FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Ventriloquist Hero]

Played this since it was mentioned in Treasure Hunt event, and wow, I can't believe this game got overlooked!

I really like the core conceit of matching gestures to the situation: it's not only very creative, but satisfying to master pulling off! It reminds me a lot of other games like Kukkiyomi and this one game where you can only rotate your eyes to match social situations, I forget what it was called. The sketchy art style was nice too as part of the presentation.

It's a bit of a shame it doesn't have much content going for it at the moment, but I would consider it a perfect game jam result, as it absolutely grabs my interest and makes me hungry for more!

DavidMarchand responds:

Oh, you're probably thinking of Social Interaction Trainer. What a fun game! Thank you for your kind words.

[Loop Cat]

Whoa, this is a pretty wild find for the Treasure Hunt event! Can't believe this got overlooked as it feels like a very promising game!

In general, I love the arcade/pixel presentation, and the core conceit of the one-button looping/circular controls is very creative, interesting to master, and creates a lot of novel combat scenarios!

It's a bit of a bummer that there are no hi score tables, and the game can get a bit repetitive when the bosses repeat patterns, but overall the sense of progression is great and it's just a very fun and challenging adventure!

I did note that the game doesn't seem to work properly in Firefox for some reason: I wonder if that technical issue contributed to the game being overlooked? Having said that, it seems to be working now, so maybe it got patched? Who knows!

[Mark's School Escape 2]

Hey, this is a solid entry into the Riddle School clone series! Very glad that the Treasure Hunt Event dug this up, as I had a great time with it!

The general presentation is stylish and well-animated, the gameplay is smooth and intuitive thanks to helpful design decisions like highlights for interactable objects, there's loads of funny flavor text, and it's just got great goofy vibes: well done!

For feedback, I did note that there are some slight typos here and there, as well as some bugs if you do stuff like click when the game is already doing something else, so it could definitely do with some polishing up in general. Also the puzzle logic can be pretty bonkers at times, but eh, I guess that's just par for the course with these kinda games, haha!

Kule1Toxic responds:

I'm surprised people are still looking at this game.
thought it would just get forgotten about after a while lawl.
Glad to see that someone posted my game for the treasure hunt, means a lot to me.
Also thx for the comment!

[Rolly]

Goddamn, this is what I would call buried treasure! Very thankful for the Treasure Hunters for digging this up as I had an absolute blast with this precision platformer adventure!

Mastering the controls was a very fun challenge and I liked that all 4 courses had their own interesting themes or unique mechanics. The game is definitely pretty hard, both in terms of course design and in some frustrating aspects like hitboxes being much less forgiving and wall clinging being more, well, clingy than I'd like. Having to do it all in one sitting is pretty brutal as well. But yeah, I had a great time nonetheless and I can't believe this got passed up!

My final score was 226 deaths, completed in 28 minutes and 9 seconds.

[Running Shine 10 Year Anniversary Collab]

Wow, I wasn't expecting to see a Running Shine collab here! Are they a Newgrounder? Well, anyway, I'm a big fan of their reviews, particularly their YIIK review, so this was nice to see!

Having said that, I don't think this is necessarily a great art collab experience, being a pretty boilerplate default slideshow instead of going for a more creative presentation. I mean, it does at least have the whole YouTube framing and aesthetic going for it, so that's nice, but yeah, I just can't help but wish it had a bit more razzle-dazzle to it.

For other feedback, I also wish it had more features, such as being able to click on artist names to open up their profile, or even clicking on running shine to open up their youtube. It'd also be great if there was a thumbnail gallery of all the artwork to help with navigating directly to a certain piece instead of having to flip through pages: you could even put them in the scrollable 'recommended video' sidebar as a fancy touch. Finally, it'd also be nice if the music would autoplay one after the other: I dunno why it stops and I need to manually queue up each song, and yet you do have a button for repeating the same song.

Again, as much as I criticize, it's nice to see a community event like this, and all of the art is wonderful!

melotron responds:

Thanks for being thorough with your feedback, I seriously appreciate it. We originally planned on having a title sequence and other nice features to help boost the production quality, but, like usual with first time projects, we overestimated how much we could actually get done in a week, so we put more focus on just making the main scene look as nice as we could. Clickable links and auto-playing to the next song escaped us as features we should add all together, but they definitely should have been planned to be included. We didn't require submitters have an NG, meaning not everybody would have a link, so we are relying on the built in collaborators tab for finding the artists this time around. It seems I can add links through RichTextLabels in Godot though, so next time we want to do a collaborative thing like this, we'll definitely include those within the program itself. This was definitely a big learning experience for us, we'd definitely need to give ourselves a bit more time to actually comfortably get all the features together next time. In my hurry, I didn't have the song nodes in a list so you could easily go forward and backward through them. If I had that feature planned from the start, I could have structured it a bit better in the program.

That being said, I still had a great time doing this, and working with everybody. I'm very happy for all the love and feedback it's been getting. Newgrounds is great. Thanks again!

