FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Simpler space]

Hmm, I had a rough time with this game, unfortunately.

On one hand, I thought that it was kinda cool to build up your spaceship, bit-by-bit, through killing enemies. The freedom in being able to add new modules onto your ship as well as upgrading them allowed for some great expression and customization. I also kind of liked the mystery of figuring out how the game works due to its minimalist design, like how money isn't represented with a number. Definitely some interesting progression to be had here.

But on the other hand, all of the progression felt ultimately pointless. All the game ever seemed to do was introduce more and more spongy enemies: they never fired back or got more complex AI patterns or anything to pose a threat, so what was the point of upgrading weapons in the first place if nothing provides a challenge?

To add to that, the core controls felt bad to me as well. Moving and aiming the ship was an exercise in frustration since you just keep flying to wherever your cursor is, never being able to stop and aim (and when you do stop at your cursor, you bizarrely do not point in your last direction, instead you always point to the right). Shooting being automated was annoying too: the constant drone of the same firing sounds going off over and over quickly became grating.

I can certainly see the appeal of these progression games and I think there is some neat stuff here, but the core gameplay here was a big miss for me.

[FROGUE]

Pretty neat game! It's like a cool fusion of SuperHot and Dandara and I had a blast playing it.

It definitely didn't make the best first impression on me: there were some odd snags such as the introduction movie getting off-sync when I attempted to proceed by hitting space, and it was a little confusing to grasp the movement and mechanics at first, since the slow button was unresponsive in the tutorial zone for some reason, leading to me thinking it wasn't unlocked yet, and I didn't realize you could dash into enemies at first since I thought you could only throw at them to kill.

But it didn't take me too long to start dancing around the levels in a stylish and satisfying kill frenzy! Loved the satisfying hit effects, both in terms of visuals, feedback, and sound, I loved the strategy provided by the unique movement mechanics and diverse enemies, and I liked the nice touches like enemies announcing their incoming attack with an exclamation point above them.

There is still some minor jank I have with the game, such as how I don't like how it loses my mouse cursor if I put outside the level borders, and how it doesn't just snap the targeting to the closest square which your mouse path leads to (for example, if I put the cursor into a box, it shouldn't red out and not allow me to click to move, it should just target the closest space outside the box and allow me to click to go move there, despite not being precisely on it). But for the most part, it's some cool stuff!

[Saimai Rd. (demo)]

Hmm, had a bit of a rough start with this game, so I'm not sure if I understood it all. My trouble was mostly because the tutorial did not pause during, so I felt like I had to rush through it so as to stop the alarms from sounding, leading to me not grasping a lot of knowledge. I didn't realize I could manually pause until I already rushed through the tutorial, but to be honest, why do I need to pause the game during a tutorial? It should be automatically pausing when appropriate.

Anyway, I think I eventually grasped the game, in that you need to build roads and then connect carriages and carts based on imports/exports that places have based on their intuitive arrow symbols above: a wheat field takes in person from carriages and spits out wheat in carts that go to another place that takes in wheat and spits something else out that goes somewhere else, etc etc. Not too shabby, except, and this might be due to my confusion, the gameplay seemed quite boring as it just led to adding more carts and carriages to the same routes over and over as populations/demands grew. I didn't feel like there was any interesting challenge or progression to it: yes, new products were getting introduced, but it was the same type of solution over and over. Challenge felt wonky as well as the pacing seemed random: the first time I played barely any new housing happened which made me feel bored and the next time houses were popping up all the time at a breakneck pace (maybe this was because I was doing better so it reacted to that? curious if that's the case, if so, kinda cool)

I do think the game has a lot going for it: I like the presentation and the way you watch your workers going around on the roads like an art farm, and I like the little touch of being able to click on a worker to see what they are carrying. Seems like a cool city-builder: just feels like it needs a bit of a better tutorial and a better sense of how it progresses and how to control traffic jams and such. Would love to see how it develops.

