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Tomorrow, I am sure you will get first place daily and first or second place weekly. Promise.
Reviews for "Level Up!"
Solid Game
There's a lot of heart in this game.
Simple gameplay, with plenty of detailed sprites in the background. The music fit right in with the retro theme. Even has some interactions with townsfolk and mini challenges to complete.
The Nightmare touch was pretty sweet-giving players a sense of frustration over losing their abilities in a very difficult battle.
But that part is actually a cinch if you have at least dash, double jump, hardiness, regeneration and high levels in healing, relationship, fortitude, and jump. As it's all a matter of luck whether the meteors rain down on the Shadow or not, all you do is dash from one side of the room to the other in a game of keep away, staying in the air and along the ledges on the sides to evade. If you get hit, then find somewhere safe and remain idle so regeneration kicks in. Without some of those abilities, it's a much tougher, if not impossible fight.
Didn't experience that computer room glitch when I played. But I experienced a different freeze (described below)
Some things of concern:
Why don't the medals work? I'm logged in. In fact, for some of the medals, the medal window was popping up like mad along the bottom of the screen. And to think I got all the gems, finished the game, beat the boss, and all that stuff. It could be a browser issue (I used Opera), but I've acquired medals from other games using it. Perhaps, I'll try again some other time.
The sky remains the same color throughout the entire day. You could have made a color changing sky, as it's weird for things to be so sky blue in the late evening.
Normally, you end up going down to the tunnels first because of inadequate jump ability. There are some people who would gift the girl with some upgrades if she does some challenges. But the only one I really got from the bottom guys was the Hardiness one. You simply have to get damaged 5 times to get it for free. That's as easy as air recovering from the lava just nearby to the right 5 times.
Why was it so pointless to do challenges? Because it's way too easy to get the permanent upgrades, as they are buyable in the upper areas. And if you're exploring as you should, you are basically picking up gems all the time even.
Maybe if there were two levels of the upgrades (like lv 1 double jump in which the extra hop is less than a lv 2 double jump).
After getting the upgrades, the open-ended exploration feeling became a little too boring. Open-ended means that there are sidequests to do and stuff to see. Here, to get 100%, it's just filling the codec, grabbing all the gems, and getting all your upgrades at 5 so that you can finish the game. I suppose it's the best that a small flash game can do, though, and the initial moments of exploration were wonderful.
Why did it freeze up on me after I spoke to the boy after beating the game? It was a dialogue about her talking about the flaming sword and such.
Console window opened up a lot during the game. Particularly when I jammed on the directional keys on instinct (to shake dizzies, that is, even if it doesn't help in this game at all). Of course, they can be closed with the ~ key, and isn't a big issue with those who play the game correctly.
Well, the ending was an "Oh really?" moment for me (meaning that I wasn't so impressed.) Then again, you can write anything about an amnesiac hero, so it's
easily overlooked.
titch007uk responds:
I'm attempting to address the problems with the medals. Since this was my first game with them there was plenty of scope for things to go wrong and unsurprisingly they did. It's interesting to see with Nigthmare that some people 'get it' and others don't.
I wasn't entirely happy with the skill challenges, which range from mad hard (the dash and double jump ones) to mad easy (regen and toughness). At one time the game was going to have real sidequests, they just got cut because of time. They aren't -entirely- pointless, speed running to get a day 0 victory is reliant on being able to do a few of them, but still not what would have been ideal.
I've disabled the console key. It's easy to forget that some people use the num pad and the 1 key is so close to the arrows on it. Thanks for all your feedback, I'll keep it in mind in future.
I found a glitch.
I was in the computer room, and after talking to it (it told me I wasn't high enough level to restore my memory yet), my game froze. Well, not completely frozen; the game can still pause but the game screen itself is competely motionless. Very frustrating.
Still, it was a pretty good game, and you don't find those too often out on the "under judgment" flash portal, so I'll give you an 8. Good job!
Hah! I was just thinking about this the other day.
When you mentioned it to me in the pub months back, this is pretty awesome :)
An excellent, well-rounded game worthy of a 10
Wow. Where to begin? What you have given me is one of the most spectacular free-roaming platformer RPGs I have ever played. Such brilliant games only come around once in a blue moon, and I don't give out 10s to games very often.
I'll start with the story. While it may be lacking, the fact that the game is a parody and you even bothered with a story is excellent. I liked the recurring nightmare idea, and while I felt the ending to be a bit weak, I'll be glad to see where it kicks off in the sequel.
Next, and this will probably be my longest part: The gameplay.
The sheer open-endedness of the game alone grabbed my attention when I started. I must've spent most of my game time just exploring the landscape to collect some of the many gems scattered about. There were many areas to unlock, tons of gems to collect, and oodles of trinkets and tidbits everywhere to hold my attention for well over an hour and a half. The NPCs were wonderful, and all had something witty to say, and the ideas for them were kooky and creative.
The leveling up mechanic was, of course, the highlight of the game, and I had plenty of fun getting my character up all of those levels. There's some sort of rush when you max your character out with full abilities. The recurring nightmare does take away all of your levels, but here's a nifty fact: It doesn't take away your purchased skills (double jump, dash, radar, etc.) It took me a good couple of days to finally max out my skills, though others might want to take longer to give the environment a good look.
The addition of medals was cool, but some of them glitched, and you might want to look into fixing that before adding them officially.
Each skill was unique and useful, and I felt you really did a perfect job with every bit of the level system.
On to music:
I felt that the music choice was very fitting for a game with pixel art like this, and it provided a great sense of atmosphere. Kudos to your musician.
The art was spectacular for pixel art, and the animations were very fluid. I can't wait to see what kind of things you'll put in the next game.
All in all, one of my favorite- no - my FAVORITE game on Newgrounds. Excellent job, you really outdid yourself, and I can't wait for any future games you might make.
titch007uk responds:
Thanks for your detailed review. It's so nice to see all this praise after all the work I put into Level Up!
The glitching medal is unfortunate. I'm trying to fix that at this very moment.