First of all, the memory leak. @Mentor31, you're relying on garbage collection, which I guess works differently in the browser. Solution: don't. Instead of creating a new entity every time an in-game object is created, just instantiate like 2000 entities and then RE-USE them. You're welcome. However, even on Kartridge, this game is simply not as good as the first one. The original was a delightful self-encapsulated experience that expanded like an incremental game. This one is more like an insipid mobile game, with boring upgrades between missions. Also, the balance is bad. After 3-starring the first level, I bought the three 1-star upgrades, and then proceeded to buy NOTHING for more than half the game. On the other hand, the last few challenges are almost impossible, and this is mostly due to broken mechanics. Knockback never procs? Dragon fire only deals damage on a small selection of random frames? Flyers fly over dragon fire? Fix your game. 2/5 on Kartridge, 0/5 here.
It's been a long time since I last left a comment on this dead website, but this BOTD really takes the cake. I have played many games here that are more frustrating than this one, yet Bubbles 2 is by far the absolute worst badged gamed I have played on Kongregate. The only thing making this game less frustrating than some of the others I have excoriated is that it doesn't even stoop to the pretense of blaming the player for randomly losing. It knows that it's random and it doesn't care. There's hardly any player agency at all, and what little agency does exist is degenerate in nature. There's an essential, archetypal, almost primordial garbageness to the design of this experience. It is less a "game" than it is the *idea* of a game, a lazy scenario one might contrive as a test case for a hobby deep learning algorithm. If I could give this a score below 1/5, I wouldn't hesitate. -1/5.
So many bugs. To avoid save file problems, refresh the page frequently. Gunball Reloaded (like many other Flash games) writes to the .sol file on your disk only when it unloads (when you close the page normally), so if it crashes, all your progress that session is lost. Why does it crash? A massive memory leak! Every stage takes at least 100 MB to run, and that memory is never freed, so after 10 stages in a session it's holding an extra 1+ GB of RAM. Depending on your RAM, it can take anywhere from 20 to 400 stages before your OS runs out virtual memory to allocate, and then the game crashes. Regarding the game itself, I was smitten by the art design. The cute intro is a refreshing departure from the broken English story premise of the previous two games, and I laughed the first time I saw a level-up. Unfortunately, the gameplay leaves me wanting. Melee weapons are trash now, so ignore them until Plague Sword. Vampire Sword does nothing: zero damage, and the +health is fake. 2/5
I wouldn't ditch the power of the GPU for a few technology stragglers like me. I've played other Flash games that use the GPU and when it works, it works really well. It's obviously the future, and it probably makes authoring for other platforms like Steam easier as well. I've heard that Windows 8+ has serious performance issues with the original Steam release of Binding of Isaac because it uses Flash software rendering with ActionScript 2. I'm sure you know as well as anyone that Flash software rendering scales poorly with graphical complexity. That I can even sustain 60 fps on this toaster (with the appropriate setting) before I hit the lag wall is really good for Flash. I just now tried disabling hardware acceleration in Firefox (right click on the preloader -> settings) and the beach issue is gone, but in return I'm getting like 12 fps (still better than Chrome's Pepper Flash). An option to lower the antialiasing quality would be great (because 800x600 at High ≈ 3200x2400).
Hmm, yeah, I'll have to play around with anti-aliasing and other stuff, and see if there's any other options I can use to improve performance a bit. Very few of the beta testers had performance issues, so I assumed things were fine.
Here's some more information related to my previous comment. I'm on an old Windows XP laptop with a Core 2 Duo T5500 CPU and Intel Integrated 945GME GPU. I realize that this is an outdated edge case, and it might not be worth the time to investigate. Windows XP is after all no longer supported. However, I suspect that what I've encountered may be a more severe manifestation of the lag complaints some other comments have reported. Performance might be improved for a number of people if it's possible to identify some misbehaving operation and just avoid it on some or all platforms (since the game works fine everywhere else, and otherwise proceeds in the trouble area without any obvious graphical error, albeit at a slideshow pace). Incidentally, fiddling with the graphical options didn't help.
Thanks for the info. I think the problem is probably with the GPU - this is the first time any of my games have used it, and it may have been a mistake, as older ones don't work well with the game. Sorry about that, but there's probably not much I can do at this stage. ):
My future games will probably go back to regular Flash CPU rendering.
This was reasonably enjoyable, until I reached the second area (the beach). Once the first enemy shows up, the game slows to ~1 fps, though the HUD still says ~30 or ~60 fps. Once the lag shows up, it affects the whole system even when the game is paused, but disappears when I return to the menu. This randomly happens earlier, but in area 2 it's unavoidable. Process Explorer reports full core saturation with red (kernel mode) CPU use. It appears to be a rogue script (busy loop hammering a dropped hardware call?). It happens in Firefox (where hardware rendering works), but in Chrome (software rendering only) the game is just equally unplayable everywhere. For what I could play, Bullet Heaven 2 feels kind of empty compared to its predecessor. All the flavor mechanics are locked behind "cheats", so playing for medals feels like "No Items, Fox Only, Final Destination". No upgrades (and weak costumes) means you can't enhance characters, so Natalie and Lance will always be terrible. 3/5.