[64 Bits - Squid Game Boy]

Hah, I wasn't sure how much I was going to like this, considering I've never seen Squid Game and I expected a large appeal of the game was just going to be from recognizing references. Surprisingly though, I learned enough through cultural osmosis to recognize or at least intuit practically everything, turning it into a fun experience!

As always, you guys are pretty top-notch at this whole demake business: I really like seeing how you pick the notable events and transform them into these playable minigames. I'll admit that most of the minigames are fairly simple and more like scripted events or QTEs than proper games, so it felt a bit disappointing at times, but still, the name of the game isn't essentially playing the game, but admiring the craftsmanship, and in that, it felt very authentic.

If I were to have any complaints, it would be that I found the odds and evens game to be a bit weird. I would expect it to either be rigged to force the player into the situation where they need to lie, or to just make it so that if the player is forced into lying, that the game ends with that, to mirror the show's experience. However, for it to be truly random and to keep continuing until you win, even if you have to lie over and over, just turns it into a pretty repetitive and boring experience if you get unlucky (which I was). How ironic: one of the times I wish you didn't make a legit game and just kept it as a scripted sequence!

[Nymble 2]

This is looking to be a very promising puzzle game! Definitely makes a great first impression with not only how beautiful the presentation is, even with elements that are usually overlooked like menus, but how good the game feels to play and how juicy the effects are. The difficulty curve and sense of progression is nice as well, forming an addictive rhythm where it gets more and more challenging, though easing back a bit whenever it introduces a new mechanic. I love the scoring elements as well: while it takes a bit before the game gets hard enough to make them meaningful, I love going back to score a 3 star instead of settling for 1 or 2.

Yeah, it's just all-around very solid stuff! I don't really have any major feedback I can think of, beyond the fact that the keyboard controls can be a bit confusing: you'd think I could use the arrow keys to select a button to press instead of needing to memorize the hotkeys, and it's a bit weird that I can't access the pause menu by hitting esc which feels more natural. Also there were times where I screwed up and wish I could just hit R during the death animation to interrupt/skip it, instead of being forced to watch it.

Man, level 10 had me stuck for quite some time!

xalezar responds:

Hey FutureCopLGF, thanks so much for playing and for the detailed review—really appreciate it! I actually recognized your name from your review of the original Nymble a few years back, so it was great seeing you pop up again.

I’ve learned a lot since developing that first game and really wanted to step things up this time. Glad the polish is coming through!

Good call on the controls—this was originally built with mobile in mind, but I ported the demo to web (with some minor tweaks) to gather feedback and get a sense of whether it has potential. I do plan to make the desktop controls feel more native, especially since I’ll be using the demo to drop teasers of future enemies and mechanics.

And haha, yeah—Level 10 definitely breaks the pattern a bit. It leans more on discovery and experimentation than direct teaching, which makes it fun to see how players approach it. Others have also mentioned the difficulty of that level, so I might just end up tweaking it slightly.

Thanks again for the thoughtful feedback—it really means a lot!

[FleshWorks]

Hmm, I'm not generally much for idle clicker games: usually takes a lot of creativity to win me over, but this is delivering a pretty standard-ish experience, so I didn't find it too appealing.

That's not to say it doesn't have some nice elements going for it! For example, while other idlers would have their automatic systems just generate points from thin air, I like the physicality of seeing people put on conveyors and then dropped into the grinder: it's a more literal interpretation of automation that I think adds a lot of charm! The game also seems to promote clicking a lot more than automation with elements like the heat gauge, as well as bonus bubbles to pop and other random events: keeps the player active while other games remove remove clicking very quickly!

However, while it does show some promise, I lost attention rather quickly. Again, this could just be because I'm not the intended audience, but if I were to have some feedback, it'd be:

*As interesting as it is that the game keeps clicking at the forefront instead of automating it out, it's too much for an old man like me with bad wrists to keep clicking over and over. It'd be nice if I could just hold it down the mouse click.

*The interface graphics are very distorted and a bit ugly, especially if you play it in natural windowed mode. Trying to read the instructions is difficult due to how chopped up the text is rendered, and I didn't even realize those purple bars were supposed to be scroll bars: call me silly, but I spent a long time not realizing I could scroll down and access more power-ups!

*I really wish there was a cooldown bar or something next to the pipes that drop people onto the conveyors to let you know when the next person is coming: when I first bought the automation upgrades, nothing was happening and it made me confused if I was doing something wrong.

*The game is very quiet due to defaulting to low settings, but even with the volume levels put to maximum it still remains quiet.

*In general, I just didn't find the game that appealing. I wish I had a bit better of a sense of the ultimate goal, and while the grinding process has some appeal, I wish there were more juicy and satisfying effects for the various aspects of gameplay. Some clicker games just do a better job at giving me a sense of purpose and progression even though they are all rather mindless, and I didn't quite get that here. I dunno, maybe there needs to be deadlines to meet, some sort of optimization challenge to construct enough flesh to make a monster to halt an assault from the heroes, and that could feed into making you use the ascension system to have a better chance next time if you fail.

DeludeAndConquer responds:

 I apologize for my slow response - I'm currently trying to enter university and haven’t had much time for proper game development.
Thanks for playing my game, and thank you for the feedback.

