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Reviews for "Ten Second War"

This is one of the most enjoyable games i've ever played on Newgrounds. It's fresh, it makes you think and seeing your strategies come together bit by bit is incredibly satisfying. The NG API usage for player ranking is a nice cherry on top.

This is an excellent action+strategy game, with an innovative concept and very smooth, challenging gameplay. In principle, I didn't even intend to play this when I saw it on the front page, but I'm glad I changed my mind.

First of all, the music is pretty nice, it's enjoyable to listen to, fits the theme, and doesn't get in the way of thinking. It's certainly the kind of music I'd love to listen to while thinking about stuff. The graphics are simple, but it's not like they had to be much more ellaborate for this game, and in fact, I think they'd be distracting if they were, and they are just cool enough to allow the player to "feel" the action whenever an enemy is killed and guns are fired.

The gameplay, of course, is what makes this so interesting and pretty unique. You must control a set of different soldiers in each stage, one at a time, during at most ten seconds, where you must pick a soldier, move around, destroy enemies by shooting at them, avoid being killed if possible, and finish the soldier's turn. Once you finish a soldier's turn, and you pick the next soldier to control, you start defining his course of action from the exact point in time in which you started controlling the ones before it, which means you get to see your previously controlled soldiers carry out the moves you made when you controlled them, killing enemies and avoiding fire as though they were being controlled simultaneously to the character you're currently moving. In the end, all soldiers you controlled start moving at the exact same point in game time, and carry out the actions you planned for them paralelly, making it so that the game time taken to beat a stage equals the maximum amount of time taken by an individual soldier to finish his course of action.

The objective of each stage is to destroy all enemies while minimizing the time taken by any individual soldier to do his job, and let me tell you, the challenge is pretty intense, especially if you're like me, only being happy when you can obtain an S score. If you're trying to get a high score, you have to be as quick as possible, avoiding enemy fire and killing fiends as fast as possible so you can finish each soldier's turn quickly enough under pretty tight time constraints. The action is, as one would expect, intense and fast paced, and it really keeps you on edge. There are many different kinds of units, such as single shot, double shot, homing bullets and even explosive units, and you really have to master the fineries of playing with each kind of unit in order to truly optimize your time. For instance, the single shot units require more accurate aiming, but can shoot faster than homing units, while homing units don't require as much accurate aiming, but, since the homing bullets don't always get the enemy you really wanna take down, you sometimes need to come closer to enemies to aim at the ones you really want to get, which adds an extra level of danger to the game. There's also a large variety of enemies and stage features that are employed in the stage design, such as rapid fire shooters, barriers that you can't shoot through and other things of the like, all requiring a slightly different approach to avoid being killed.

It's really awesome to be able to see replays of what you did once you're done solving a stage, since it's a brief, yet cool show of action and shooting. The replay command, of course, can also be used for something more handy than simply marvelling at your war feats, since it can also serve as a way to check what parts of a level run can be done better, and by what soldier, in order to gradually optimize the time taken in a level.

The game has a huge amount of levels, all of which present a different challenge to be beaten, and the difficulty curve is pretty solid, with a few easier stages thrown in at the beginning of each "world" just to keep the game from losing momentum, and then picking up in challenge quicker and quicker the further you are into the game. I'm assuming that, since most stages will only take, say, two seconds to beat with an S score, if we were to watch all action scenes in sequence, you'd get a pretty fast-paced little action animation, however short it would be.

One of the problems I found with the game is that, in order to finish a soldier's run, you have to press F, but F is too close to R, so I saw myself very often discarding good runs accidentally. You know, the "finish run" button should be something more "impacting", like the spacebar, that'd not only make the game more satisfying (as weird as that may sound), as it would also make accidentally discarding runs a lot harder. Also, I think it would be handy to be able to, say, mouse hover over a character and see how long their current run is, because that would help in optimizing runs a lot.

Overall, this game is one of those really interesting and innovative experiences that I always look for in casual gaming, and hardly ever find. It seems to me that the developers of freeware casual games have found a few "working formulas" that they tend to repeat exhaustively in every new game, just like the developers of commercial, so-called "hardcore" games did long before. Thankfully, there are still a few games that try something new, and those are always a delight. 4/5

AlmostMatt responds:

Thanks for the detailed review!

I LOVE games like this, where you can essentially go back in time to accomplish something you'd otherwise not be able to. Keep up the good work.

Great job man!! Can't wait for more!

One of the more innovative games I've seen here. Hope to see more like it!