Wall jumping in SkullFace is a nightmare. When the developer needs to apologize for a mechanic in advance, you know something's wrong. After more than 4 years, why are McMillen and Refenes still the only ones able to do this genre justice? Go spend 5 minutes playing Meat Boy right here on Kongregate. One thing Meat Boy does right that many just keep not understanding is to buffer your keypresses. If you press and hold jump in mid-air, then YOU JUMP AGAIN AS SOON AS YOU LAND. Games got this right in DOS. You don't have an excuse to get it wrong today. You just don't. In SkullFace, this is an issue for wall jumping, regular jumping, and rolling. If only that were the only issue with wall jumping. The "wall-stick" glues you to the wall with no real slide, so if you touch a wall at the wrong place, you're going to die or at least mess up your timing. To make matters worse, you can't even control the height of wall jumps. If this were longer and harder, I would rate more harshly. 2/5.
In the comments, you see some talking about an easy game, and others a hard game. The problem with Monster Legions (besides it being yet another of Nerdook's uninspired grinds with minimal interactivity) is that its difficulty exists in an unstable equilibrium. The problem is that the difficulty increases after every battle, and if you start struggling, the game just keeps going without you. I coasted through the entire game with a ranged strategy before discovering it totally fails against the Beast. As I tried to regear, each pass being ended by the Beast, my opponents started throwing around a mythic pantheon of high-level 4th and 5th tiers while I was still fussing with low-level 2nd and 3rd tiers. Meanwhile, I was punished for buying cards with a price that soared over 9000. As the game punishes you for failure, and these punishments then make you fail, the initially gentle campaign is easily sent into a death spiral. Also, Balrogs still take damage from flames. 1/5.
After fighting with the brokenness of Music Catch, all four badges for Music Catch 2 were a relaxing cakewalk. I got the hard badge on my first try while unlocking options. Almost everything that could be improved has been improved. It still suffers from weird scaling, but it's no longer game-breaking. It still suffers from performance-dependent shape generation, but it's so generous that it doesn't matter. Dramatically more shapes are produced, evening out chance effects, and exactly one "yellow madness" shape is usually produced early, further tempering any luck aspect. You also now have the ability to select options that are fairer than the original rotating stage, which blindsided you with offscreen red shapes. All in all, a good game, improved further by MP3 support. Irritatingly, MP3s aren't buffered and they're downloaded every time they're played. I'd prefer to load MP3s from my computer. Badge hunters take note: radar is the highest scoring pattern, due to purple power. 4/5.
As everyone else has been saying, Music Catch is entirely too luck-based. But it's secretly even worse than that: it's highly dependent on computer speed. If your computer is too slow, the hard badge is impossible. Not "Kongregate impossible". Impossible impossible. Try running a CPU-intensive process on the same core (you can set the affinity of both processes if your OS isn't Mac). Although this game uses very little CPU and it's synchronized with its music anyway, you'll notice less shapes of all kinds are produced. I was able to slow it down such that it only gave me 9 yellows. Broken. To add insult to injury, you can't even zoom in or out, because elements won't scale correctly. In particular, the line on the rotating stage will be shoved off to a side, making the game unplayable. Of course, the stage isn't even well centered at no zoom. TL;DR: zoom to 100%, right click to set low quality, and hope your computer is fast enough. The music is nice, but the game is garbage. 1/5.
There is little to add to the vigorous volcano of vitriol already spewing forth toward what is clearly a bad game. The fact that this game is bad, is an immutable fact I am stating for the record. It does not mean inability is what is taking place here. I have the impossible badge for Vertigo, as well as for both Meat Boy games. Vertigo isn't hard; it's broken. Sporting inconsistent hitboxes, erratic controls, frame-specific timings, and HUD hide-and-seek, the whole game is a lesson in fake difficulty, and earns a solid 1/5 even before its myriad bugs are considered. I have no sympathy for yet another developer whimpering that they lost their source code, as if the countless others that came before had no lessons to teach. If Dropbox is too arcane, you could just email yourself the source. No, the reason you had no backups is that you simply didn't care. So why should players? This abandoned abortion is not only undeserving of badges, it's undeserving of hosting. 0/5.
With only 470 hard badges awarded out of 21,889 medium badges awarded, something is wrong here. The problem with Dillo Hills is that the supposed player has very little control over the outcome. I am tired of unavoidable thunderclouds and vast expanses of gently rising slopes. If you can avoid landing on a gentle slope, launching off of one can give you such a low and flat trajectory that it becomes impossible to grab a downhill roll. If you do wipe out, it is difficult to start back up because you will both overshoot the next valley and undershoot the next peak. In zones 9 and 10, the final zones, you will constantly lose speed and happiness to an invisible wind, so you need to start with 5x happiness and race through to the end before you run out of steam. Contrary to some advice, crystals are helpful in the final zones, because they give you that "crystal boost" you've been upgrading. The longer I was played by this game, the lower the rating became. 1/5.
