FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Abysmal Ascent]

Hey, this is pretty cool! I love the madcap chaotic balancing act of racing upwards to get away from the lava while collecting as much experience and mana to prepare yourself for bosses and other obstacles: it all makes for a very addictive and challenging arcade experience, reminding me a bit of other games like Downfall (though obviously in reverse, haha)!

I'll admit though, that as much as I like it, there's something about the feel and control of the game that can be rather frustrating. In particular, the flying system feels very unintuitive in that it seems like you can't choose to, say, extend your flight and hover by tapping the flight button, as it seems the fuel is on a timer that starts when you lift off and drains constantly, even if you're not using it, until you touch the ground. How strange! But then again, maybe that's how magic works, unlike a jetpack. In addition to that, somtimes the terrain can be a bit of an annoyance in how spotty it can be and how harsh it can be in stopping you if you just slightly scrape against it.

[MUNCHIEBOX]

Hrmm...it's kinda neat in a sort of virtual museum way where you look at cool graphic designs while platforming, but unfortunately I found the platforming more frustrating than a fun challenge due to the incredibly dodgy controls and physics which create all sorts of inconsistencies: for example, trying to jump off of enemies sometimes works and sometimes doesn't, and edge jumping is a constant problem in trying to get to work. Even if it did work properly, I didn't quite see the appeal.

As a side note, it's surprising how antagonistic this game is to the player: that pit trap that you can't jump out of at the end is a hell of a 'fuck you' to the player, haha! Quite memorable to see something like that in a world where most games are overly padded, safe and friendly (but that doesn't mean I'm gonna play this game over to get past it and see what I missed, mind you).

[Lumibus]

Hmm, it's got some nice vibes going for it, the bus is intriguing, and the gameplay is certainly unique: never seen a visual novel crossed with a Where's Waldo minigame, haha! But while it does have some memorability going for it, I simultaneously found it rather forgettable: the story has some potential to be emotional, but it's been done before and I felt it was too short and static to let any significant feelings develop in me, and the gameplay felt rather token and maybe even disruptive to the mood. Furthermore, I was really let down that there was no ending past the decision from what I could tell: there's leaving it open to let you ponder on it, I suppose, but I dunno. A nice experiment, at least!

I picked the dog, if you were curious.

[Perfect Recipe]

Hmm, this one is a bit of an odd egg!

I think the core gameplay of trying to find the perfect recipe is very intriguing! Gathering ingredients, learning all of their weird attributes and then puzzling out the ones you need and the order to put them in is pretty cool! It's a bit confusing to grasp how the formulas shake out at times, but luckily the game tries to be as helpful as possible when writing out the resulting score and everything that leads into it. It gets even more fun and interesting when new ingredients are added later on!

Unfortunately, the way the game loop is constructed around this core concept does it a massive disservice, in my opinion. The game takes wayyyy too long to start introducing new ingredients, leading to a lot of pointless repetitive looping of the same small pool of starter ingredients over and over and over. I just don't understand why it does this: I already collected all of the ingredients and constructed the best recipe I could in a single turn, so why force me to do it over and over? Perhaps if I was under time pressure when cooking or if I made a mistake in the order, yeah, then I'd want another crack at a recipe with the same ingredients to make it better, but that's not the case: time stops when cooking and you can take back moves! I'm sorry to say, but I've never completed a full session of this game because I get too bored, even when new stuff eventually shows up.

I don't want to hate on this too much because I do think the core concept has a lot of potential. Perhaps you could make the loop more fun and engaging through randomness, like each time you stop, you meet a customer who wants a recipe with certain random demands, like they want a soup with corn that is 7 points, and you try to cook up something as close as possible to do and the customer either likes it or hates it, awarding you a certain number of points. This goes on until it gets so hard you can't go on, or maybe you reach the time limit, and then you get ranked on how well you did. I'd love to replay something like that, and I'd be interested in your own ideas on a better loop as well!

[Prickle DEMO]

Hey, it's great to see this game back in a more fleshed-out version! I loved the game and its very creative puzzle concept back then, and I still love it now! That means I don't have very much new to say, but one addition I really liked were the goofy intermission scenes between sets of levels: I'm a big fan of these in other games like Pac Man and Oil's Well, as not only are they amusing to watch, but they serve as a nice mental 'checkpoint' that escalates the feeling of progression! Anyway, best of luck and I hope the game gets a lot of attention (and money)!

