FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[JOKE, PLEASE]

Huh, quite the interesting game! It kind of throws you in the deep end and can be a bit tricky to figure out what you're doing, but eventually I got the gist of it, being that you need to dig up certain information on each client you're processing by checking their logs and then accurately process them, akin to other document-checking games like Papers Please, the challenge being that you need to be efficient in what logs you pick based on the facts needed.

It's definitely quite the novel experience and I had a good amount of fun once I got my feet under me, but the game was a bit confusing and rough in certain areas:

*I don't feel like the game delivered on the whole 'joke' experience, as it never even once seemed like the generated joke worked off of the information we gathered, and I don't see how or why it even exists in-universe in the first place. To be honest, it felt like you just made a document-checking game and then crowbarred in the whole joke aspect last minute to replace a more standard accept/reject process: I personally wouldn't give it many points at all for meeting the game jam theme.

*Game's difficulty was pretty wild: first couple of times I played it, it seemed incredibly demanding for just the first day, failing my nearly perfect run due to a minor mistake. But then upon revisit later on, the first day now seemed to be rather easy due to randomly lowered requirements. Not sure what was going on there.

*As said, the whole joke theme and story aspect felt very confusing and not well-defined. I was disappointed that the game ended so quickly instead of continuing to evolve, and the ending just felt unclear what was happening.

*Game is also riddled with strange bugs: for example, I had a lot of logs for people containing repeated facts, or facts bleeding into each other.

Definitely seems like a fun concept, but the execution does waver significantly, most likely due to the game jam limits. It's cool enough that I can see the potential past the bugs and would want a more fleshed-out version of it, though, so that's a good jam result.

Frogrammer responds:

hey, thank you! always appreciate the honest dive-in

you are very much right it has absolutely nothing to do with jokes mechanically and we knew that from the start, I really hate the theme, and after losing the first 16~ hours just trying to come up with a mechanic that would actually incorporate the theme we just decided to ball. i haven't seen a single game that would incorporate the theme well either, most of them are just "funny"

so yes the game is about reading and remembering with a touch of manual management

about the difficulty: originally I uploaded a harder version of the game but after noticing the struggle of players I re-uploaded a version with lower quotas so that might be what happened


thanks again!

[Dino Time]

This one was really rough for me. On the face of it, this game is pretty much "baby's first game project" in that it is just an incredibly simple arcade experience where you jump up, collect points, and avoid falling to your death from the ever upwards scrolling death zone. Nothing really exciting or memorable about the experience: just a very bog-standard experience that attempts to elevate it by using goofy art and sounds.

If that was it, that'd be fine: every game dev needs to start somewhere and this could be ok for a few minute(s) of fun. However, the game was plagued by absolutely terrible controls which felt incredibly unintuitive and awkward. Trying to move had a weird delay on start-up and some very slippery momentum that didn't seem to have any natural reason to it: you go from not moving at all to slip-n-sliding to your death.

The strangest thing was that, I tried playing the game with a controller, and was able to control the character just fine with the analog stick: no awkward delay or slipperiness or anything! However, that didn't help in the long run because then I noticed the busted jump controls, which, despite using the same power for the button press each time, would randomly change the maximum height that my jump would reach, sometimes making me unable to proceed upwards and getting an unfair death.

If I was to be charitable, I'd say that the controls were part of some intended challenge, and perhaps some of the slipperiness is to make you utilize wall bounces, or something of that nature. But while I've played a lot of rage games which utilize difficult, tricky controls, the difference is that they all managed to elicit fun out of the process, whereas this absolutely did not, coming off as just badly programmed, if not straight-up broken.

NattoSumi responds:

Smh some gamers just aren't ready for momentum based movement. Btw the jump takes ~1 second to charge up all the way after landing. Hope that helps!

[ENERGY SEEKERS: IPD CONTRACTS]

Hmm, it's a little bit janky and doesn't have much meat on its bones in terms of content, but I quite grew to like the core mechanic and found it to be quite fun and promising!

I really like the back and forth strategic juggling of switching characters, where you both need to factor in their strengths when dealing with certain enemies, while also covering for each other's cooldowns. Also, the art and animation is quite impressive and makes for a good first impression.

As said, though, the gameplay is a bit janky: could use some input buffering as I was getting ignored inputs when trying to spam shots, hitboxes felt a bit unclear and disjointed as there were times I'd be hit by an enemy that I had already killed. Was also rather short-lived as the game seems to run out of interesting enemy types and wave compositions rather quickly, meaning that eventually you just quit the game out of boredom instead of dying from increasing challenge.

Would love to see this in a future state with some more polish and greater depth/variety in gameplay!

[Dungeon Deli]

Jeez, I hate to say this, but I had a really rough time with this game and found it very difficult to stick with it, eventually having to quit to preserve my sanity.