Good feedback, and I agree with pretty much everything you said. I also think 400k is a bit too high for a hard badge (something in the ballpark of 350k or even just reaching the end might have been more appropriate), but alas, I don't pick those numbers. We've definitely tried to remove a lot of the other frustrations you mentioned for the sequel, especially unavoidable obstacles, the weird difficulty curve (1-8 are boring, then 9 and 10 are unforgiving), and how difficult it is to regain momentum after a crash.
Everything about this game is just arbitrarily bad. Not being able to move backward, even under the effect of gravity, is a lazy game mechanic. Having invisible checkpoints placed at the inscrutable whim of the author, without being able to return to before a checkpoint, makes collecting all the bubbles unnecessarily difficult. Even which obstacles kill you on contact is arbitrary. In location 7, visually identical crystals of floor and ceiling close in diagonally; the ceiling ones kill you even if you land on top of them, whereas you can be crushed underneath the floor without dying. In location 8, you ride across a bridge of spikes that would kill you anywhere else. By fashioning its entire experience around precisely memorizing arbitrary strategies with degenerate controls, this game distills decades of bad game design into a product of pure malice. This is the E.T. of Flash games. It didn't even give me a scarf on my second playthrough for the hard badge. 1/5.
1/5 isn't a low enough score for this glitchy unfinished trash. Shame on Kongregate for making it part of a challenge. Any further critique would be worth more than the content in this "game". 0/5.
Challenges are usually easy. 10,000 exp is less than half the medium badge, so I figured I'd have time to get it. I was wrong. After spending about an hour in total watching tiny men slowly crawl across the screen, slowly battle other tiny men, and slowly take over strongholds, I have about 5000 exp to show for it. Oh, and it's not lag; check the CPU usage. There's artificial game length, and then there's just fraud. When you examine the "upgrade tree" (and I use those words very loosely), you can see that there's almost no content whatsoever, and yet the locked game speed means at least 10 hours of solid waiting. Hopefully the sequel is as slow to develop as this game is to play, so we'll never have to suffer it in this lifetime. Also, the game mechanics are garbage. 1/5.
I have enjoyed bridge building games, but this is not one of them. Quoth the author (regarding the first Cargo Bridge), "I know that physic is not perfect. It is my 1st game so please be understanding. In further game I will use other physic engine to solve those problems. Thanks…" Here we are, 3 years later, and Cargo Bridge 2 still has the same broken physics, and it still grows laggy if not refreshed. That connections still can't be adjusted is crazy. That components are now hidden behind a tiny plus symbol is absurd. It's 2012 and we get an interface LESS accessible on touch devices. Consumable powerups bought with nonrenewable coins only serve to make a bad game worse, and rewarding a set number of coins both for completion and for improved score is a perverse incentive to play as badly as possible. In the words of wbenfold, "Got an awesome, unbeatable score first time round on a level? Tough, no more coins for you." In the words of Newgrounds, "Blam this piece of crap!" 0/5.
I Love Traffic is a frustrating disaster of fake difficulty. There is a reason that controlled intersections in real life are not built this way. Can you imagine if traffic sensors needed to be psychic? "Oh, but that's the challenge!" Yes, and it's a fake challenge. When you're controlling lights only along one axis of an intersection, and the other axis doesn't yield, you have to predict and hope you can get through. Too many semis, a badly timed speeder, or a light arbitrarily distant from the intersection? "You caused an accident!" A sudden influx of traffic on a mysteriously short length of road? "You backed up traffic too much!" Too few cars produced on your road? "You ran out of time!" No. No. No I didn't. Progress in this game is functionally random, disguised with an insulting illusion of agency and corresponding responsibility. Also, there's no level select, no quality setting, and the performance is inexplicably bad. 1/5.
Wings of Genesis is an okay shooter with some interesting RPG mechanics. It is presented as a side story to Ge.Ne.Sis, a promising tactical RPG series unfortunately abandoned after its first chapter. Like Ge.Ne.Sis, Wings of Genesis suffers from no respecification paired with a surprise level cap. If you make the right choices, the endgame is a cakewalk, but if you make the wrong choices, you have to start over. The good news is that there's a comprehensive official strategy guide. The bad news is that the guide no longer works because it downloaded content from a now-dead resource. 3/5.