[Don't Kill the Messenger]

This game starts off with a solid first impression from the great intro cinematic and the promising concept of a game where you play as a pacifist messenger who needs to dodge and use improvisational weaponry to make it through the deadly lands...but unfortunately it quickly goes downhill from there!

The primary issue that I have with the game is that it seems like it's barely holding itself together. Not only did I suffer from loads of visual glitches like doors not rendering until you walk up to them and sprites being layered incorrectly, but the controls felt very janky, unintuitive and inconsistent, and I suffered from multiple outright crashes and freezes, even when I tried installing the demo from Steam, hoping it would be more stable than the web version (it wasn't).

Even if we put aside all of the technical issues, the game itself just seems rather bland, generic and repetitive, with me quickly wanting to just leave the dungeons as quick as possible instead of staying for all the loot. I'll admit that part of that isn't the games fault, just me being bored of yet another roguelike game, but still, I wasn't seeing anything particularly eye-catching or innovative here.

You have my sympathies because bug-hunting and other quality assurance tasks are thankless and unending. I had to be honest though that I had a bad time with this: hopefully it can be fixed up in time for full release!

[No Shirt, No Service]

Pretty decent little top-down shooter arcade game! It's a bit simple and plain and therefore the appeal didn't last very long for me, and it did have some confusing elements like telling me to be careful not to shirt someone already shirted even though you get more points if you shirt people twice...but I did like that the game pushes you to use the gun's recoil as a means of not only getting around quickly, but it allows you to stay alive and dodge upper management if you're skilled enough: feels great to be able to fight back at what seems impossible!

So yeah, not too shabby for a little game jam experience: it's lacking in content, but the core movement/shooting feels addictively good and I'd like to see more!

[No More S'more]

Mmm, this is a rough one for me! As a fan of Warioware minigames, this is right up my alley, serving up some creative and amusing little scenarios, and I like how cute the game is at first glance. Unfortunately, as I played it, I felt like I kept encountering issue after issue and the game fell flat for me:

*The help screen at the title doesn't work: it gives instructions for the first three games, but there's no way I could figure out how to scroll or switch the page without freezing the game outright, leading to a lot of frustration when I didn't know how to play the others when they came up (and you gotta react so fast on the Toss minigame!)

*The Hide minigame not only felt a bit repetitive in how you're just running from one side of the table to the other, over and over, but I was also confused as to what exactly was happening: why am I dropping off costumes in some sort of cup? I wish the minigame was more of a stealth affair where you need to keep make your way across the table, ducking under cover to hide away when someone glances over.

*The Dance minigame was a let-down because there was no music to hit the notes to, which is the main attraction of rhythm games.

*As said before, the Toss minigame goes by way too fast and can have you die instantly before you realize what is happening, and even when you do, I didn't realize that the fire was an actual obstacle and not just in the background, so again I died instantly and had to wait forever to give it another try.

*The Roast minigame is kinda neat in theory, but in execution you're just repetitively scooting from one side of the stick to the other, over and over and over. It takes soooo long for it to finish that I generally lose patience and just die intentionally so that it's finally over.

*Even if you do survive for long enough to get the achievement, your only reward is the same 'game over' screen where you die that you would get if you didn't try at all. Just feels like all of that work was for nothing. I suppose he's fated to be a s'more, perhaps, but still, I wish there was some slight alteration to the ending, or a better scoring/ranking system to make you feel more accomplished.

I know that was a lot of complaints and was probably hard to read, but again, I feel like this game had good potential and some cute vibes, so I want to give it as much feedback as possible, and I'm hoping that you can come back from this and make cooler games in the future using this as a learning experience!

ProctoredGames responds:

Wow, that's a long review lol. Thank you so much for the feedback!