At its core, the game is quite the interesting experiment. Similar to games like Necrodancer, it is attempting to change up the typical dungeon formula with a mechanical twist, being not only rotating directional attacks, but also constantly shifting modes that affect the field. It changes typically straightforward combat and navigation into a improvizational puzzler that keeps you on your toes and has you dance around in a bizarre, but intriguing way. It's definitely unique and it piqued my interest!

However, while the mechanics are interesting in theory and ideally should make a fun puzzle dungeon, the more I played, the more I got aggravated with the huge side-effect of tedium that the mechanics wrought:

*It's just so damn annoying that each step you take has to shoot out a bullet, and you need to wait for that bullet to go and hit a wall (which can be very far away at times) before you can take another step. Over and over and over, it adds so much time and turns movement into such a chore, especially if the room is already clear of enemies: why wouldn't you make it so that the player has to decide when to shoot, or at least turn off the auto-shooting when the room is clear? I'd also turn off the modes when a room is clear too: it's all such pointless tedium!

*I also didn't find the whole rotating bullet aspect to be that fun. Ideally, I'd like it to be that you'd be dancing around an enemy to try and always keep your gun pointed at them, but there's just no way to do that, meaning that all you can do is just try to keep them on one side of you and stall until your gun rotates all the way back around. With that, it's just turned into basic kiting but with more steps: not that exciting at all.

*To add to all of this, the game is rather dry in terms of pizazz and juice. For example, killing enemies just has them instantly poof away instead of giving some sort of satisfying feedback. I understand it's a dungeon crawler so I'm not expecting big explosions and fireworks, but something would be better than nothing.

*There were also a couple of bugs here and there, like how an enemy moved during my shooting when they aren't typically allowed to do that.

As said, I appreciate the experiment as I think the idea behind this has merit, but the current execution of said idea is not my cup of tea.

EvanMMO responds:

Thanks for playing. Looking forward to the vid!

[Planet Invasion]

Hmm, bit mixed on this one, unfortunately.

Game definitely had a pretty good first impression with the very humorous and animated opening cutscene. The concept of protecting your planet from incoming planets with a unique planet-clashing mechanic was quite novel, considering you could've easily opted for the more traditional turret shooting mechanic instead. Also, there was certainly an attempt at keeping things interesting by always upping the ante with bosses and larger planets to contend with. There's certainly a lot of potential here!

However, I just overall found the gameplay to be rather unsatisfying and dry, despite the attempts made. Few points to consider:

*The core mechanic of crashing planets into other planets by dragging them just didn't feel that great: there was no sort of fun feedback or physicality to be had, both due to the simplicity of such an action and the lackluster special effects. Would've loved a more interesting and challenging core mechanic, such as maybe being able to fling or flick planets into each other, either directly or perhaps indirectly by spawning gravity wells that change their trajectory.

*The game was confusing from lacking feedback for elements like your current experience points and how far you are from your next upgrade, as well as the cooldown timers for your laser/missiles/etc and where they are being pointed.

*It felt like so many times I would run out of ammo through no fault of mine and be unable to contend with a boss or a planet about to crash into me. It was also weird that we aren't able to grab the tiny space debris, considering we are able to grab small planets that are bigger than it: I guess I can understand why you did it to compel you to play differently, but it still feels illogical.

*Powerups were confusing at times: for example there is a bigger cursor powerup which I thought might've let me be able to grab the next biggest tier of planets, but no luck. Would've really helped with the above issue as well if it were the case.

veeh1ve responds:

Thanks a lot for the feedback! I've already started rewriting and tweaking some things, but you did bring up some things I haven't considered. I'll certainly look into them.

[Lights Out (NGPD2024 Demo)]

Pretty decent puzzle platformer! Has a nice retro aesthetic, the concept of shutting lights off and racing out of the darkness is cute and childlike, and the mechanics are built upon with new stuff at a good pace. It doesn't exactly wow me or anything, but it provides some decent fun.

If I were to have any feedback, it would be:

*The default controls were pretty bizarre and unintuitive. For example, I would expect the menu to be accessed with ESC, but it's done with Enter? As another, I would expect the main/interact/confirm button to be something like Z, X, Space bar, or maybe Enter, but D? Why D, of all buttons?

*I felt like maybe the levels were paced a bit too quickly. For example, I was surprised that, on the same level where you introduce buttons, you also introduce the twist of using batteries as objects to hold down a button. That's quite the loaded level! But then again, better to be fast-paced than too slow.

*I was really scared of levels that had a bunch of ghosts, because it felt like it creates so much busy work to clear them out before you can actually play the level. If I were to die, I would hate to clear the ghosts all-over again, going back and forth to aggro them and pull them to the light, one-by-one.

*I found it odd that, while there is a symbol for acquiring the coin in the level, there's no symbol on the calendar to indicate that a level has been normally cleared.

[Y.O.F.F.]

Oh man, this is a rough one. The concept that you're going for is solid and there are glimpses of greatness in here, but the execution felt incredibly ham-handed and unfinished.