The reason this guide no longer works is because it's just a frontend for data that used to be downloaded from www.1manstudio.net/wog/guide/xml/, which is now a dead link. The pages at game.1manstudio.net and www.1manstudio.net/genesis/forum/ still exist, but this seems incidental, considering the author disappeared without statement 19 months ago. Many files related to Ge.Ne.Sis later vanished when the website was revamped as a professional portfolio. Life happens. Priorities change. I'm okay with that. Nevertheless, legacy support files could have remained in place, and the indefinite disinterest shown by the author is somewhat less than impressive. 1/5.
This claustrophobic arena shooter presents a clunky aiming system that aims to be "unique", but (like your ship's gunner) it misses the mark, and where it lands is only uniquely frustrating. Because the energy mechanic doesn't let you fire continuously (and thus retain mouse focus by holding down the button), your ship will inevitably stop chasing your mouse when you are cramped near edges of the screen. To add insult to injury, the player is burdened with an unforgiving hitbox that's actually larger than the ship sprite. Meanwhile, those chaser enemies that fade in can actually spawn right on top of your ship, breaking your chains without warning. While the game engine remains impressive, the resulting gameplay experience is disappointingly inferior to the excellent Voidgale Arena, a previous game by the same author. 3/5.
Bad dialogue, bad story, bad execution. This game is too easy, but also too long. It's just too slow, and not only watching monsters dodge or waiting for battle rewards to trickle in; even using training items is turned into a grind. I could talk about stats, skills, balance, or all the monsters the player can never use, but more important are the glitches. So many glitches! Here are some I have experienced. (5) Your rivals' monsters remain weak, while the "monster battle" monsters are overpowered and give no experience. (4) If you change game screens, any "monster battle" will be gone. (3) If you touch an item in your inventory, but don't use or sell it, it will later disappear. (2) Practicing for training consumes a week each time. (1) The save file can just stop working; it's not that the .sol file disappears, but that the game refuses to update it. Bad game. Worst badges. Monster Arena is not even beta quality, and I do not await "the next installment". 1/5.
Great game, but there were a few annoyances. The game automatically pauses when focus is lost, which is fine, but doesn't unpause when focus is returned, which is particularly silly while in a mouse-driven menu. Unexpected easter eggs can be accidentally dismissed with no way to see them again. The trophy descriptions in the Ancestor Records are incomplete, with no way to review the text you see when you initially receive one (and which usually explains why you've received it). Finally, I found the game intermittently hiccupped, pausing for a second or two. The more entities (like projectiles) that were being created and destroyed, the more frequently it hiccupped. The strange thing is that this seems to have no correlation with either memory or CPU use; the game just takes a break.
Memo to everyone voting me down: notice that I do have the hard badge. My criticism is not some misdirected rage. I have played the game enough to know what I'm talking about. I'm sorry that people so dislike what I have to say.
When playing a supposedly skill-based game, I ask myself if a computer player could perform better (since computers excel at pure skill games); if the answer is no, then the game is actually luck-based. After 10 minutes, I was as good as I was going to get, and then I was just waiting for the random number generator to give me 350 meters of favorable spike placement. Some spike placements ARE impassable, because even the slightest tap still makes you go up, and sometimes you CAN'T slide down. Such arrangements "could" be passed if hit with enough speed to do a high jump, but you won't know that until it's too late; if this version has "Improved visibility ahead of player", I'd hate to see the original version. Making the laser accelerate with time (rather than height) is a perverse mechanic that encourages a mad rush through the early meters. The game is very well developed for 72 hours, but is ultimately just frustrating. 2/5.
After playing briefly, my intention was to rate this game 3/5. After finally getting the hard badge, I rated it 1/5. This is an honest rating because I honestly hated it by the end. I would say the hard badge should be impossible, but really this game doesn't deserve badges at all. The game is not hard so much as it is stupid, and there are a few basic problems: (1) the tail is too long and too unresponsive; (2) the locational damage of armor and blades abuses the sloppy control; (3) powerups are far too rare; (4) objects dart in from nowhere at random times and random speeds; (5) the claustrophobic screen has too little space to maneuver. These are all examples of Fake Difficulty, and the game is far too reliant on luck. Futility is having swarmers spawn directly on chunks of tail, and this perfectly encapsulates the Oroboros gameplay experience.
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Good feedback, and I agree with pretty much everything you said. I also think 400k is a bit too high for a hard badge (something in the ballpark of 350k or even just reaching the end might have been more appropriate), but alas, I don't pick those numbers. We've definitely tried to remove a lot of the other frustrations you mentioned for the sequel, especially unavoidable obstacles, the weird difficulty curve (1-8 are boring, then 9 and 10 are unforgiving), and how difficult it is to regain momentum after a crash.