Drakonais's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[The Rise of a KING]

Potential, but not quite

Pros -
The attack and magic system work great. I like the freeze, poison, burn, shock effects. Good, solid system with a lot of potential. Too bad it didn't deliver.

I like the options of being a prick or a valiant knight. Too bad it didn't change anything in the long run. At least make a variable that adds up and gives you your good knight/bad knight title at the end. I was hoping that the use of either the good best sword or evil best sword could also add to this variable (I don't know much about coding in Flash, but throwing some +1's in there couldn't be too hard).

Con -
Weapon/Armor/Magic cost is way too low. I had the best sword and armor before the first mission was even through. Even though the game was short, I might play a little longer if I was aspiring to buy a sweet looking expensive scythe.

The weapon variance for damage and/or effectiveness is little to none. Mix it up: slow, but kickass mace, bow for distance, pike for multi-enemy hit, your choice.

All the vendors sold the exact same thing. Spacing items/spells out between towns would make for more variance. Hell, even make a spell or item a unique reward for doing something great.

Switching between armor/shields/weapons was completely unnecessary. Especially for the armor/shields with special elemental defense, seeing as there was one element-using enemy for each type in the entire game. If, say, I were entering a volcanic den, with all kinds of fire attacks, I might switch armor. Maybe make some armor heavier than others (decrease agility, but raise def)? I do like the blocking aspect of the game, but there was hardly a reason to do so.

Enemy difficulty was pathetic. The only reason I changed up my strategy of "push forward while swinging" was to block a fire hammer or jump a lightning bolt. All other enemies allow the hero to run behind their swings. I would eliminate the first backward swing in the combo to enhance difficulty. Or, hey, make only one weapon do the backward swing to increase variance!

Was there a limit to the number of potions you can carry? If there was, it was way too high. Should've been about 5.

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I only bother to say all this because it certainly had potential. I mean, granted all my criticism, I still gave it a 7 because had a lot of good in there. Good animation, makings of a decent system, but failure to apply effectively. I look forward to playing a sequel.

SeethingSwarm responds:

You have some good points there, and I have to say I agree with all of 'em. Thanks man, inspiring me to improve on my creations. In this game there were a lot of firsts for me. This was the first game for me with a shop system, a money system, a conversation-tree system, a pause button, a save option and the ability to switch armors, spells, swords etc. All this was the first time I've done any of those. Now that I've got them all under my belt, I can try to improve on them all as well as on gameplay. Oh yeah, and with the enemies, damn, I have always struggled to make proper enemies, and I try to improve every time off course. Hopefully next time I'll make some decent ones :)

Thanks for the review, very informative.

[MindFeed]

Can't see anything

I'm using the latest IE and when I open the animation, the background is white. I found the begin button and watched all that initializing stuff, but then it's completely white. Would've liked to actually play this.

K-Guare responds:

Try opening it in a Pop-Up, i think that worked
for somebody with similar problems.
Thank you for your error report, though! :]