Yup; I've played similar games elsewhere. It does get repetitive quite soon, and I really need to be able to turn off the music. The repetitive track pales quite soon, and I'm listening ot my own music on another line -- this interferes.
Cute. Hard to win. Any sudden moves leave poor Steve lurching around. Gotta stay alive long enough to get ten glasses of water, I guess. So far, my high score is 65.
The game needs proper documentation. What are the rules of the game? What are the objectives? I see my icon and others in red and green. I've figured out that I'm supposed to run around the board without running into some (all?) of the other figures, and somehow "collect" a certain percentage of the board. Squares turn darker as I pass over them multiple times, but I don't know why. Why do the different perspectives matter? If it's just a matter of viewpoint for the playing surface, i should be able to set them outside the play time and then leave them while I'm running around the board.
Poor documentation, several potential problems in the design, and annoying sound that I can't turn off before the game starts. Please revise the game for a more usable experience.
Can someone explain why I can't wear a ring and a medallion at the same time? Does the game designer know the difference between a neck and a finger? No wonder "critical" hits don't work. :-)
Another bug: Fill up your inventory, go to a dead-end map area in an area below your level, and fight your way to the far end. Sit in a corner and wait for the monsters to come to you, picking up whatever you can, leaving the items that are new to the inventory. Soon enough, you'll be trapped: to continue with the game, you have to *destroy* something in your inventory to pick up a blocking item. Why can't I step over a shard, a berry, or a snake skin? I can certainly step over a live snake when I pass my pet.
On the other hand, building this blockade might be useful when needing to recuperate in the field. I haven't used a healing potion or antidote since about level 9.
I found another bug: "back stab" does not work as described. If I sneak up and stab a monster in the back, how does the monster get first hit and poison me? As far as I can tell, there's no difference among the different attack modes except for the amount of damage dealt out. Even a heightened chance of a critical hit doesn't really work: the critical hit doesn't disable the opponent in any way. Are you unclear on the concept of "critical"?
I didn't get very far: Live Messages brought up the MS "looking for a solution" box. I closed that, launched Paint, and the sim is now hung. Rebooted; a couple of the icons don't seem to do anything.
As I develop as a warrior, I should get better at clearing an area (so my return trip is easier) and at affecting things at a distance. Give me distance weapons and area blasts. Its' ridiculous for a level-20 warrior to keep taking time off from the main work to ferret out individual sand bugs, train a new pet for an hour of play time, and so on.
Again, step back and think about the overall flow of the game -- what am I supposed to get out of the whole thing? Start from there and try again. I'm going off to find something with a good line. I hope to see you here again next year.
Again, fix the movement problems. I can step over my pet scorpion, but I can't step over a fire shard on the way to kill a snake? I run to slash and burn a pair of monsters ... but my sand beetle side kick is in the way, and I suddenly can't leap his sorry carcass? The result is that I lose the initiative, lose my slash preparation, and then frantically hit the direction keys while the two venom vipers chomp my hapless pet.
C'mon ... I was teaching these algorithms to my 300-level students in 1981. DO your homework instead of trying to reinvent the wheel.
The physical development needs work -- this first-order questing was pretty old back when we were doing all of this with pencil-and-paper characters and rolling our own dice. Instead, have me quest for something in the grasslands -- then have it come back as one of three components I need to pass the glacier level. Perhaps I find a particular fire shard that is used to craft a semi-magic arrow.
When you take this from beta to production level, make sure you balance the gaming factors. One of the biggest joy-killers for me is farming the beach for an hour to collect the wild berries I need to sustain my pet for one good run towards the generator. This severely suggests that pets aren't worth it in the long run -- as does their vulnerability after hatching.
A lot of people have pointed out the potential in this game ... sure, if all you're worried about is the surface appearance. As far as I can see, nobody considered the high-level flow and gaming design. Thus, this turns into a week-long grind in six parts, with no resolution, no closure, ...
The art is nice, especially having each critter class with a different attack motion. The music gets wearing; after about three minutes, I turned off the sound on the computer -- you didn't' give me a way to turn it off within the game. In fact, there don't seem to be any environmental game controls. Anyway, I finally gave up waiting for the music to go somewhere. You can have a simple theme, but you really need complexity of some level to keep it from distracting from the game.
