FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

['Tower of the Missing Sock' - DEMO]

Cute game, but a little bit bland once you get past those cute graphics and play for awhile.

Don't get me wrong, I think the game is quite cute and endearing with the style and animations, and the game does have some really neat aspects like the boss fight at the end, which was a definite highlight for me.

But in the end, it felt like the game was merely decent, being a very simple zelda-esque game without any interesting gadgets or puzzles or setpieces: just incredibly basic combat against the same enemies over and over, and the combat was very frustrating at times due to the sluggish movement and attacks coupled with the enemies not being stunned from your attacks. Also, this is a nitpick, but I didn't like the lazy animation done for the door/stairs transitions: just looked unnatural, especially for the stairs in particular since it didn't have the shadows to try and hide it.

The goofy story and style was enough to hook me, and I'm glad since I got to fight that neat boss at the end, but it did feel like this could've used more meat on its bones, if you'll pardon the pun. As a side note, it is cool to see you experiment with all these different genres!

Butzbo responds:

That's a fair point, I took this one as a bit more of a challenge of making a game of this kind, so in terms of gameplay there's nothing I could consider particularly new. Still great to hear that other bits were fun including the boss fight, I'd like to keep going trying out other genres and hopefully adding something new next time ;) Thanks man!

[Grandpa's Minigun]

Fun little game! Loved the goofy story and concept to it, and had a blast mowing down enemies like I was mowing the lawn. All the little touches to the game were great: the feedback from blasting enemies and the corpses they left behind, the little speech bubbles, the way the music amped up when a wave transition happened: really cool stuff. I especially liked the element of having your attack slow you down significantly, as well as turning being very slow: really sold the weight of that minigun and added a cool strategic element of choosing when to attack and when to run. In that regard, I almost feel like you shouldn't have had the dodge roll since it ignores the weight of the gun, but eh, I'll allow it since it was fun, haha.

There were definitely some minor nitpicks to be had: for one, I have no idea what the heck that minigame all of a sudden was, two, it was a bit difficult to tell when I would be hit and when I wouldn't since the hitboxes could be a bit vague (is the minigun and the crown part of my hitbox? is it just one of the kids, and if so, which one? etc), three, it was a little annoying how difficult it was to pick up souls, and four, the game did get a little boring in that I found you could easily just get in a circling pattern to avoid attacks, slowing the action down. Also I was hoping for more gibbing variety: little disappointing that the enemies didn't have more variety in corpses and splatters and such, but as said, that's pretty minor.

jefvel responds:

Thanks for the thorough review! I agree that the dash might not fit in super well with the heaviness of the gun, but it was so fun so I left it in. I had planned to have it more like a drifting mechanic, so you could sort of swing the minigun, and the crown would act as a morning star club, but that might have made the controls a bit too difficult.

Yeah, the minigame comes in super quickly, it was tricky to balance between having a flow that matches the music and giving the user enough time to understand what's happening.

Exploding monsters with a ton of gibs was something I wanted to have too, but didn't have time for adding, maybe they'll be in a future game. And yeah, both siblings have a hitbox, a circle around their feet, it's not very clear at all, didn't think about that. The splatter system was written very haphazardly, which made adding variety to it pretty tricky, but it's something I might improve on in future games :)

[Crush the Industry Demo]

Wow, pretty impressive demo! You frontloaded by saying it wasn't gonna be polished or anything, but I felt like what was shown was already quite polished: animations and graphics were very lively and cute, combat system was deep with a lot of interesting strategy and characters to choose from, and so on and so forth. All around it just felt very well put-together, with the thing I liked the most about the game was how intuitive the interface was: while I felt like the initial tutorial was a bit too much to grasp at first since it just dumps everything on you at once and I feared I was gonna miss something, it was great at how helpful the game was in letting you hover your mouse over practically anything to get a tooltip to see what it was. There were some small things that could be fixed up here and there, such as how sometimes the effects from combat would happen too fast for me to realize the full effects that just occurred, but from seeing how it's already going I think you're on a good path. Looking forward to the full version!