[Cosmodrome Demo]

I got incredibly lost in my playthrough, unfortunately, so I can't say anything definite on the game in a deeper sense. I think it has potential and a lot going for it, and could just be a game not for people like me, but nevertheless, I think it absolutely needs a bit better of a tutorial experience, more intuitive design and a more uncluttered HUD.

The tutorial was way too overbearing and impossible to process. It just vomits pages and pages of textboxes at you, giving you no time to breathe or see the full results of certain mechanics before it speeds off to teaching you the next set of mechanics, so you just forget everything and stop listening. It doesn't help that the textboxes are overlapping constantly as well which makes it impossible to read or interact with anything.

Regarding the tutorial: For one, I'd say you can cut down on the amount of instructions you give: the game is already laid out pretty intuitively and provides a ton of info pop-ups to learn, so you don't need to explain every single thing. And secondly, I'd say you should have the tutorial be a bit more of a story where they introduce mechanics bit-by-bit: leave the complicated mechanics for later, let the player just learn about basic trading first for a few days or whatever, then slowly introduce more complex stuff like crew and factions wayyyy later on.

The game was absolutely chockful of typos. Luckily, they were never major enough that it hurt my understanding of the game, but I seriously don't think I went by a single textbox without something being misspelled. Bizarrely enough, there would be times where the same word would be spelled correctly and wrongly, all practically in the same sentence!

I didn't like how I was being rushed all the time (the game gives you so much text to read and so little time to make a decision, alarms going off with unclear meaning as to why they were going off since hovering over the alarm doesn't tell you with a pop-up, you can never pause full-stop, the game doesn't pause automatically when you go into menus, etc) and yet simultaneously I was also just waiting around all the time (felt like all I could do was just sit and wait for events to happen, hoping for something in my favor to randomly happen, ordering oxygen/food/water is so delayed and unintuitive, etc).

I can definitely understand the difficulty in teaching a game as complex as this to a player, so you have my sympathy, haha. Looking forward to seeing how this develops!

JamesChapp responds:

Thank you very much for taking the time to play cosmodrome!

I developed the game alone for 4 months and it's not finished yet.
It seemed important to me to share the game in the state it is in before leaving it archived on my hard drive.

Luckily it had a very good reception from the public and now I'm putting together a team to finish it.

To begin to understand cosmodrome you have to keep in mind that it is an experimental game. where I implement a lot of different mechanics in a playable experience.

One of the last parts of the game I developed was the tutorial and I had a lot of trouble explaining each of those mechanics.

Regarding the alarms. yellow alarm is when you are running low on oxygen, food and water. (Less than 30 units.) If that happens automatically the station will contact a ship of those primary resources and will buy that resource.

The red alert is when the station is attacked by pirates or there is a threat like asteroids.
There is a button with which you can mute the alarm.

There is also a button with which you can automatically sell fuel to the ships that come to the station. that makes not so many windows with text appear, interrupting the game.

Regarding the design of the UI... sorry... but each system has a different system... it's all part of the experimentation... but I am aware that the UI is a disaster. hahaha.
All that is going to be fixed with the team... yesterday I was meeting with the new ui designer (Naty) who is going to clean up the mess I made.

Regarding the spelling errors... the game was made at super speed without corrections. Missing the editing and correction part.

The game is a kind of multi task...
You have to survive first and take care that you don't run out of resources for life support. (oxygen, water, food)
Then it's a space trade. where you have to trade with different resources to earn credits.
Then you have a Tower Defense where you have threats that attack the station and you can buy and improve your defense system.
on top of that there is an experience system with skills.
and on top of that a system of factions where depending on the relationship you have with the factions, different events are enabled...
and on top of all those systems... like a cherry on a cake... there is a system of random events that happen all the time...
all those systems make each experience playing the game different... or at least that's what the game's design points to.

Thank you again for taking the time to play the game and record a video.

