FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[BATTERY ACID]

Pretty cool game! I'm always down for some Megaman Battle Network esque combat, and this had a pretty solid rendition of that, especially for a game jam game. I liked the system where you need to put yourself at risk to gather up static to keep yourself going and get more powerful in turn (though I got confused since I thought they were bullets I needed to dodge at first haha) and I liked the satisfaction derived from parrying bullets back at enemies. And of course, the boss fight was super cool as well, though he was a bit weak and didn't do as many interesting attack patterns as I'd like (though it was nice how he amped it up the more he got hurt). There was some slight jank with the game, such as the absolutely grating sound that happens when you get lasered, but nothing too serious: all in all, a cool experience, and I'd love to see more enemies and such added to this if possible!

This is gonna be a weird complaint, but I do kind of wish the game would just end when you kill the boss. Maybe I'm missing something, but I'm pretty sure that things just keep on looping over and over with no further meaningful progression once you beat the boss the first time: to me, it kind of makes it so that the game drags on until you get sick of it and quit, leaving the user with a worse impression then if the game ended with a satisfying explosive finish to the boss (and then giving the user the option to start over to get a better score).

EDIT: Weird, I gave it another go and it actually started to throw other bosses at me! Was I just really unlucky, or did it glitch to keep repeating the first boss? How odd, but glad I tried again as the other bosses were pretty neat!

[Portal Golf]

Pretty cool game! I find the concept and gameplay very fun: intuitive to grasp but with a lot of tricks to learn to get those challenging silver and gold medals. But more so than that, I absolutely love the amount of polish that this game has: the pitch-shifting sounds of collecting coins, the satisfying explosions for collecting medals at the end of levels, the great animated outlines and shaded coins showing your previous run results that let you plan further bit-by-bit, the fluid placement and movement of portals around the walls, and so on and so forth. All of it really gives the whole game a very professional look and feel to it: well done! The only bad things about the game that I could think is that the levels themselves could maybe have a bit more pizazz or something to them instead of just being the same drab walls, and that I wish there were even more levels to go through, haha!

Frenchie14 responds:

Great review and spot on feedback! Looking forward to seeing you play in your monthly review video! :D

[Spooky Music Machine]

Cute little app! Was impressed by the amount of functionality it has, such as the record/play/save options, and I liked the charming olde-style presentation to it all. While the audio is nice, I do wish it had some sort of visual feedback when working with it: felt like the main touch plate was begging for some sort of waveform or sound visualization to appear in it, both to let you know you can interact with it in the first place (I wasted too much time fiddling with knobs, not even realizing I was supposed to put my mouse in the touch plate since it was static) and just to get extra satisfaction, but it's ok and I guess adds to the olde charm. There were some other actions I wish I could do, like click to preserve a position on the touch plate while going to fiddle with the knobs, since as it is now you cannot use knobs while touching the plate since the mouse can only be on one at a time.

Anyway, it was pretty cool! I'd admit though, I was almost expecting some sort of jumpscare, the device starting to act in odd ways or finding hidden scary functionality, haha!

KittyhawkMontrose responds:

Thanks for playing! Yeah, with a mouse, it's pretty limited what you can do, like choosing to use the touchplate or use the sliders, but the cursor on the touch plate is an idea worth exploring. Haha, a jumpscare would've been funny, but we were trying to make a real instrument. Honest. XD

[Neon Shadows]

Pretty interesting game! I found the fusion of stealth gameplay with speed-running to be a rather fun combination to work with, and indeed I found myself getting addicted to trying to make it through the various levels in this. Definitely a good "elevator pitch" concept at work here. Game was quite stylish despite being having rather simple graphics and had good pacing by introducing new mechanics and ramping up the difficulty bit-by-bit.

It's a little clunky in some respects, and I don't agree with all the mechanics such as the lasers which don't telegraph when they are going to appear, the weird ways enemies reset or rather don't reset upon player death leading to inconsistent setups, and the fact that enemies will still chase you despite leaving their cone of vision (have to break line of sight with a wall instead), but I found it rather enjoyable nonetheless.

[The Hot Dog Incident]

Hmmm, it's not too shabby considering it's a jam game, but if I had to compare this game to a hot dog, I'd say it is an undercooked plain hot dog, unfortunately. It's not bad or anything, heck, it actually has a lot of nice touches in it like the blood stains left behind on the floor, the splatter when you hit enemies, and the fact that enemies actually have animations for their attacks. But with only one braindead chaser enemy type and the same monotonous sound effects being played rapid-fire without any pitch-shifting to help, the game just turns into a repetitive loop-de-loop as you just lazily run backwards from the enemy while shooting them, hoping your eardrums don't die before time is up. It's definitely going in the right direction of being a good shooter, but at the moment it's just very lacking.

[TREES' ADVENTURE - Demo]

Pretty neat demo, but a little rough on the edges (though of course, being a demo, that is to be expected). I think it definitely has a pretty good core to it for now: speeding around and bouncing off of walls and springs felt great when you get your momentum going. Definitely seems to be going for Sonic-esque gameplay and I'd say it's getting close.