I am kind of regretting not putting a scroll bar on the help screen now. That's a great point that I will make sure is not an issue in future games! I wanted to keep all of the minigames tied to the theme of making s'mores and I had to get creative at parts to make it work. Now that I think about it, your idea for the Hide Minigame is a lot better than what I ended up going for, which I admit is repetitive, and Roast is a puzzle game out of the blue after everything before it so I can see why it would be uninteresting. I may update the game later on to fix the Dance minigame as what you see here was not the initial idea I had (which I simply couldn't execute). Back to hide, the intention was that equipping a disguise makes you take longer to find and the best way I could think of to make each disguise add time logically was to make the last one disappear and new ones spawn when the player goes inside the bag. I can see why you would think that you are "dropping off" the disguises though and I should have been more clear in comunicating what was actually happening. Being more clear on the toss minigame is something I should have done as well. Again, thank you for the feedback, these more critical reviews really do help me improve in future projects!

[Roachbound: The Eight-Year RPG | Chapter 1]

Hah, now this is some classic Newgrounds behavior, except where before we would trash celebs, now we're trashing diet celebs, aka Youtubers. Nice to see the spirit of the Assassin series is still alive, though perhaps here in a much less violent manner!

I don't know too much about Pirate Software, but I've seen enough shorts and the drama to recognize most of the references, and I thought the game was pretty clever in how it captured certain elements of his behavior like his speech patterns and MSPaint scribbles. I also thought stuff like making the Apologize action much smaller than the Bullshit action was clever (though I'd love it if it also did something like gravitate the mouse towards Bullshit so you have to fight against it, haha).

As amusing as the game was at times, I have to admit that I felt a bit disappointed at the end of my experience with this, literally going "is that it?" Perhaps you could argue that's part of the joke in a bit of meta-humor, but I dunno if I'd agree. It's very short and made even shorter since choices didn't matter and led to the same ending, there was no way to mess with the game like putting the color blocks on the wrong switches, and it just felt like the gags were a bit of a random mish-mash instead of a well-paced and directed roast that really takes him to task.

So yeah, I had a few good laughs and it showed some potential, but I still felt like it was a bit less than the sum of its parts. Perhaps you're operating on a higher level of humor that I'm not getting though: you did have to explain that last joke after all since I didn't get it.

midgetsausage responds:

silly futurecop, don't you know it takes an iq of 200 to understand my elite grade shitpost?

fr though, okioki so: ty!!!!! now, about the game's length, it being short was both intentional and unintentional. the latter was because i had ran out of stupid jokes to put that wasn't already what the player had seen beforehand, so in my head it was better to end it before it overstayed its welcome. the former was because the game I was parodying had been in development for over eight or nine years at this point and despite that, only a portion of the game is available, compared to something like Undertale that was made in a much shorter period of time but had more stuff in it and a longer playtime.

a lot of the disappointment probably comes from expectations. i'm not trying to insult u guys or some shit but i do think there were some people that expected a mighty good roast out of a shitpost game that got frontpaged, when in reality i hadn't really expected it to get as much praise here as it did and I had even expected an Underdog of the Week award. hell i'm just as surprised as anybody it stayed on the frontpage for as long as it did.
now if I was aiming higher when I started this, then I def would've done a lot more work, like more research on both [him] and Norse mythos, and a proper outline with more gameplay-story choices in mind n stuff. but this project was sort of done in the heat of the moment and the main goal was to make a shitpost that was a couple levels higher than, i don't know, zabujard's

the other main goal was to make people at least somewhat enjoyed, and to that, i'm glad u at least were enjoyed when u played it!!!!!

[JAY LENO ADVENTURES]

Hah, quite the goofy adventure you've made here! I must admit, I've never known Jay Leno or other late-nite hosts that well, but thank god for this game in delivering me all these facts to enrich my knowledge banks (facts that I hope are all true and not doctored in anyway).

Overall, I think the game serves up a decent little journey loaded with secrets and funny gags, and is rather heartfelt in a weird way, but as is the unfortunate case for a lot of games like this, it's a very style over substance kind of affair: once you remove all the funny sound effects, you're left with a very bog-standard and dry platformer. It does show some promise in some areas: the last gauntlet where you're riding a turtle with a spring comes to mind as a fun challenge. I just wish we had more challenges like that so the game wouldn't feel so padded!

So yeah, good for a chuckle, but I wish this game was also legitimately good as a game and not just as a gag: we've seen it work with other games like the AVGN adventures!

Oh, and a bit of a side note: I swear that bonus Gyromite-esque minigame is damn near impossible! I had my play optimized down to a frame-perfect science but I still couldn't win.