FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Jeri II: Tower's End]

Oh man, it's great to see a new Jeri Tower! I absolutely loved the first one, and was really excited to play this. While I do think this is overall a great adventure with awesome music and a large variety of cool mechanics, such as the whole switching mechanic which reminds me of Toodee and Topdee...I'm a bit unsure of how I feel about this as I found it a bit more frustrating than fun!

Some notes of my experience:

*The game definitely feels like it gets way too hard, way too fast. Maybe it's not actually that hard if you know what you're doing and are patient and all that jazz, but I was getting wiped in some of the earlier levels and losing my patience. Feels like I'm playing Mario The Lost Levels instead of just Mario 2. Maybe you took that criticism that the first Jeri Tower had a slow start and went too far in the opposite direction, haha!

*The controls can be a bit finicky and annoying to deal with. No, I'm not talking about using ESDF instead of WASD, that's fine (though I have no idea why you did that) I'm more talking about other stuff, primarily the awkward delay when shifting forms, or aiming the gun with the mouse, which I wish would just fire in cardinal directions like the sword so you don't get slightly angled shots that don't make it all the way down a corridor when you want it to for example. My mouse also kept leaving the screen and messing up my inputs: it was the worst on the level where you have to aim at the brown blocks which are, guess what, right at the edge of the screen! It's like you were trying to screw me over.

*The game does have a lot of enemies and mechanics of all sorts which adds a lot of novelty, but I feel like it also kinda loses focus and just turns into a mish-mash of whatever. There was a long span in the middle where it felt like the levels completely forgot about the switching mechanic except in an incredibly token way, for example. Again, it's neat, but artistically it feels like it lost its identity.

*Game just feels like it was jerking me around. Jeri Tower was a fun time, but playing this made me grunt, scream and moan constantly, and I'm a pretty patient guy who likes to play rage games. I'm not even talking about some of the maliciously annoying mechanics like the stars that run away from you or the chaser dragons (though screw you for them anyway). No, I'm talking about stuff like how every level is a claustrophobic mess and just has so much damn busy work of clearing out enemies and collecting stuff before you get to try the part you're having difficulty with, only to fail and have to run it all back. There were also oddities like how the bouncing system works: I'm still unsure why some enemies die to it yet the same one will die later on. Add up all the previous complaints about the controls and such as well.

*How in the world does a game as long and hard as this not have a save system? There were so many times I would get frustrated or tired and want a break, only to tell myself that I have to keep pressing on, otherwise I need to do everything all over again, and I don't want that. Eventually, even knowing that, I just got too annoyed and shut it off around creature catcher ii or whatever it was called, most likely never to return, unfortunately. I had no problem returning to Jeri Tower to redo it when I realized it hadn't saved my progress, but this?

As frustrated as I was, I still want to try and view it positively. As said before, perhaps this is meant to be a sequel like Mario The Lost Levels was, a challenge pack for the diehards instead of starting from scratch again, and I imagine it would be good for those folk. Saying that, I thought I was one of those folk, but I dunno anymore.

succojones responds:

Thanks for you thorough thoughts as always. Glad to have broken your spirit ^_^

A Mario 2 of Jeri using the original game as a base was my original intent. And I actually got pretty close to making that but I had some technical issues and wasn't enjoying making levels, so I decided to add the gun and start the project over, using saved code and gfx space to make the new enemies and stuff.

I think the problems come from slight jank in the mechanics and yeah the levels are super hard. You start with all the movement options dumped on you at once and expect you to have great motor skills and understanding of the physics like I do from testing the game for hours on end.

This was a really long and drawn out project for me, I started it about a year ago and just really wanted it done so I can move on to other stuff. I was super burnt out at the end of development. So I'm not the proudest, but I'm really happy with the art and some of the crazy levels even if they're only fun to me :')

Thanks for the almost 5 stars nonetheless! I APPRECIATE YOU!!!!!

[RoboNips 2]

Hmm, it's a decent sequel to the first RoboNips, I suppose. The presentation is charming, the concept is ok, and the inclusion of the gun is a nice way to deal with those frustrating scenarios where you have just one block left but you can't get the ball to bounce there. But other than that, I wasn't really feeling this and was disappointed at not only the lack of evolution, but the lack of patches to fix previous issues!

