Reviews for Duke Dashington

[LethalElephantForce]

EXCELLENT GAME!

Great graphics - really could have been playing a classis 90s platformer. Nice variety of levels, each with its own kind of puzzles. The time limit makes you think. Extremely smooth controls.

Challenging but not impossible - though I haven't tried making it through without losing a life. None of the level designs are impossible to design a strategy to solve them, and the controls are good enough that it's not too frustrating to implement the strategy once you know what it is.

Strongly recommended.

[polarbearcashstache]

An excellent game all around. Fantastic art, music, and gameplay. My one big cretic is the size of the character relevant to the rest of the game. I feel as though if the character would've been just a size smaller all around it would've dramatically increased the gameplay and made this game an easy 5 stars. One complaint doesn't make a bad game and this is a fantastic play, a suggestion if you do a sequel in the same style as this is maybe make the scale of the level just a little bit larger with a smaller yet faster character.

[NeonSpider]

Excellent game as always. I frequently find you consistently make some of the best games on all of Newgrounds.

Also I find it incredible that you somehow completed all this in just 48 hours. I would think the graphics or music alone would take much longer than that to produce. The level designs are quite excellent too, for the most part, with a few exceptions.

Level 24 in Hades Volcano Run is simply ridiculous and badly-designed. It's very twitch and pixel-perfection sensitive and sometimes you'll lose because of a sticky bug. If anyone is having a problem getting through the Hades Volcano Run with zero deaths, I bet anything that level is the main culprit. Maybe there's a more reasonable way to complete that stage but the only way I know requires pixel perfection and twitch-accuracy.

The sticky bug in that level doesn't always trigger, but when it does you stick to the vertical platform once you touch it and, for example, instead of dashing left from there once you press left, you dash while sticking to the platform, then fall to your death.

For those confused about the hitbox, it seems you get a bit more leeway in the hat area, if that helps. Assume the top of his collision box is near the bottom of his hat.

I will assume he's wearing a magic hat. This makes the most sense considering wearing a hat in those conditions would otherwise be completely impractical, plus how is he able to dash like that? It's gotta be a magic hat!

AdventureIslands responds:

This is post-jam version, not the original 48 hour entry

[Simius]

I personally don't like two things about this game:

1. When pausing the game there is only an option to retry that particular room. I'd would be neat if there was also an option to retry the entire level, so you don't need to go trough all those menu's.
2. It doesn't have a little bar, like most games have, that tells you what level you're playing. This would be useful, because you can more easily remember when a difficult level is coming up.

The "story" doesn't affect the gameplay much, but it is weird. It makes very little sense. The bird stealing the treasures feels a bit pointless. I was expecting there to be a boss-level where you had to steal the treasures back, but there wasn't. I'm basically clueless as to why this stuff with the bird is in the game. The fact that Duke can instantly leave after finishing a building is also just stupid, as some levels wouldn't even be possible in reverse. It would have been more logical if Duke was somehow trapped in the building by some sadistic wizard creature. That way the story would have made more sense. But the story as it is now is not really annoying, it's only just weird; it doesn't stop the game from being fabulous.

I'm also a little disappointed that there wasn't a boss battle. But that's just my own fault I guess, because I shouldn't really be expecting there to be a boss if there aren't even any living enemies in this game. But I would have liked seeing a boss with these gameplay mechanics. I imagine some beast -that bird for example- chasing you trough different rooms or something like that.

What I like about this game is that it's quite unique even though it's a platformer. It also has quite a lot of levels. Similar games like this that are posted on Newgrounds only ever have 20 levels or so, but this one has 120, which I find impressive.

AdventureIslands responds:

The game was originally created for a game jam in 48 hours with only handful of levels, so the story took a backseat. I focused on adding more levels and traps rather than work on a story because the game worked fine how it was.

If I ever make a proper sequel for the game, I want it to have actual story, perhaps even boss battles or escape sequence "boss" levels.

[Wegra]

Feels like something out of a Wario game almost. This was actually pretty fun and challenging and the pace was good. Nice work!