TharosTheDragon's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Knight and Prison of Ice]

I agree that the execution needs work. It seems like you were going for a roguelike. It needs more permanent upgrades, more loot drops, more variety, and faster progression. It's way too tedious to go through the same old identical rooms fighting the same old identical enemies over and over

[Botanica Demo]

Very impressive work. I love the music. Great vibes.

But how come you're trying to kill all these other plants and animals? Shouldn't you be friends?

[Lampyrinth]

Hey I found the bonus level in level 10! Interestingly, that made the game put 10 seconds as my best time for level 11. I assume it was supposed to count as one of the three bonus levels at the bottom of the trophy screen.

What the heck are the apple and orange trophies? If they're about getting all the food, wouldn't that just be one trophy?

Veinom responds:

I'm glad you asked. The Apple icon in the Trophy Room, lights up when you gather all the visible food. The Orange icon lights up when you have also have gathered the secret food in a level, and there's always a hidden diamond (except from level 0). There's a lot to discover and also yes, there are 3 hidden bonus levels.

[Walking Up]

There are so many gravity gimmick platformers like this (the most recent I can think of is Leap of Life Alone from last month) so you don't get a lot of points for originality. However, one thing I found to be pretty nice about this game is that you prevent players from pushing blocks up against walls so that they don't get stuck. Thanks for that :)

[Florisher]

I was able to get all perfect hard medals on my first try without ever killing a root branch so I think the game might be a bit too easy. If you don't kill any root branches, all of the plant types are exactly the same

amidos2006 responds:

The game suppose to be on the easy and relaxing side

[The Legend of Quintavius]

Is there an explanation for why your fallen comrades are alive and well in the next scene?

ImmanentDeath responds:

Not other than saying that they're "defeated," but not "killed." There's just the assumption that when you win a battle, your defeated soldiers are only wounded and will be fully healed by the time the next battle happens, probably with the help of the healer Quintavius.

It's not something I thought was important enough to address in this game, since the story is the main focus and it assumes a main character won't die when they shouldn't. Your allies are just tough, and when they fall they'll get back up and walk it off.

[Feathered Escape]

Ha ha, I accidentally beat the game with all the fruit without even knowing I could ceiling run and stuff because I didn't read the instructions :P

yokoboko responds:

Epic!

[Piñata Poppers]

I don't want to be mean since I did enjoy the game and I feel like you put effort into its charm, but if I'm being honest I have to award almost no points for originality. There have been a ton of suika games on Newgrounds lately and most of them have at least one thing that sets them apart. Your game might be the most generic of all. The only thing different about it is that there are fewer levels than usual, so I can get that happy feeling of making it to the end, but that's more like a missing thing than an extra thing. Also I guess there are multiple ways to handle getting to the end. I think Cthulhu Merge just prevents the top level animals from merging. Another approach would be to form higher levels automatically by doing something like making the balls a little bigger and changing the color a bit. Your approach is to allow two top-level pinatas to merge into one top-level pinata, effectively destroying one of them, so I guess that's something unexpected at least.

Also, I lost because an explosive merge sent a few smaller pinatas flying :P

Reply: Yeah Fit Cats has a mechanic that allows you to destroy cats, and Cthulhu Merge lets you devolve animals, so that kind of thing definitely can work. With pinatas you have a lot of possibilities. Pinatas are supposed to drop candy, right? Maybe you could get to break a pinata when you collect enough candy, though that would be kind of backwards. Maybe you could get a bat that you drop the same way you drop pinatas, so you could only break pinatas at the top. Maybe pinatas could have hit points requiring them to get hit multiple times. You could even get rid of the suika mechanic and just make a game about trying to bash pinatas against other pinatas hard enough to break them before they fill up to the top

UnitedFailures responds:

I appreciate the honest and well thought feedback :)

A mechanic we had like 50% working (and maybe I'll return back to it if I have a better vision for it) was to add the ability to break open pinatas. I wrote a shader and some custom code for the pinata breaking effect, and we were planning on you building up "charges" to activate "pinata breaker mode." In this mode, you'd move your mouse around on the pinatas and slightly hit them around and deal damage.

However, we realized this is hard to balance and disrupts the natural difficulty escalation of Suika game (think of the small pieces that get stuck and build up over time, now you can just essentially delete them) -- and could lead to seemingly endless playthroughs.

I would want to add some sort of "pinata breaking" mechanic to the game, and I think it would help give the game more of a unique flavor. If you have any suggestions or thoughts on that I'd be down to hear them :)

[To Kill A Fidel Castro]

Pretty tricky games. There needs to be like a practice mode or something. The penalty for failure is too high, having to restart and go through all the dialog again

[Boxling's Garden]

You sell the boxlings by talking to the drone.