If the remastered version is made with Unity, why isn't the web demo delivered with the Unity web player? Hacking this together in Flash didn't work out very well. This Flash demo performs worse than the original Flash game, especially in the opening cutscene, where it uses a lot of blurs and gradients and transparency and moving debris. Bosses are underwhelming, as there's no penalty for getting hit by their cheesy attacks. It's almost impossible to avoid the missiles from the flying saucer unless you just stand on the far left. The giant enemy crab can't attack you at all if you stand on the far right. The sharktopus just sits there and lets you hose it down. Through it all, the music drowns out the voices (of which there are fewer than the original). Not impressed. 2011 No Time To Explain on Kongregate: 4/5. This demo: 1/5. It looks like I missed the opportunity to play a non-terrible Unity demo, and this Flash demo actually reduced my desire to check out the full game on Steam.
If you want the hard badge, buy only artillery and nothing else. It only takes 4 hits to pop the air balloons, so upgrading the nail really isn't necessary. I bought only the artillery, and still I took no damage. Be aware that the nail deals damage only when it's moving down and/or left, to simulate a poking motion with its graphic. Enemies per day and gold per enemy are both random, as you can see in how the spoils of the first level can be anywhere from 1600 to 2100. That's a big spread. I finished on day 11, with slightly more than 4000 gold remaining, which is just barely enough to afford the golden nail. It was clear that I could have wound up with less than 4000 gold, if I had to use slightly more artillery shots, or if I received slightly less gold from enemies. So don't buy the golden nail. As for my review, Shore Siege is a reasonably fun diversion which ends just before it wears out its welcome. 3/5.
« Solprovider’s better system: Virus. Cuba, Greenland, Madagascar, or New Zealand. Buy Sneezing, Coughing. If Madagascar, buy Vomiting. Buy Moisture1, Heat1, Cold1. Sell Sweating. When non-starter region @4K infected, sell Vomiting; @8K, sell Coughing; @30K sell Sneezing. Wait for all infected. Buy in order: Drug4, Coughing, Hemorrhaging, Pulmonary Edema, Diarrhea, Kidney Failure, Hypersensitivity, Fever, Fatigue. Full details @ http://www.kongregate.com/forums/3/topics/34897 » Solprovider should be the one with over 9000 upvotes. I won on my third try with this strategy after starting in Cuba (disease name Capitalism!). I skipped coughing at the start because buying and selling it seemed wasteful, and those 7 points saved did help at the end. I kept sneezing slightly longer than suggested. All regions were infected (Argentina last) after 24 days, and all were exterminated after 74 days. 3/5 for luck-based gameplay, boosted to 4/5 for cultural impact. Shut down everything, indeed.
Forget luxuries like group selection. Pixel Legions would be more playable if your units simply followed your orders. You must babysit every squad because each will run off and chase squirrels to the far corners of the map, and the only way to override the sticky AI is to rapidly direct a squad over and over. This focused clicking (combined with no group selection) makes it impossible to direct multiple squads simultaneously. Unless you're the AI, of course, which thankfully doesn't exploit its advantage. The strategy and tactics are very straightforward, and the game mechanics are tolerable all the way to the medium badge, but "fair play" is thrown out the window in the luck-based missions for the hard badge. In level 28, you may be dead before the game gives you control. Also, some maps ARE zoomed out, which means the slow scroll on others is intentional for "difficulty". Real difficulty is Dostoyevsky. Fake difficulty is "Dick and Jane", in Klingon. Which one is this? 1/5.
The previous installments in this series were mediocre at best, but this one is just atrocious. Why is it even slower than previous ones? Why is it even more on rails (no backtracking, no exploration, final destination)? Why are levels 13 and 14 broken ("hurr durr go faster", says a curiously clueless developer)? Why do you get attacked while frozen during cutscenes? Why do stores cheat you out of purchased items? Why does the flare gun freeze the game? Finally, why hasn't the author reached out to a native English speaker to edit the dialogue? It doesn't really matter because the gameplay is garbage. "Favorite weapon" is a joke because you have no control over it. As others have pointed out, later levels rely on unlimited respawning because the game is not balanced to be winnable without dying (die rarely and see how much excess money you accumulate). Zombotron 2: Time Machine is an insult to Kongregate. My rating kept going down until I wished there was a score below 1. 0/5
I seem to be getting voted down, while people are saying the hard badge is totes easy, bro. None of my friends have it, but okay. Do you think I didn't read any comments before lobbing forth my own loquacious commentary? Yeah, I know you "can" get the hard badge on level 20, just like you "can" win the lottery. Good for you. It's still easier and more reliable to get the hard badge when there aren't loads of enemies and missiles on screen. I initially followed the advice to hug the walls, and while it's a good strategy for staying alive, it doesn't guarantee zero damage, and in that it didn't really help me get the hard badge. If an enemy sends a missile directly into your face, you might get caught between the wall and a carpet of missiles. I eventually got the hard badge the way I suggested. Either way, you're reliant on random enemy patterns, and that means luck. I thought that was a bad thing, but I guess I'm alone in that opinion. As usual. 6/5 needs weekly challenge.