I watched parts of your video, but 6 hours is a bit long for me to get through entirely, but I did see your first impressions of the game.
Your criticisms are valid and totally reasonable. And I'll see what I can do about improving the game.

[BOKOBLOCK]

Very solid puzzle game! There's a good variety of puzzles, a nice sense of progression in terms of difficulty and new mechanics being introduced, the controls are intuitive, and the game overall has a very polished sense of construction, and despite using simple graphics the overall presentation is cute with a good amount of juicy special effects and feedback to make it feel nice. Not much more to be said: it's just a very comfy, well-made and addictive little game to test my dumb brain in, haha!

If I were to have any complaints, I'd maybe like it if the symbols used to determine block behavior were a bit more intuitive than just memorizing the different faces: for example, maybe the symbol could just be a circular arrow pointing in the direction it turns (but then again, I suppose that wouldn't be as cute or appealing).

Night-Kolo responds:

Oh my, thank you for the constructive feedback. ^^

I’m glad the sense of progression resonated with you. Level design and mechanics were my primary focus - with presentation, special effects, the little guy, Poko, etc. as visual juice. To me, puzzle design is what would’ve entirely made or broke the game. I once naively proposed adding a move counter to the gameplay, when I showed the prototype to play-testers, it received lots of heavy criticism. Despite it being a trope, I noticed any attempt at counting the moves creates an interesting challenge while eliminating the exploration element of the puzzle immediately. They did make for great optional medals though. That move counter asset was repurposed into the board number.

Appreciate you for voicing this complaint. Admittedly, I made the blocks having different faces corresponding to their turning behavior as a primary concept, for the sake of uniqueness and kawaii-ness to aid the game’s presentation. A circular arrow pointing towards a block’s turn direction or more intuitive language is something I once proposed as a game design solution, but I didn’t want to lose the game’s charm, as you pointed out.

Thanks for the awesome review again!

- Kolo

[Azumanga Donjara Daioh DX]

Oh man, when I saw that Mahjong tile in the title, I dreaded the worst, and lo and behold, it turns out this was a Mahjong game! Oh my gah! Not Mahjong, the bane of my existence!

Despite that, though, I gave this a shot, and I was pleasantly surprised! Thanks to the tutorial, I was able to pick up enough of the fundamentals to get a general grasp of things, and was having a somewhat decent time playing. Feels silly to have been so reluctant of learning it for so long. I know it's technically a simplified version of Mahjong, but still! Maybe I can finally play those minigames in Yakuza or FFXIV for once after all!

That being said, I still had loads of problems understanding the game rules. I didn't quite understand what Riichi was and what benefit there was to not calling it or if you're even allowed to not call it, I didn't quite understand what people I could steal from (does neighbor mean both sides or just my preceding turn neighbor), I didn't quite understand the triplets scoring system beyond matching 3 of the same without a guide during the game or highlighting of tiles, and it was just difficult to keep track of events since there were no animations for the tiles moving during actions. You're not even allowed to go back a page during the tutorial without starting over!

I also realize that maybe this is unfair, but considering this is the so-called DX version of an existing game, it was a bit of a bummer to realize how much of a downgrade it was to the originals: no fancy story campaign to serve as an extra bit of motivation, no animations for actions to make things feel lively and more intuitive, and so on.

So yeah, I'd say this is pretty decent, and I gotta give it credit for finally getting me to learn Mahjong, at least at a basic level. But it could definitely use some work in how it teaches the player, both in revamping the tutorial a bit, and by juicing up the gameplay with stuff like animations and highlights for triplets to make things more intuitive and exciting. This very much feels like a prototype that needs that extra bit of pizazz (not to say it doesn't have any pizazz, what with the music and voice quips)!

mksfbirdup responds:

Thanks for the in depth feedback. It was fun to watch back your video review to see you learning to play in real time and coming up with various questions and realizations. Your defensive strategy was actually pretty good for a new player!

Since donjara, which is basically the children's mahjong equivalent with a very simplified ruleset, has it's own peculiarities there were a few instances where knowing anything about actual riichi mahjong tripped you up.

To answer a couple of your questions:
1) You can only Steal from the person to your right and only if you already have a pair of the same tile. Unless you are in Riichi but at that point it's Donjara instead of Steal.

2) 90% of the time you should call Riichi when the game offers you a chance to do so, with the only exceptions being if you know there's not enough of the tile you have a pair of remaining to win. Alternatively, if you need to assemble a huge hand for a big comeback you can call choose not to call riichi and fish for a different Yaku worth more points.

3) The full scoring table is available in the "All Yaku" menu in game. They're all themed based on events from the manga, but I can understand the confusion with it being the first time playing Donjara. From the video my guess is the confusion stemmed from that it only displays 1 of each tile type from the triplets you needed to score instead of the entire triplet.

4) This version is titled DX namely because it moves from the 1-on-1 donjara gameplay to the more standard 4-player game. It also uses all the modern donjara rules which gives extra strategic depth in comparison. Also the community submitted fanart gallery as little bonus.

5) I do agree I wish I could've done more animation work, but it was ~1 month project and was my first time do NPC AI in a game.