As said, this has the makings of a great speedrunner game in the likes of Mirrors Edge, Neon White, and so on. When the game is firing on all cylinders, it can be a load of fun as the courses turn into very exciting rollercoaster rides where you're dashing and jumping with style through all sorts of clever designs. I quite enjoyed trying to clear some of the more challenging aspects, like this part where you need to triangle jump upwards between two platforms!

But overall, the game felt incredibly janky and awkward to play:

*Not being able to strafe is a strange design choice, and movement in general felt way too slippery and strange, especially as there's a weird sideways adjustment you make upon stopping that I see no reason for.

*I didn't like how your gauge is instantly killed if you let go of forward for even a nano-second, as it made it so overly delicate and didn't let you do stuff like drifting.

*There's no coyote time so I was constantly having my jump inputs ignored when jumping from the edge of platforms.

*There were loads of missing sounds and feedback, such as when you get a feather: without feedback, I had no idea whether I got it or missed it.

*The game doesn't even get simple things right, like how it doesn't even update your facing upon death or level transition.

As said, there's definitely potential here, and I really, really want to love this: it just needed more time in the oven!

Kunishiro responds:

Thank you for the review!

[Gates of Hades]

Huh, I hate to say this, but this felt, well, pretty bog-standard and boring, like some sort of unfinished 'my first game' student project or something. I could barely stand to play past a minute based on the terrible first impression.

There's so many aspects that feel like they are placeholders, such as the menus and UI, and the gameplay is just so uninspired, being an arena shooter with no unique concept or powerups or interesting combat design. Shooting enemies just wasn't satisfying, the levels drag on, and the controls also felt incredibly awkward, especially with the jumps which are momentum-based and don't allow any air control.

It's strange because there are so many elements that are technically good on their own: sprites and artwork are nice, music is cool, the arenas change up as you go, enemy variety is good, there's some decent special effects like the gun casings spilling out, and so on. But for some reason, the game feels way less than the sum of its parts.

There's certainly potential here: as said, you've got some good assets, and the skeleton for an arena shooter is present. There just needs to be more pizazz, some sort of juicy hook or concept, some spark of joy to make the gameplay interesting!

Paytonio responds:

I appreciate the criticism. It's fair to say there's a lack of a hook in the game. The design philosophy was inspired off of Sonic 2 where the final batch of levels are brutal to encourage you to run through the easier levels as practice. The intention is to make the run where everything finally comes together as satisfying as possible. I see how that isn't a very intuitive philosophy, though, and unfortunately very few players will experience this rewarding feeling from the game. Luckily, I will be able to create my next project with this in mind and I will be sure to make my vision clear from the very first level.

[SUPRA DREAM BEAN GARDEN DRIFT]

I tried my best to figure this out, but despite my best efforts, I have no idea what this game is or what the appeal is, and am left baffled and confused, unfortunately. I just really couldn't tell whether this game was some sort of experimental outsider art, or just busted!

In some ways, the game has a lot of potential in its weirdness. The graphics have a certain level of charm and craftsmanship to them, and the level design is rather surreal with its flower design and void-like structure. There's a feeling that there is so much going on with all sorts of alerts and alien mechanics, and it's an adventure to try and learn how everything works. I felt like the strange way the car reverses on a dime is reminiscent of games like Big Rigs. There's some satisfying juicy hitfreeze when hitting objects, and the way the car drifts is also neat.

But on the other hand, I was completely lost. Controls and goals weren't explained and even when they were explained they could be contrary to how they operate. The game's performance would constantly dip into single digit FPS on certain sections of the map. I wasn't sure if aspects like glitchy void, the powerful car reverse, were intentional or just shoddy/unfinished. Despite my best efforts, I felt like I was making zero progress.

It was certainly...something!

tscoct responds:

Ye, sorry, this is my first time ever writing on Tic-80, so the performance was the only unintentional thing, everything else was more or less fitted to work in conjuction with each other

[Pixel Fixel]

Huh, this is a pretty nice and chill puzzler you got here! I was a bit confused and wasn't fully sold on it at first, but there was something really interesting about learning the main conceit of the game through experimentation, and the act of arranging gradients tickled my 'strangely satisfying' sense quite well! All the fun of taking a trip down to your hardware store and playing with their color swatches: maybe with this as practice I can finally see the difference between true white and off white!

If I were to have any feedback, it might be that it'd be nice to see the fastest/par score within or at the end of a stage, instead of only being able to see it in the menu. It'd also be nice if it were to grade us at the end of the level, give us a medal if we got under par and all that jazz: add a little bit of addictive razzle-dazzle for the achievement hunters and all that.

It does also get a bit tedious and overwhelming as it just keeps increasing in scale and utilizing colors that are so close to each other where its super hard to eyeball the very minute distinctions in color: I'm not sure how you would do it, but it would've been nice if the levels somehow evolved or changed things up in a different way with a new mechanic or some such.