I tried my best to enjoy it, but not only is it pretty much a basic block breaker, I found myself very frustrated with the physics and collisions. The way the ball would bounce off of blocks made no sense at times, and trying to aim the way to bounce the ball off of the player character was annoying due to how thin they are compared to a standard paddle, causing me to lose patience easily. Shooting was nice but was severely limited: I wish it had some sort of passive recharge mechanic in addition to the star ammo. All in all, I didn't make it that far before giving up, sorry!

[Glim]

Nice little arcade game! It's a bit simplistic, but it's got some good vibes, I liked the varied Glum behavior as it creates some challenging patterns to deal with when they overlap, and the risk/reward of consecutive bounces and flips to get a hi-score is cool. I don't really care for the colors and hats as much as others likely do, but the challenge room with hard mode is a nice bonus.

Some subtle aspects that I enjoy are the fact that the Glums have animated attack telegraphs: it does a lot to make everything intuitive and avoid unfair/cheap deaths from sudden attacks. As grim as it sounds, I also love the death animation: the sudden freeze and the explosion afterwards gives me old-school vibes like the Adventures of Lolo (and I like that you can skip it once the novelty wears off!)

If I were to have some feedback, it'd be:

*While they are generally ok, the hitboxes can be a bit wonky at times where instead of my character getting hit, it's more like the invisible space of their bounding box gets hit. Also I've had some rare times where I totally jumped on top of a vulnerable non-attacking enemy and I get killed instead of bouncing off of them for some bizarre reason.

*The tutorial window is terrible as not only is the text grainy/distorted, it auto-advances too quickly for me to read, and when that happens, all I can do is hit the block to start the sequence over and wait for it to get back to the page I want to read. Ideally, you should hit the block to advance to the next page when you're ready.

*While you do get some sparkles and sounds when you do a high number of flips which is nice, I wish that the feedback would be more specific: I'd love a number to pop up for how many flips I've done during the sequence, and how many points I got when I end my flip combo.

*I'm not sure as perhaps I'm missing something, but it feels like the game is stagnant, meaning that it doesn't increase in difficulty the farther you get, and that means that once you get good enough, high scores are just a matter of patience, not skill. Ideally, I'd like the game to speed-up or perhaps transition into hard-mode after a certain amount of time or points.

[Meta Wargames]

I had a rough time playing this at first because the camera kept drifting for me. Eventually I learned that it seems to be a Firefox issue (and a lot of games seem to be suffering from this too), but the fact that I didn't immediately quit in frustration and kept going by playing this in a separate browser is a testament to how much the game impressed me and made me want to stick with it!

The game's already nice enough in delivering a good set of MGS-esque VR third-person stealth missions with a load of various mechanics to keep things interesting as you go through the levels. But when you then add on some neat story hooks and a fun ranking system, well, now you've impressed me! While a bit janky here and there, as well as not having the most impressive graphics, this was a great lil' adventure!

EndworldReaper responds:

Thanks for the review! I agree about the graphics and jankiness, if I had more time I would have liked to polish both. Glad you had fun!!

[Runner Of The Universe]

This one surprised me! I feel a bit silly for liking it so much considering the game is so simplistic, but hey, if it works, it works, and for me, this worked! I loved racing through the courses as fast as possible, not only to get a hi-score, but to maintain a high enough speed to clear some of the gaps. It provided a nice challenge with some cool twists like the wall running, and it reminded me a lot of other fun speedrun parkour games such as Neon White or Cyber Hook. Just some good ol' simple arcade fun to be had here!

By the way, it looks like there is a weird camera drift when I try to play it in Firefox: it goes away in other browsers like Chrome though. I've been seeing this drift issue in a lot of other games too, so I dunno what's going on and how it can be prevented. Bummer!

[King of Sliding]

Not too shabby! It's a tad bland, the low poly graphics aren't used in any interesting way, and the sliding puzzle mechanics aren't particularly exciting or new, but nevertheless this game makes for a decent puzzle-solving experience with plenty of levels to go through that add some interesting complexity when you have to work cooperatively with multiple characters. The inclusion of par star scores to go for is always a nice bonus too.

froggyrs responds:

Thank you! I really appreciate your feedback.

