The game was enjoyable but lacking in in some areas such as various equipment stats and armor. The crits seemed to deal the same amount of damage to the enemy and to myself regardless of the weapon used. Because of this any actual progression seems entirely rng based. However this was still enjoyable in a few aspects and brought me back to the early days of online games.
Reviews for "The Last Flash RPG"
RIP Flash
It's a basic flash RPG, doesn't seem like anything special. If you want to play a flash RPG i'd recommend Swords & Sandals or Sands of the Coliseum.
I really wanted to like this game, but I think it falls short.
There is a trend to add skeletons, skulls, blood and gore into games, I'm not sure if it is "to be cool" or what? But it doesn't add, it detracts from the game. People watch American football to see the teams execute offensive and defensive strategy, and to out play their opponents. They cringe in those rare moments when a player gets badly injured. They might like to see a fist fight during a hockey game to see who's the toughest, but they don't like to see a player sweep the skates of another player and put them in the hospital with a brain injury.
Substance should be things like movement, wielding weapons and shields, and other forms of skill, not blood and gore.
This game is lacking on real substance, showing the time spent on blood and gore could have been better spent. I'll list off some of the ways:
Add some indication as to what the various traits do when you upgrade them.
"Combat" is a vague and meaningless term. All the other terms could also fall under combat. It is a game about combat. Does the skill boost physical attacks? Magic? Both?
Okay, we know combat is good, but not how good.
"Defense" does this help you take more damage like Vitality? Or avoid damage like Agility?
Okay, we don't really know what that one does either.
"Agility" we kind of know what this is, but does it help you to hit more often? Block more often? Move faster? Some or all of the above? How much help is 1 point here?
"Vitality" okay, we kind of know that more is better here, but how much? Does it just help total health? Or also regeneration? The damage we take in battle is hard to put into context as we don't know how many points of vitality we need to survive 5 or 10 hits.
"Stamina" is pretty clear: allows you to fight longer before resting, but again, no indication on how much is enough, or how much +1 benefits.
The Doctor should be The Alchemist, as he isn't healing you, he is giving you potions.
The potions nicely explain what they do.
The Shady Character should be a teacher or mage of some sort, as he is teaching you how to use spells.
Then we come to the blacksmith, and we have both an armorer, as well as a weapon smith in one. None of the items gives any indication of the value. Does the game have increasing return on investment, so that an item costing 1,000 is worth twice one that costs 500? More than twice? Less than twice? No way to tell.
And since we can't fight the same enemy twice: no way to directly compare them.
This precludes making informed choices about which items to buy.
Combat has 7 options:
Use magic
Jump forward / back
move forward / back
rest / attack
So only 2 of the 7 are actually combat, and the other 5 are support roles.
The combat part of the game should be mostly about combat, not moving and resting.
Some ideas of how physical attacks could be varied:
Thrust / Lunge / Slash for type of attack
High / Medium / low for area of attack
This would give 9 different attacks, with head attacks doing more damage, but being harder to achieve, while leg hits would slow down the enemy on top of doing damage to health.
This could be done by subtracting 1 or more points of agility per leg hit.
Vitality could also be applied to the various areas: head, body, legs, or even arms as 4th/5th choices. One that reduces enemy attacks/defenses, the other reducing shield defense.
Then during combat you could see things like "dodged", "blocked", "Parried", or just "Missed" if your swing was bad without the enemy affecting the results.
Armor values could be added, so you know how much armor improves protection vs reduces agility, etc. As it stands, I can't tell if armor blocked 5% of damage, or 5 points of damage, meaning does it scale with the attack? Or just stop a fixed amount of damage?
Likewise: do weapons do a fixed range of damage? Or scale with your skills?
2D8 (2-16 points) vs 20%-160% for example.
Quality and condition of the items could also be taken into account, with the condition dropping as the items are used, and quality dropping as they are repaired.
Overall: the game works, and is kind of fun for the first battle, but there isn't much variation to give it replay value. This is critical since the 2nd battle is basically replaying the 1st, as is the 3rd, 4th, etc.
Is it worth spending 45k on armor and weapons to earn 50k to be set free?
Probably not.
Is it worth replaying the same battle over and over at 3k per battle to earn 50k?
Not in my opinion.
But the game is playable, and could be made significantly better with some relatively minor improvements. To make it a 5 star game would require a lot more hard work though.
You would need to add adventuring after your freedom, armor for arms, legs, and torso, etc.
Get rid of the gratuitous gore, and address some of the issues I've outlined, and you're looking at a 3 1/2 to 4 star game.
plutonium-soft responds:
Hi 5smarter!
Thank you for your very informative and insightful review! This was actually my first time making an RPG game so I agree that my game is flawed in many ways :D It was a fun and interesting experiment for sure!
I agree that making a skill named "Combat" is a little confusing. In fact, the Combat skill used to be called "Melee" in an early prototype of the game since I was going to add ranged weapons such as bows and spears. At that point I hadn't even planned to upload the game anywhere and just wanted to make the game work so I decided to not add the ranged weapons and just focus on fixing the various bugs I encountered while programming the game. Hence, the skill was renamed as "Combat" which I now think is quite dumb.
I also should've explained what all the upgrades and stats do, and what a single skillpoint in a certain stat actually does. However, I did sort of explain this in Help though very very shortly. I guess I wanted the players to figure them out by themselves.
The combat system is also very minimal and simple, and I 100% agree that there are so many ways on improving it and making it more interesting. Yet again, this game was not intended to be released when it was still in development phase.
The next time I'll be making such an RPG I will literally improve everything from combat to wandering in the town!
I really liked your idea of being able to attack different body parts! :D
P.S. Sorry for my bad English, I'm not a native speaker xD
Swords and Sandals Redux
plutonium-soft responds:
More like Swords & Sandals Lame Edition :D