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SergeantLuke

74 Game Reviews

18 w/ Responses

An absolutely spot-on tribute! You can even see the shadows of the sprites on the screen, just like the real thing! It's a very simplistic game, to be sure, but then again, these kinds of games really couldn't be any more complex than this.

ChrisKempt responds:

Thanks dude :) Glad you liked it. Sometimes I wish all games could be this simple!

I really hate giving a mediocre score to a game that clearly had so much time and effort spent on it, but man, Road of the Dead 2 just disappointed the hell out of me. I was already nervous when I saw it on the front page, as I thought that the first game was so great that nothing could possibly improve on it. Sadly, I was proven right: plenty of content is added to this sequel, but all of it only detracts from everything that made the original so fantastic.

On the one hand, I do have a certain appreciation for the game's premise, as the protagonists being soldiers allows for some fun minor callbacks to the first game, like the same radio conversations reappearing. But the soldier premise also, unfortunately, undermines the feeling of desperation and terror that the first game had. One single man driving a haphazardly-upgraded civilian car feels much more vulnerable than two soldiers driving an army Jeep with a whole horde of weapons in tow. The voice acting here is basically on par with the original, in terms of sound and acting quality, but I liked the first character a lot more. Sure, he had a lot of goofy lines and was totally flat (I'll confess I've completely forgotten his name), but his solitude and desperation still shone through, and you really got the sense that you were totally alone and had nobody to fall back on. It seems like this game's trying to give you that same sense, seeing as the sound design is just as chaotic and freaky, but you really can't feel scared when you have backup and loads of spare ammo.

The gameplay upgrades only make the game feel unfocused. The original's design was properly focused on the car, the title being "Road of the Dead" and all; you had barely any weapons and only used them as a last resort, with your true main weapon being the car itself as it plowed down zombies and soldiers at breakneck speeds. That was my favorite part of the game: Gathering up a ton of speed and getting into a long combo chain of demolished undead! But in the sequel, you can never go above 20 MPH (at least, it feels that slow) because you're always stopping every few feet. And once you do, you have to wait for your partner to slooooooooowly go to work at repairing the car or gathering ammo (how long could that possibly take, anyway?) while you shoot at zombies that are too damn hard to kill. If I had a penny for every time I got devoured by a zombie jumping into my car, I'd have a thousand dollars, and I only played the game for less than an hour.

At first, I figured that I'd only need to stop if I was running especially low on ammo or if the car was especially damaged, but I soon came to realize that happened ALL THE TIME! You basically need to stop at every single building, because if you don't, you will almost immediately run out of ammo, and since it's so hard to get up to an acceptable speed, you won't be able to kill enemies with your bumper and you WILL get eaten.

Like I said, there was clearly a lot of love poured into this game, and the presentation - music, graphics, voice acting, features - is absolutely top-notch. I do like that you've included a level creator mode, which if you ask me, is something nearly every game should carry by now! I regret that I'm judging it primarily based on its predecessor, but regardless of my reservations, Road of the Dead 2 just doesn't come together.

Oh man, that awful music is gonna be in my head all day! Still, there's an option to turn it off, so I guess I won't knock that against you.

I'd expect something called "Angry Gran Toss" to at least be good for a laugh, but it isn't very funny and certainly isn't a very fun game. Toss games in general feel pointless now that Toss the Turtle has been out forever and clearly proven itself as the best there is, but any other one can still be fun if done well. Angry Gran Toss isn't done well. It's utterly riddled with slowdown, no doubt a result of the unnecessary amount of extras, and even without all the visual choppiness, it's just a sloooooow game. I never felt like I was launching Gran that far at all, even after buying some upgrades, and easily the worst part is how Gran just STOPS DEAD the minute she hits the ground. There's no sense of momentum; she should bounce around for a while, but she just goes splat and does a few half-hearted hops like a fish out of water. Very disappointing.

I feel like this is a real waste of potential. The graphics are very cute and have a nice look, with some really cool interpretations of certain characters (I love the Ancient Greece-style Alice in Wonderland!) but the music is just the same 20-second (or so) loop played over and over and over and OVER! And it isn't even a good loop, it's annoying and dull!