Nope. You don't get to demand 100 chance events in a row. Many enemies fire many missiles that herd the player down randomly manifested paths that may or may not lead to a dead end. This conflicts with the game mechanic where the only way to destroy an enemy is to guide missiles into it. As a result, the player is frequently presented with situations where a focus on dodging precludes the destruction of enemies. No amount of skill will see you win a game that doesn't let you, and I hold special disdain for those games that try to make the player feel at fault for forces outside of their control. To add insult to injury, level 20 is suddenly far more difficult than all previous ones, and if the player dies they must play all the way through to try again. Dodge is a potentially good game undermined by senseless cruelty. Badge hunters take note: restart if you get hit within the first 8 levels; the hard badge only gets harder after that. 2/5.
The tutorial demonstrates meteor targetting on a Golem, the single giant immune to meteors; consider this foreshadowing. Meteors are ineffective against giants. The hero gets stuck if ordered to climb down from a giant. The hero ignores blocked orders rather than queuing them, so he must first stand up before he can be told to move. Towers are unbalanced. 5th level towers are worthless except for swordsmen. Stage strategies are overly tight. Mammoths survive for random distances, depending on how often they eject the hero. Mouse scroll is unresponsive and annoying. Saves were lost in an update (twice). Crashes remain unvanquished. Badges don't register immediately. ... Giants and Dwarves TD is an innovative tower defense game, and I appreciated the nods to Shadow of the Colossus (obvious) and endeavor (sky dwarves in Titans' Garden). Sadly, this game deserves more than the score I'm forced to give. Maybe next time you release a game, you will actually beta test it first. 2/5.
The original Cat God vs Sun King was mediocre at best, but at least it gave the player some degree of control over the outcome, providing an engaging spell system with a wide variety of manually triggered effects. Cat God vs Sun King 2 is dumbed down to the extreme, allowing the player to point and click and nothing else. The player can upgrade very few effects that will trigger at random, and some can actually work against the player by causing the victory condition to be met too quickly (never upgrade Firewall, or Emperor Offense 3). This game is categorically bad to the extent that it seems intentional, and as if that wasn't enough, it's also broken. It decided to stop correctly tracking the number of levels "completed", so now even having gold on all levels, beating the Epic Finale, and hearing the song, the song button remains locked and the Monarch Mow Down badge remains unawarded. I have 7 out of 9 "Levels Completed", and 2 were gold on the first try. Coincidence? 1/5.
The first game was zen. The next, depth out of balance. Now, disappointment. First 4, then 3, then 2/5. See Oroboros. Here lies fake difficulty. This path strays from joy.
It's one thing for a Flash game to have poor controls. It's another for a developer to say to themself, "self, let's abuse these poor controls in the most perverse ways possible". Whether it's small targets to hit with a clumsy portal gun aimed from third person, cramped spaces in which to swing around cubes and turrets, or portals and tunnels into which the character just doesn't feel like moving, this game's levels are intentionally constructed to take advantage of its inherent flaws. Severe clipping glitches can teleport the player and other objects, ruining attempts on certain levels. In the most frustrating glitch, a lot of people are still experiencing crippling control lag half a decade after release. I played this back in 2007, and it was all just as bad then, so you can't even blame Flash updates. Neither can you blame the year, because other games released in 2007 were not total wrecks. This is not strictly a bad game, but it is definitely a broken one. 1/5.
Oh look. Another atrocious shooter with a bigger-than-player-ship hitbox gets badges. After three (and a half?) iterations of the exact same game, this developer has learned less than nothing. Notebook Wars 3 Unleashed rejects the adage that "less is more", and the result is actually worse than the first Notebook Wars. The gameplay remains passable, but it relies heavily on random drops. Enemies in the last few levels take way too much damage (especially in hard mode), and the overstuffed shop blatantly lies to you (about both weapons and addons). This developer's apathy is eclipsed only by his cynical contempt for players, as he knows they will rate highly anyway. The worst part is that he's right. 1/5.
A short but fun bullet hell shooter, Red Fluxion is an overlooked gem. Like others, I discovered this during Kongregate downtime. The levels have a satisfying difficulty curve, and though some bosses seem too tight or too chaotic to realistically perfect, you're given so many lives that the game is less about winning than it is about excelling and enjoying. There is a lot of potential here that could be developed with more and more balanced upgrades, as well as more interesting stages before the bosses. 4/5.
Not good at dodging? Not a problem! Slowly grind your way to an anticlimax by upgrading your uninspired weapons and stacking the regeneration needed to survive. Pixelvader is a bullet hell shooter with a huge hitbox and undodgeable bullet patterns than can only be escaped using a scarce and unresponsive panic ability. Brilliant! 2/5.
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Hmm, yeah, I'll have to play around with anti-aliasing and other stuff, and see if there's any other options I can use to improve performance a bit. Very few of the beta testers had performance issues, so I assumed things were fine.