ScarletLotusProd's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Fruity Tower]

The gameplay feels really good. Gunplay feels punchy and enjoyable. I am also a sucker for dynamic music, and really like the soundtrack. I like that you can bail out any time, so there's no pressure to complete a floor and risk losing your progress unless you get greedy. The art is a little goofy but it's charming.

It's a little hard to see with the low contrast sometimes, an accessibility feature would be very welcome. Also a bit more variance in the guns, many of them felt kinda same-y especially in late-game progression. The boss is also surprisingly easy compared to the floors below it, but that's kind of symptomatic of this genre of game and not necessarily a dig on you.

Overall very enjoyable!

[Tricky Keys 2]

Rather good mechanics, relatively intuitive, takes me back to when we used to use Scratch in our programming seminars in middle school. Really have no criticisms, nothing was super hard but everything still required some thinking and experimenting.

[Maerl Bay]

Overall rather cute and fun. A minor issue that winds up being a big problem in gameplay is that the pictures collected meter is so large that it obscures most of the top right corner of the screen, which essentially forces you to avoid climbing to the surface in that direction.

[Auto Necrochess]

Very much enjoyed playing through this, although I think the progression could use some work. If you destroy the castle too quickly it becomes basically impossible to defeat the final wave. A good work around for this might be to give the player extra coins whenever they add a bone to the cauldron? Additionally, the only way I have been able to beat the game is with a summon + bard combo, anything else I've died at the final stages with. It'd be nice if some of the stat-focused units leveled up a bit more strongly. I think what would be most helpful is allowing you to upgrade a Level 2 unit with just one additional Level 1 unit, rather than requiring you to combine two Level 2 units. That would make it much more viable to use units that don't spawn other units.

Overall a great game though, would be interested in seeing something like this as a full game with more fleshed out skill trees, additional levels, etc.

[Kobold Siege]

There's a delay between shooting and regaining movement control that is a nightmare to deal with. Also was not a huge fan of the camera. The hitboxes on some of the larger enemies are also wonky, and aimed shooting is clunky and doesn't work at times. The control scheme is also a little rough around the edges, it would've been nice if the "parry" and "jump" buttons were shared instead of mapping the parry to aim. Since the parrying gives you extra jump height it would make more sense that way anyway.

The level progression feels good though, and for the most part combat was enjoyable. Overall a pretty good game and kept me entertained for a few hours!