That said, I did feel like the demo was lacking some polish (I know, duh, but still). For one, the game seems to lack any amount of coyote time which made it feel bad whenever I jumped from the edge of a platform and it used my double jump instead of making it count as my first jump. In a similar fashion, walljumping felt very awkward in that if you try to press a direction and jump instead of just jumping (which is very typical), unless you do it perfectly in sync you'll usually just fall off the wall and double-jump instead of actually walljumping: I think there should be a bit more stickiness to walljumping, a bit of a half-second buffer where you can hit a direction without immediately becoming unstuck from the wall. Moving beyond controls, with the power-ups and springboards and such having no sound-effects or sparkles or what-have-you and instead just disappearing instantly made the worlds feel very hollow and unexciting, which also combined with a general lack of direction in terms of their being too many routes and no story to work off of. Finally, and this is just my opinion, but the climbing ability felt a little weird and misplaced with the way it kills your momentum and allows you to go up anywhere: almost felt like cheating when I remembered to use it. Again, it might be that I'm being silly in pointing those things out because they are obvious and going to be addressed in the actual release, but I want to play it safe.

Also, I tried to play this game with a playstation controller and it didn't work unfortunately: just something to note for you to look into if you can!

UnlimitedTrees responds:

thank u. ive been gettin a lot that the game is very unpolished atm and yea, it is what it is. the game's pretty early in development and this demo really is just a little slice of what i have planned, so while the base ideas r there everything is lacking polish which i didnt have the time for with this demo. im glad u and other peopl r able to enjoy this demo, i hope i can rlly make the final game something special so every bit of criticism helps.

for the playstation controller, i dont own one so im unable to test it but i may look into that later down the line. ive mainly tested with an xbox one controller and keyboard, hopefully some day i can make input stuff better and cooler.

[Hell Fight]

Pretty cool game! While the combat is rather basic in terms of only having a single three hit combo, there was some interesting strategy to be had with stamina management, choosing between jumping or dashing to avoid hits, and managing the attack patterns from the many different enemy types and bosses that led to some great fights. Didn't expect to see some interesting additions like stamina only recovering if you are far away enough from enemies, and the various cool abilities you can acquire like dash attacking.

That said, the game did feel a bit clunky. The feedback from hitting enemies didn't feel that satisfying and impactful, and their health bars were difficult to parse to see how much damage you're dealing. Enemies were a bit irritating on how inconsistent stunning/staggering them with hits was, and a lot of times the hitboxes and dash invincibility felt awkward and led to hits that I feel shouldn't have happened. Also I didn't like how if you try to dash backwards mid-combo, you end up dashing forward. And finally, it's a minor thing, but I don't know why the game uses both mouse and keyboard: you'd think everything would be keyboard-only and it is for the most part, but then for some reason a few menus are only operable with the mouse, and the unnecessary mouse pointer says around even when it's not in use.

Basically, while I think the game has a pretty good core, I do feel like it is lacking a bit of polish. But anyway, I still had a great time and I'm looking forward to try and get deeper into this game!

[Happy Birthday, Ninjamuffin99]

It's a gag game, so it's mostly about the joke appeal, but I was surprised to see that it's pretty fun and addicting! The mechanics are simple but quite intuitive and deep when combined with the various candle assortments. I kind of wish the game was a bit deeper and tightly designed: for example, I'd love if there was some sort of time pressure where you need to keep blowing otherwise the candles will fully regen their flame, not allowing you to be cowardly. But maybe I shouldn't wish for that because as it is now, bloody hell does it get hard: I'll never figure out how old ninjamuffin is because I can barely get past 11 or so! Given the kind of slapdash nature of this game, I can't have 100% confidence if it's me or if it's the game not being robust enough to avoid generating an unwinnable scenario, but I'll give it the benefit of the doubt: I guess ninjamuffin will just need to accept that he's 11 years old. By the way, love the secret bonus of hitting both A/D at the same time: I felt clever for thinking to try that to use that as a means to win, and then even cleverer for finding that easter egg, haha. Nice work on creating both a fun message and a fun lil' game!

[Gravitate]

It's a rather simple game without much to it, but I gotta admit, I found myself getting somewhat addicted to it! There's just something satisfyingly zen or trance-like about the game: it felt really good to get better at going with the flow, feeling out where the center of gravity was, and then setting up gravity slingshots to get to the end with as minimal input adjustments as possible. I think you definitely chose the right words to serve as a prompt to direct the player: don't fight gravity, harness it. Having said that, the game is definitely a little wonky at times, what with sometimes having the next level be won immediately by having the portal spawn right on top of you and such, and the game felt a bit lacking in terms of special effects like audio, but it didn't bother me too much. Bit of a bummer that, for a score game, it didn't get integrates with Newgrounds high score tables: I wanted to get good and flaunt my score for this (though I'm sure people got higher than 45, haha)!

DMG-84 responds:

Thanks for playing, I really enjoyed watching you play it on your stream and I really appreciate the feedback, it was fun watching you ‘get’ it. Keep up the great work!

[Glitcheon]

Very interesting and fun puzzler! The goofy story, premise, and aesthetic were very cool, but the part I loved the most was how interesting the powers/abilities were and how the puzzles and platforming were built around them. They just felt very different from what you get usually in these types of games: instead of a double-jump, you get this wild temporary platform creation ability, and instead of a dash, you get this blast ability which can also serve as a psuedo-dash if you aim it backwards and ride the recoil from it. Combine those abilities together and then throw in some interesting obstacles like those ad windows that you can only stay on temporary, and this ended up being so much fun! Bit of a bummer that it's not complete and it has a bit of an anticlimactic ending, but hey, I'm happy to hear that it is in development since I think it has a lot of promise going for it, and I can't wait to see how it is improved upon! I didn't encounter many issues in the game as it felt pretty smooth for the most part: I think the only confusing part for me was the tutorial in teaching dash jumps as it makes it look like all you need to do is dash and jump to make it all the way across, instead of dash jump, create a platform midway, and then dash jump off of it (but maybe the tutorial is vague so you feel smart figuring that part out? up to you!)