Reviews for Castaway

[Kinjii]

close, but no dice.

the concept was a good one, but the execution needs work.

-the items in the shop are too expensive. without any kind of significant income, there's no way you can afford them.

-the health regeneration is too slow to be useful, and the healing items are too expensive to be plentiful.

-the fact that you lose your pet when it dies is annoying and is too much of a problem, due to the your inability to protect your pet. maybe let them stand on the same square so navigation isn't such a pain?

-the game feels like a grind because of the constant, steep level climb. smooth it out a little.

-the lack of weapon/armor drops, along with the absence of treasure-chests is a problem, as it forces the player to use the broken shop system to buy gear upgrades.

-"Hatch Time" is a pain, as it takes that long in Real Life to be of any use, cut down on this or just replace it.

-the hatched monster's level is usually too low to be useful. maybe put an XP boost on the pet untill it reaches the player's level?

-i didn't see any different pet "types" only the same "generic melee" attacks. no range? no healing? no spells for pets? give the pets some variety. make it more tactical, rather than just a dummy-tank system. a pet that heals you or throws spells or ranged attacks would be fantastic to see.

-the fact that pets you get later are more powerful is B.S. it should be that the longer you have it, the more powerful it becomes. that's part of the Pokemon deal, and doing away with it takes away form the whole "part pokemon-game" element.

if you can fix the above problems, you'll have a game i'd be willing to waste hours playing. this one... well, you got two hours at least.

5/10, but it definitely has potential! work on it and try to balance it.

[IdoLaD]

Need Auto-Save

The game is great but without auto save you can't enjoy it..

[lokaps]

Really good game!

I haven't beaten it just yet, but I'm enjoying this game a lot. It feels like sort of a real game, like something I'd play on the DS. It certainly keeps my interest for a long time, cause I've been playing it for a little over 2 hours by now :P . The only real problems I've seen in it have been said before, and are namely that potions are so expensive I never use them and that I restart if my pet dies and I've never really used pets other than my first one. Of course, he only died once other than the one other time we both died because while there aren't many health potions, there's tons of pet food. As for the grinding of it, I typically didn't run into any. I basically just killed quest monsters and hostiles I ran into. I guess the quests themselves can be seen as grindy, but that's true of any RPG so I don't count that. Anyway, I think it's a really good game overall and I hope to see more from ya :)

[Ragingblossom]

Nice^^

The game is good has some things that can get really annoying like when your pet dies you cant revive them and you would need to train a new one from lv1 or what ever they started on, next is the gold that monsters drop the higher you go the more they should drop but its the same when you fight the first beetles, and last would to be able to increase your inventory (well its not much of an annoyance but it would be greatly appreciated if added). Everything else is good feels and it has great potential for a newgrounds rpg. XD

[Seite]

Completed the game (I think)

Activated all of the generators and did the final quest. A few complaints:

1) Why have that many spaces for attacks and abilities if you're not going to fill them up? It instilled false hope. Also the reload times for every ability is way too long.

2) After the first area or two, once your pet dies, future pets will *never* be able to catch back up to your level. Every single pet hatches at such a low level that it takes a crapload of grinding just to make it strong enough to help kill anything. By then, you'll be too strong for its contributions to matter.

3) Hatching times are too long. Make them based on number of kills or exp gained (without going to ridiculous numbers) instead of getting up to 3+ hours.

4) Could use more variation in equipment. Light armor that gives less defense but lets you move quicker, heavy armor that adds strength, etc. Also make said equipment medium or rare drops off monsters.

5) Each area should use different music, and perhaps have a boss (related to story progression or just for the sake of side questing) and boss music.

6) *SPOILERS* There was no resolution to the story. You're a castaway on this island, no explanation given as to how you got there. The village leader says he'll try to help you off the island, in the meantime you help the village by activating all the generators. Your reward? "Oh we don't know how to get you off the island, but you can stay as long as you like anyway." Very disappointing. I'm assuming you did this in order to more easily create room for a sequel but it was still a huge letdown.*SPOILERS*

7) The fetch quests are annoying because everything only drops one item at a time and there's no way of controlling which thing will drop next. Sometimes you'll get nothing, sometimes gold, sometimes a fragment, sometimes pet food, and sometimes the item you need to collect. Perhaps increase the drop rates for the corresponding items when you have the quest for it active.

I haven't completed the quest for the ice sword yet so I'm not sure if completing that will unlock new quests or not. However, I don't intend to complete it either because getting the ice shards to drop is an incredible pain in the ass and you need 25 of them. No thanks.

I gave you a 4 because it has great art, a nice concept, and it is addictive (for me anyway), but the flaws outweigh those perks. I would urge you to make a sequel just because I can see you put a lot of effort into this and you'd probably be able to get it right on the second try.