I love reflections...

I was awed by some of the visual effects that you've achieved in this short movie. The reflections of the water in the opening scene, the reflection in the buildings in the top down street scene, and the distortions of the water droplet over the city background are all very nicely done. I think that I've learned quite a few good lessons on new flash techniques to use by watching this video alone.

Now that you have the publicity you needed...

Replace that annoying voice for the main character! It really stands in my way of enjoyment when a highly educated FBI agent would sound like a mentally challenged patient with speech impairment problems. It really hurts the mood and pacing of the story since his narration was basically half of the story (the other half being the 3D rendered graphics, which nobody can really complain about).

As far as animation is concerned, it's mostly fluid, but some of the cutting can seem awkward (the tentacle-tongue man somehow stood around for a second before grabbing the main character) and classic anticipation techniques are lacking (the main character knocked off a gun and punch a guy out while standing perfectly still; even if he's perfectly trained in martial arts, that was hardly convincing)... but we ARE talking about 3D animations here. The effort alone are worth the props, but the critiques are there in case you're ready to move on to the next step.

You can probably lose the character portrait on the subtitles to give the movie a more cinametic feel.

Kudos!

By personal request.

Scores given because of an anonymous request.

Complete Instructions For Those Curious Minds...

1) Your objective is, obviously, to eliminate all the tiles.
2) Like the Shanghai variation, you eliminate tiles by selecting pairs with the same picture.
2) Unlike the Shanghai variation, the rules for legal elimination are as follows: the two tiles must be able to connect via a line that makes 2 or less turns. If the line hits any other tile, then the move is illegal.
3) There's a variant in this instance of the game where tiles are shuffled up or down as they are being eliminated to clear the center. The original rules prohibit this, making the puzzle much harder. Maybe this rule will come back on the higher levels or something, I never finished anything beyond level one.

The more you know.

Comments and Suggestions...

I really like the direction this series had been going... the controls really tightened up over the different versions and everything is almost perfect now, there's a small bug where enemies may occasionally get stuck in the hit frame in midair, but I'm sure it's something that'll get fixed eventually.

Some suggestions:

- You might want to use keydown/keyup to get your inputs instead of lastkey capture, because lastkey capture counts repeating keystrokes, which breaks a lot of my combos when the game unintentionally registers repeated keystrokes.

- Air control can use some tightening up... it's really annoying when some of the air attacks (hell raiser, eagle strike) gets comboed into another eagle strike instead of a heaven fall (which connects much better). To make things simple, you might just want to restrict air attacks to spinning crescent/hell raiser/heaven fall... since you can recover from the jump fast enough to continue the combo anyway.

- The timing window between eagle strike and dragon's fury is too close - I often pulled eagle strike instead of dragon's fury (you can see that I don't like eagle strike very much). maybe you should make dragon's fury forward+d+d and eagle strike no-direction+d+d?

- The weapon feels very tacked on right now.. it doesn't do anything that continuous smacking can't do. Maybe it'll become more useful when you have more than one enemies on the screen at once.

Anyway, keep up the good work.

A Mix Bag...

In short: while the game mechanics are slightly broken, the game itself is visually appealing, which largely makes up for the lack of strategy thereof involved in the actual gameplay.

I love the blood splatters, the sound effects, the little animations, and the opponent comments. Those are the strong points of the game.

My biggest gripe is with the card system itself: it's too dependent on luck, too situational, and strategy doesn't take you very far.

For example, there are cards that are obviously worst than another one (heal+<heal+, asp+<asp++). It's excusable in a TCG when availbility is the balance factor, but here it's painfully broken as there's no good counter when your opponent, say, has a hand of 5 Dmg+18 cards.

The card set itself is strangely short of chainable cards (there's only crit. strike). The rest of the game boils down to a buff and debuff game that's strangely reminiscent of RPG fight mechanics. Rune buffing is especially unnerving since there's a card that simply max a level and the only counter is a rune-20, which you may or may not have (there's no library manipulation, meaning you take your chances on what you can have).

Give some thought to why each card exists and why, despite of all other cards in the set, the card you hold is still useful. When a card game is devoid of a resource system, all cards should have qualities that makes it uniquely useful, and that should remove people's gripes about the card mechanics.

Give it some thought. Your next work maybe your greatest yet.