I think all the feedback you give me is consistent and I appreciate it a lot... it really helps a lot in the development of the game.

Greetings

[Decadungeon]

Hmm, I'm a bit split on this one.

On one hand, I think the game is pretty well put-together and very polished: graphics are charming and animated, lots of variety in enemy sprites, menus and navigation are very intuitive in design with great pop-ups for more details to help learn the game. All in all it is very cute in its presentation and smooth to both understand and play. I also like how it offers multiple classes and the ability to customize your party for replayability. Nice touches as well in how it displays equipment on the characters during combat.

On the other hand, though, I found myself getting bored quite quickly. I found the combat incredibly monotonous as it is old-school to the core, in that all you do for the most part is wait, wait, wait, to attack, attack, attack, over and over: no interesting enemy weaknesses to exploit, no need for defense or status ailments or positioning or turn order or anything like that. There were a lot of enemy sprites, sure, but they were all functionality identical dumb hp sponges due to the lack of strategy needed.

Beyond combat, the map screen didn't offer any meaningful choices to make as it was very linear: I expected the map to have a bit of risk-reward to it, like deciding whether to take a road with lots of encounters but treasure at the end, or taking a road with fewer encounters to just get to the boss, for example. Maybe the game gets a lot more complex later on, but I didn't have the patience to get through however many worlds that takes. Also the lack of music and more powerful effects makes the game very dull in mood as well.

Furthermore, I was a bit annoyed that the characters have stats that they excel at, because it feels like it pigeonholes you into only going for roles that fit their excelled stat lest you shoot yourself in the foot. I want to explore more wacky and interesting party combinations, but it pushes you into always going for the same ones because of the excelling defaults. Could also use a codex in game where you can read the effects of stats and such.

Overall, I'd say it's very nice and something to be proud of, but this old-school design is just outdated and not for me, I suppose, as I like a lot more complexity and strategy that you get from modern RPGs.

[Love Me Newgrounds!!!]

Not too shabby! While I did have some issues with the game such as:

*Confusion over the premise/introduction of the game: why does taking other student's projects count as getting a white day gift for Pico and Steve? Maybe make it more obvious that it's for an collage in the first place as the wording of 'project' could mean anything, or just scrap the whole 'project' idea and just focus on gathering art scraps for a collage right from the bat, I dunno. (Not to mention we never get to see the collage and it never comes up in the end anyway, so why bother haha)
*Lack of choice and meaningful interactions does make the game a bit monotonous and repetitive as you just go from person to person doing the same thing (yes there is a nice choice at the end but still, it's just one)
*Minor glitches and bugs with sound where they sounded corrupted (maybe intentionally?) or were missing altogether

it was still nevertheless fun and compelling to get through due to the variety of encounters, the goofy and comedic dialogue (which was voiced well) and the colorful avatars. Also I liked that it had some little touches like being able to skip the end credits on repeat playthrus. A fun little jaunt that introduced me to a lot of cool newgrounders!

[A Toad's Trip]

Hmm, seems like it could be a fun and charming little romp, but it just seemed like the game was barely held together with chewing gum and toilet paper, and that feeling of jank ruined the experience for me.

As said, I did think the core of the game was decent. Felt fun to go on a little scavenger hunt, searching for things hidden around and solving little mini puzzles like the soccer game. The tongue was fun to use both as a movement tool and a tool for carrying/pushing objects. I liked the animations of the frog and found it cute how they transitioned between normal mode and mouthful mode. And the story, while confusing, was very goofy to experience.