The foliage variations are nice; at least the areas are pleasant to look at.
First and foremost, what kind of play experience am I supposed to have? I'm working with two games at levels 11 and 14 -- but from what I see and read, the game has been *over* for at least three hours. All I have to look forward to from here is another four sections of the same grinding? Why bother? The goals appear the same in each area: there are two new critters: kill so many of each, and bring back so many skins. On the side, gather a fistful of the new magic pellet for a new magic attack, and so many of something else for a new physical attack. Once all that is done, bull my way through another area or two and stand next to the generator. It glows, and nobody gives a rip.
In the meantime, there are myriad mechanical flaws. The controls are clunky, the automated movement is broken is several respects (some of them fatal), and the conflict controls don't work well enough for even rudimentary tactics.
No dice, guys ... this is simply Evony / Civony in a slightly different wrapper. The trademarks are all there: over-busy interface, guild set-up, blatant appeal to male prurience, grammar errors, and cluelessness as to theme. Why am I supposed to perform a non-existent, Greek-based ceremony to help my Roman-themed city? What are all the Greek and Teutonic elements doing in my Roman architecture? Also, Hypatia was one incredible lady ... you'd better do your homework and upgrade her presentation skills before the history buffs laugh you into the sea ... assuming you can find the sea.
As I wrote (in part) when leaving Civony ... don't bother me until you've learned to do your homework. This simply reinforces my belief that you people don't really care about your image and credibility on my side of the interface.
I need the real-time processing bugs repaired to make this playable in the upper levels. For instance, I click twice on a monster to attack. My hero gets at least halfway there, but then stops and awaits further instruction. A couple other times, the "stutter step" left my pet (instead of the hero) fighting the monster in a 1-square alley, killing the pet.
Another problem is when I click on combat at a transfer pad: the software drops me onto the next island area instead of engaging in the combat. This already cost me one life when a pair of poison monsters were waiting on the other side of the portal.
It's bad enough to have a repetitive grind; don't compound the problem by wasting my time in the mechanics. This set-up has good potential: go back to square one, map out the gaming experience, and redesign from there. It won't take a lot, but there are several basics you need to get integrated and get correct.
YAGA (yet another grinding adventure). I have quests lined up, but I'm spending time, time, time on walking to and fro, fighting repetitive monsters, and collecting the same handful of items. The hints and instructions are thin -- for instance, once I've learned my first fire spell, how do I throw it? No such instruction -- I just have to grind until the spell slot happens to turn opaque (full intensity), which is off screen.
This stuff is fine for beta play, but really detracts from a production game.
I've been in the game for 90 seconds, and I still have no sense of purpose. It looks like I'm simply hitting "up" at the right time to dodge obstacles, space when I'm supposed to kill an arbitrary impediment. The one-sentence intro is not a story line.
Whatever this is supposed to entice me to buy, it failed. The designers need to play the Kongregate games on design purpose. Did you guys ever consider hiring John Salwitz?
Jijij2, since when is an average rating an "F"? It's simply silly to assume that your public school's grading scale applies to the rating system of someone else.
Heck, I took the Putnam exam twice. That's 12 problems, 10 points each. The first year I took it, the median score was *zero*, and the 12 points I got put me easily in the top 5% of math students in the nation. In that test, any non-zero score would have been a "B" by typical grading standards.
I've also had classes in which the prof tried to make the exams difficult enough that the median score would fall around 50%, and that was regarded as a medium-to-low B.
Jimbo: right after you pick up the second key, where you jump form one frame up through another, you need to continue off the right side into a block that has a small, backwards "L" in the upper-left corner. From there, jump *up* into a dead end. Hit the space bar there to suspend you in air.
Move the final key's frame underneath you and start again. I expect you should be able to finish from there.
YuriaTayde, you can tell which pieces fit if you simply look at the patterns of light and dark. If they match, the pieces fit. If they don't match, you'll get blocked (laterally) or die (vertically). This isn't bad programming -- it's your lack of attention.
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