game. But I keep getting a travel time of NaN.n, where I cannot get to the next city. Fix please!

Score: 2

"Bug: doesn't "paint" the screen"

submission: Occident Warrior

date: September 13, 2009

I had a problem where only the top left quadrant of the screen was painting.

That happened after I began the game and realized there was no way to "quit to menu," or to check what the keys were to fight once you were in battle. So I reloaded the page, and then thereafter I had the screen repaint problem.

So... Needs more error checking.

Score: 6

"Hrm."

submission: Elite Forces:Warfare 2

date: August 26, 2009

I kept trying different strategies for the single player mode, and no matter what I built, I was usually overpowered by wave 3-4. So I just gave up. Didn't really seem compelling.

Score: 7

"Destory"

submission: Knights Beasts & Magic

date: July 26, 2009

"Their sole purpose is to destory [sic] everything and everyone in their path."

It was a decent but uninspired defense game. Not enough levels, and the levels were rather easy to master. The music was fair. I just felt like it could have used more variation and strategy. Minus a point for a typo to "destory" a game. I like narratives!