But there was just so much wrong with the game that killed it for me. I didn't like the weird physics for objects like trash: they could just slide away from you and disappear behind a tree and you'd never find them (please make it so that going behind a tree turns it transparent). The graphics, as charming as they were, felt like they got ruined because of the improper scaling and zoomed-out nature of the game, including the text on the chores screen which is artifacted and hard to read. The tongue was confusing in that I was never sure whether I'd gobble up an object I tongued or whether I'd fly to it and such. I didn't like how when I clicked on the settings menu it would activate the tongue at the same time, and it didn't pause the game. And speaking of that, tons of HUD and menu elements were really badly put-together, like the old man's text clipping out of the text window and the options menu not properly aligned and disappearing off the screen. And so on and so forth: just so much weird, glitchy, unpolished stuff going on.

Definitely very rough, which is understandable due to the game jam nature of it, but a bit of a shame since I feel like it really could've shined with a bit more polish and time.

[Al Dente]

Wow, what an experience! Game definitely has some rough bits here and there, such as not highlighting objects or buttons that can be interacted with, and some of the logic can be a little twisted or strange, but I found this game overall very enrapturing. The not-highlighting objects was never too bad as it felt like the environments were built to naturally let you know what can be interacted with. The game kept me hooked constantly to see what new crazy puzzle or disturbing sequence would come up next, with the, I dunno, Dali-esque graphics making everything a treat to examine and investigate further. Nice work!

[Lovestar DEMO]

Quite the wacky game, though maybe it's a bit too wacky for me, haha!

It definitely was quite the experience: game certainly went to a lot of strange places with some very charming art, characters and scenarios. While a lot of the humor and dialogue were very non-sequitor, fourth-wall breaking and just total nonsense at times, part of me took it in stride and just enjoyed the crazy ride. Indeed, I found if you just turn off your brain and embrace these nutjobs, you can have a good ol' time.

But the other side of me felt like the game was just being a little TOO wacky to the point of just being confusing, inconsistent, and dumb. During my Eva run, the characters would flip-flop their personalities constantly, going from showing dominance to suddenly being nice or scared or whatever, and it made it so I could never get a read on them or treat it seriously. For example, my character would suddenly act like they know Eva even though it's their first time meeting, and suddenly Eva would be scared when I ask about her wings despite her being in charge for the whole time. Also there was a severe limitation of choices: in the Eva run you only get one choice for your job, with one leading to a bad end with no real reason for it and completely out of your control in an unsatisfying way. I was also annoyed that the game, when I was trying to read the text for the Pizza Ending, proceeded without my consent to the next screen before I was done. Finally, I don't think it's necessarily to have so many *emotional cue* text when you could just do that by changing the character art/portraits instead (which you already did most of the time).

Apart from that, the game also has clunkiness in other respects: the main menu, for example, has the main options remain even when you click on About or Help, leading to those same options blocking the text from being read. The text in those About/Help menus also gets cut-off in many places, and the scroll bar requires you to click next to it instead of on it to operate it.

Looking forward to seeing the full version!

[KAT GAME]

It doesn't have much to it in terms of long-lasting appeal, but it's pretty decent, in a kind of 'my first score attack' kind of game!

Kind of got a mixed impression for most of it, both good and bad. The gameplay, for example, does make a solid first impression with its dynamic 3d tilted camera, and its got a good assortment of obstacles, what with the saw blades and the bouncing balls. With the way the obstacles keep increasing and there's so much to keep track of, it makes for some manic dodging fun!

However, I also found that the tilted camera not only forces you to stay in the back corner so you can see the whole board, but it made the task of determining where obstacles were very wonky and vague, especially since the bouncing balls don't leave a shadow on the ground, leading to a lot of 'that hit me?' deaths. Also the obstacles would act very strangely at times: saw blades wouldn't bounce off of each other, but balls could bounce off of saws and even get wonky to the point of changing from bouncing balls to balls that just roll on the ground.

Graphics were also a mixed bag where I liked the goofy title screen and cat sprite, but other parts of the game such as the HUD/fonts were very bland and basic. I think the game does have a decent concept and core to it: would just love to see this polished up and improved upon for an even better version with more levels, more obstacles, etc (would also be cool to see a bit more story or narrative progression: I wanna know what the big red guy has against this cat!)