As a silly side note, I hope you're having a good time developing and that the whole toxicity aspect is just for fun and not to be used as a shield against criticism or anything like that: it can be rough out there but I hope you're able to stay with a healthy outlook and sort out the good feedback from the bad. I just don't want this to be a "oh you didn't love my game? whatever, you're just a hater" thing instead of realizing what might seem likely overly critical feedback deep down is trying to be helpful...eh, I'm overthinking things.

CognogginGames responds:

Thank you! And I'm having fun with it. I wouldn't want a shield against constructive criticism -- it is essential to helping me improve the game. The character core skills update that just went live was something that I was motivated to do after reading feedback here.

[GRUNGE]

Wow, really cool game! Definitely has all that and a bag of chips: cool graphics, sound and music, interesting combat mechanics, satisfying feedback and effects, good enemy variety and progression, all packed with a humorous and wild story/aesthetic. Found myself getting super addicted to this, making it all the way to the final boss on my first go!

I'll admit that my first impression wasn't that great: I actually didn't know what to do on the first level as I didn't realize I just needed to keep fighting through the wave till it ends (it took so long I thought the enemies wouldn't stop spawning and I needed to go down a path or open the door but couldn't figure out how). Glad I stuck with it though, but maybe could use a bit more direction or signals?

If I was to have a small nitpick, it's that one, I feel like the debris from broken items should be darkened or something to let you know you can't pick it up anymore, and two, I found the health system a bit weird at times: I'd throw an enemy at another, always expecting both the one I threw and the target to die on collision, but one would always remain. Don't know why that annoyed me so much, haha. Throwing enemies and objects was awesome though, especially if you shake 'em up first.

Speaking of that, as a side note, I also found it weird that the game seems to try and dissuade you from shaking the enemies up before a throw, since I found it really fun (not sure if it was meant to be taken in earnest?)

(also I do have some beef with how the mid-boss-fight-cutscene where your boss shows up to give you a weapon ended up getting me killing during his drop-off)

[Apocalypse Of The Damned (ALPHA)]

I think this shows a lot of promise, but it's definitely quite rough at the moment. Understandable of course, since it is an alpha, and hopefully I can provide some nice feedback so it becomes better in future!

For the good, I liked the whole Scott Pilgrim-esque graphics and animations: very cute and bouncy all-around. I think it showed some solid fundamentals for a good beat-em-up, as I really like the hit-freeze and feedback from punching enemies, as well how you worked in some strategic elements in the moveset, where you can use the punches for combos/damage while using the kick as a spacing tool.

For the bad, I'll admit, there was a lot (though again, it's an alpha):

The worst was probably the enemies, which felt very boring, brainless and generic: they mostly just felt way too spongy and moved way too fast and straight-forward instead of having any personality or interesting patterns to them. Groups of enemies were a problem as well since the game seems to not let you hit multiple enemies with your attacks even if they are overlapping: I can understand if this is intentional but it felt very unsatisfying and frustrating.

Next was the animations and controls. Again, while I generally liked them, there were a couple of stinkers like the kick attack. Also while the controls were alright, there was some stiffness to it and just general jank in the actions/reactions that could be smoothed out. I also spent a long time in confusion in just trying to play the game, not realizing that the controls weren't interchangable, but supposed to be one for one-player and another for two-player (I was trying to use the numpad as player one).

Feedback was another one. While I do like most of the feedback as said before due to the great effects and hit-freeze, there were some oddities like boxes/trash cans having a bloody hit mark/sound for feedback when it makes no sense and having infinite health meaning I couldn't destroy them, and there were also some weird cases where I could hit an enemy that was in the process of dying/exploding (feels like those attacks should whiff).

Again, looking forward to seeing how this shakes up as a huge beat-em-up fan!

[Dubstep Raven]

Another great RatThing game with that distinctive goofy yet gritty/grungy style and straight up action gameplay!