[Stain World : Prototype]

Hmm, not too shabby for a prototype!

It's certainly rough in a lot of ways: I would get stuttery performance hiccups a lot, I'd get confused over how much I need to clean up to lower the thorn walls since there's no gauge or tracker, it's rather repetitive to clean the goop up, and in general the game can feel a bit too big for its own good which leads to a sense of directionlessness.

But the movement shows some promise in how smooth it can be to platform around, the world has a decent amount of obstacles and secrets to keep things interesting, and above all else, it has some neat melancholy vibes due to its music, world design, and characters you meet.

So yeah, feels like this has some potential to make for an interesting adventure. I'd love to see the act of cleaning get a bit more interesting than just spamming the broom: it'd be great if fancy movement techniques could be used to clean-up, similar to what you'd see in something like Dustforce.

trixelbit responds:

Thanks for playing! This summarizes a lot of the feedback I've received.
I need to improve communication with players. I think I left most players without important tools that aren't obvious.
Thing's like not needing to swing to cleanup areas, and ways of increasing distance in jumps.

Either way, lessons learned and things I seek to improve in the future!
Thanks again for playing!

[Psychofind: Anomalies]

Hrmm, this one is in too rough of a state for me to enjoy, unfortunately! I think the characters are cute and I'm always in the mood for a good beat-em-up, but the game just feels wonky in almost every respect imaginable: even doing something as basic as just moving the character feels stuttery and unpleasant, like the game is barely holding itself together! I try to fight the ghosts but my attacks are so stubby and awkward that I typically end up messily trading blows, and after beating a few, the game just seems to stop, leaving me in this empty subway with nothing to do but assume it either glitched out or is just unfinished (which seems to be the case based on the description).

It's very rough right now, but I'd like to see this game in its ideal state if you continue to work on it. I wanna lightning kick the heck outta those ghosts properly!

psychobun responds:

I haven't thought about the movement, I recycled a code from my current developing game, but I always thought it was fine, if you want you can tell me more about the movement and the fight stuff, the punches goes to the camera direction which is controled by the mouse but if you're near to the enemy it redirects to them, idk if it's better to snap automatically to the enemies or just punch at the view direction 🤔🤔. The same is for my current game, so I don't wanna have that bad feeling in the big one 😭. I used this game for this, to get feedback that will be useful for the big project (and also polish this idea)...
And yeah the ghost are supposed to spawn all the time so its a bug and also isn't a bug (? I want to make it a propper ending.
thank you for the feedback

[Twitchshift]

Hah, reminds me a lot of something like Carmageddon! I like the goofy and comedic vibes that the game has, and mowing down pedestrians and trying to keep your combo up is quite fun! I don't think it quite has enough content to it to keep it entertaining for the full 5 minutes (could use some more interesting events like stream snipers) and it's a bit rough to play with weird collision detection and an unsatisfying drift that is so awkward I just end up not using it, but it's a pretty good attempt at a nice and simple arcade game!

[Daxolissian System: M46]

Argh, this was a rough one for me!

I really want to like it for several reasons. Driving along as the tank feels very fun just by itself, especially when you hit the turbo and turn into a sick drift, kicking up dirt. The enemies can be quite challenging in interesting ways, such as the missile launchers which fire where you're going and thus force you to dodge. And in general, I like the idea of blasting stuff as a tank!

But man, I just found the experience incredibly frustrating and annoying to play. Call it bad aim or a skill issue, but trying to shoot at these teeny-tiny enemies with even tinier hurtboxes was impossible for me, especially since you need to be shooting at them while moving: I really need some sort of lock-on or generous aim assist for this to work for me. It didn't help either that the world and levels just felt needlessly big and dull, and I hate that the general enemies get hitscan weapons since it makes it feel like its just luck on whether they hit you despite your best efforts.

I think the concept behind the game could work, and there is some charming aspects to this like the goofy narrator, but yeah, the execution is lacking for me currently.

3p0ch responds:

Huh, I thought they'd be reasonable targets if you get close and/or slow down and shoot them without completely stopping. Hopefully you got a video, I'd probably have to see what's going on.