"Dull" is also a fairly good word to describe the game itself. All it really amounts to is clicking around and watching things happen. The puzzles are incredibly weak, as there's almost no actual thinking involved: all of the items are in plain sight, they combine automatically, and there's obviously only one object (the character) to use them on. Even the parts that are literal puzzles (the pipes, the sliding image) are very simple to figure out. The only thing that really even resembled a challenge was the part with the girl in the cage, and while I DID laugh pretty hard when she just fell down that hole on my first try, it was very obvious what I did wrong and I got it right the second time.

I can tell you wanted to make a fun adventure game, but you should definitely spend some more time on your next project. You need to come up with some real challenges if you want to make it entertaining.

The fact that this whole game is in some kind of Slavic website makes me wonder if you even made it. Even if you did, it's nothing more than an ugly clone of Bust-A-Move.

Boy, it's hard to believe ol' Sam's been around this long, isn't it? It feels like it was only yesterday that he first started shooting the living hell out of his fellow (stick)man. Odd that the series is being created in such a bizarre order (1-4, then 10, then 9?), but at least it's managed to stay fresh.

Even though the whole "the environment is invisible until you shoot it" idea has been done before, it hasn't become common enough that it's worn out or anything, so it still feels like fun. The graphics and level designs are basic, but then, "basic" has always been the series' forte. The quiet humor (like the amusingly pointless character customization and the sheer foolishness of the enemies) still hits well, and overall, this is an okay game.

io3creations responds:

Thank you! :)

Yes, certain parts of StickMan Sam series are meant to be "basic" so I can focus on the programming parts. Of course, a little humor is added in there for entertainment.

What fun! I appreciated the gentle humor (like your amusing description of every individual zomby bird, or the way they keep going "Fried brains! Saucy brains!") and the inventiveness- every level seemed to have something new. I'm definitely going to be spending some time with the level editor, it seems pretty robust!

kikill responds:

I'm glad you appreciate details like that. ^^
Yeah, the level designs took a month to finish with like 30 odd testers (all my neighbors ^^).
The level editor, while bare bones, took the same amount of time.
I played your level and I like how neat and well thought out it is.
Thank you!

An incredibly creative twist on the classic memory game! On one hand, the use of memes... aggravates me (they're so overused!), but on the other hand, I suppose it makes sense that you'd want to use images that most people are already familiar with, otherwise this game would be impossibly hard! Even as it stands, it's a great challenge, and fiendishly difficult in all the right ways.

It's just the right length, too. 15 levels doesn't seem like much going in, but I felt completely satisfied!

xmorpher responds:

Great review!... We spent some time balancing the difficulty and lenght of the game thanks for noticing it and Thanks for your comments :)

What a fun game! Sometimes, simplicity is king. I especially appreciate the way that the speed-up powerup's counter only decreases if the character is moving, so it's never wasted- great touch! More games need to be like that! On the other hand, I could do without the extreme slowdown that happens every time you get close to a car (though I'm not sure if that was the game or just my computer being slow).

What a strange game (if you could even call it that). I can't even begin to comprehend what it's all supposed to mean, but then, it seems to be a very personal work for you, so maybe I'm not supposed to. There's barely any gameplay, but what's there is intriguing. It's interesting how moving backwards will make everything rewind, and make that little ghost appear. There's symbolism in that, methinks.

I really like both the graphics and the music, which both felt very authentically 8-bit. Obviously some artistic license was taken, since the NES could never create most of the visual effects in this game, but it's a well-crafted illusion- the backgrounds really look the way digitized photos did back then, and the music seems to adhere to the NES sound chip's limitations.

I really don't know what I just played/watched/whatever. It'd be nice if the game filled up the entire screen, and that there was a more clear point to all of this, but I enjoyed it.

locketheleisz responds:

Thanks for your feedback! The screen issue is fixed :)

Alright, worms! I've got a lot of time to spend, and I don't want it wasted! Now go make something that impresses the hell out of me, and I MIGHT give you 3 stars! Make the best damn thing I've ever seen, and you get 4! What? 5 stars? BWAHAHA! DREAM ON!

Luke Schwiebert @SergeantLuke

Age 28, Male

Joined on 12/15/07

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