I gotta say though, I did feel like this was one of the more weaker RatThing games lately. Don't get me wrong, I still enjoyed my time with this: the powers were cool, it felt really satisfying to chain together shooting and possessing, dodging bullets in slow-mo was neat, and as usual the story and bosses were neat. I'd say its core is very good and polished.

I just felt like the levels were a bit repetitive and ended up dragging on for me: the enemy variety wasn't that great and the enemy formations you tackle as a player felt very haphazard, practically randomly generated. I say that because it didn't feel like the difficulty curve was well-designed: you can get some tough formations at the beginning where you gotta get to the shielder first though some crazy bullets, then suddenly you can go through several levels with no shielders and really easy enemies. Just felt all over the place, and it didn't help that the backgrounds weren't changing and it wasn't introducing any new enemies either. Again, it was still fun, but it's just near the bottom of my RatThing ranking as it were, haha.

[Sulka]

Gotta say, it didn't make a great first impression on me since a lot of the first levels were spent on some pretty basic platforming. Once the game introduced the cool gravity powers, though, I was hooked and really loved the creative and challenging levels that were set up for this ability! C'mon, don't hold that stuff back, gimme that good stuff straight into my vein right from the start, haha!

[Cactu-Sama 2]

Nice to see a sequel to Cactu-Sama as I liked my time with that and also enjoyed my time with this! All-round it was a cute little game with some great challenges that mostly relied on a nice 'gotcha' system where you need to avoid taking what seems like the obvious route, as it is usually a trap.

If I were to have any complaints, there would just be a few minor nitpicks. For one, I found the game to be a bit more muted and less peppy that the previous one: movement felt a little more stiff, sound effects were more quiet, and events that used to have a bit more fanfare like completing a level were unfortunately silent now. I also felt like the story setup was a little weak: I mean, it is a little amusing to just see the balloon drift away and read "oh noes" but it did just kind of confuse me since we don't even see what cactu is doing: is it his balloon? Is he sad? Where is he? Is he even chasing after the balloon? You might say of course, it's obvious he's chasing after it, but every level just has us picking up puzzle pieces for some reason, so what the heck is he doing? Haha, anyway, still a cute game.

Diemorth responds:

I'm glad you liked this new version of the game! :D

You brought up a lot of relevant points, the game is actually a little quieter. I really tried to prepare the game for the story, but we ended up not developing it much, the story ends up looping and I think it can be a good start to have that defined in the case of a sequel. They are certainly points that we will pay attention to.

Thank you for the game compliments and for playing! :D

[Mr. Godot & Watch]

Solid short and sweet platformer! It didn't do anything revolutionary or anything, but it was solid all-around: cute graphics and animations, smooth controls/movement, a good assortment of challenges and some cool music to tie the whole package together. The aesthetic is a little weird in how some elements conform to it with the slow FPS movement while others don't, but eh, it's all good, I ain't gonna nitpick about that. If I were to have any major nitpicks, it's that I found it a little weird to get used to the preserved side momentum in jumps when you let go of movement, and that the death system was a bit too punishing in that it takes away all of your diamonds, instead of just the ones that you haven't 'banked' yet by using a checkpoint. I just took it as a challenge that you're pushing the player to go for a perfect run, haha.

[LawnMower City]

A decent game, but I found it to be a bit shallow. While it was fun at first going through the levels and mowing the grass, it all just ended up feeling quite boring and couldn't keep my attention. While the levels did advance in complexity somewhat by introducing new enemies like tanks and turrets, I actually thought the levels were randomly generated at first because they all just felt so similar with no progression or style to them. Furthermore, I wish the mowing of grass felt a little bit more satisfying: perhaps if the sound was more similar to that grating hum of an actual mower or electric shaver it'd be better, and also if the mower would slow down when mowing grass to give it a bit of friction feedback, I dunno. I also found the controls a bit weird at first since I expected pressing up to move the mower diagonally up-right because of the isometric angle, but instead it moves directly up. I got used to it though and maybe more people prefer that way, though, so eh, it's understandable.