FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Chthonic Brilliance]

Pretty solid puzzler! Definitely puts its best foot forward in terms of presentation: I found the overall graphics, animations, sounds and so on very charming to see and play, and I especially like the touch of the cute map screen that shows your progress, among other things.

Puzzles were pretty good as well...at least eventually. My main gripe with the game is that it felt like it took way too long to get to puzzles that actually made me think and plan: a huge portion of the early levels were braindead easy, but nevertheless also involved a lot of busy work as the movement speed can be quite slow with no way to speed it up, making it a slog that I could see making some players drop off. However, thanks to the good presentation as stated before giving me a solid first impression, I stuck with it and found that the later levels picked things up nicely with more brainteasers. So while it does get good eventually, I would've loved if maybe the game would get to the later puzzles faster, and maybe change up the speed somehow to pick up the pace. Still, solid work!

[A Viking's Tale 2]

Pretty decent point-n-click adventure! It definitely had some rough edges that I didn't like too much, such as the inconsistency with determining what is interactable or not: the game goes back and forth on whether items pop-up/highlight or not when you hover over them, and that can make it unnecessarily confusing to let you know whether you can click on them. Also, I do wish the environments were a bit more lively: I'd love to see the snow actually falling or the trees shaking back and forth, and it'd also be nice if the people you can talk to could be seen in the environment itself so it isn't so abrupt to see them only appear in the 'dialogue zone'. Having said that, though, it was still a nice adventure with some cool puzzles to solve: though those sliding puzzles will always be the death of me, haha!

[Undergrave]

Certainly puts its best foot forward: this felt like a pretty solid game! I enjoyed the slick presentation it has to it from the very start with the cool title screen and opening cinematic, and that presentation continued into the gameplay with the slick in-game HUD, satisfying animations for attacks and intriguing world design. Game had a lot of nice subtle touches to it as well such as being very good with informative and intuitive pop-ups/symbols, smart auto-targetting for abilities. Gameplay was solid as well with a simple assortment of abilities with many ways to apply them strategically: felt cool to combine some like jumping to where you left your sword behind with a throw. All in all, feels very professionally done.

In terms of minor feedback, there are some weird graphical glitches, like the jump crater decal overlapping objects that should be in front of it, like jumping behind a table/gravestone has the crate spawn on top of the table/gravestone. Also I found it odd and lazy-looking how each level starts with a bunch of warps in sequence, but the enemies all spawn at once when all the warps are done, instead of spawning in sync with the warps. Also sometimes the controls can be a little unresponsive if you try to move or act too quickly in sequence.

In terms of more major feedback, I found the game getting pretty repetitive: a bit of a case where it feels like the game was stretched a bit too thin for the content it offers. A huge portion of the early levels are just the same fight over and over against basic zombies, and I was getting sick of them, especially on replays. It took way too many levels for something as simple as a new enemy being introduced to happen: I think either the amount of levels should be reduced to match the content on offer, or the amount of variety in enemy types and level layouts to be increased to match the amount of levels you want. Also some of the rules were confusing or illogical to get used to, like how attacking a zombie by walking into them doesn't count as a move, or how a zombie that moves next to you is able to attack you on the same turn (I understand why this was made for difficulties' sake, but usually these types of games only allow moving or attacking in a turn, not both, so its weird when it happens). Also there's a weird glitch where if you mash the movement buttons at the start of an arena fast enough, you can get a free move turn that doesn't allow the enemies to have a move next.

[Abstract Dasher]

Decent little game! While it does have a very 'my first game' vibe to it due to the overly simplistic graphics, system default fonts/buttons and janky game feel (such as the collision glitches) to it all, I did feel like it was a good core concept where you need to play effectively in order to outrun the dark and that there were some cool touches to the game, especially the way the music would amp up as you get closer and closer to hitting your boost threshold until it finally starts blasting!

My main problem with it is that the speed is supposed to be the part of the game that you're supposed to get excited about and is required to win, but I absolutely hated it since it made the game way too bloody fast and the combination of the warped camera and obstacles that are colored the same as the ground made it way too annoying to dodge effectively. Controls felt very unresponsive as well considering the speed it wants you to react for dodges.

It's definitely kinda ho-hum and not anything too great as it is, but I feel like the little touches such as the dynamic music give me hope to see bigger and better future projects!

By the way, not that it's bad or anything, but might this have been made from just making the 'my first game in unity' tutorial game from Brackeys and just making some minor adjustments to it? Just curious: I made a simple game from that tutorial as well and its very similar to this.

Steventus responds:

Actually, this was coded from the bottom up.
It goes without saying that there was a lot of touch-ups absolutely neccesary from the design end.

Much of what I think the problem lies in, is that the controls are too slippery, and as you additionally mentioned: obstacles and things are too bloody fast.

I tried alleviating that by adding a large particle effect on object spawn but it goes without saying that there needs to be more work to be done.

I'm not continuing work on the project though, but this is something for me to take to other projects!

Big thanks for your words and it's great to have your feedback on this!

[Vacuum Ball]

Hmmm, a decent game, but felt like it could've used a bit more. It was quite fun to go around and suck everything up: it was satisfying to watch structures crumble in the process and reduce everything to a clean slate. So it does have a decent core concept that I feel could be used well. But it started to get incredibly repetitive with every level just being the same ol' same ol' since all you have is the one power and a limited set of obstacles. Speaking of levels, they felt incredibly out-of-order, where instead of having a rising sense of challenge from level to level, the difficulty could dip up and down rapidly, where I could finish clearing a difficult level and then suddenly do a level with absolutely nothing hard about it at all. I also felt like the game didn't do anything to promote non-boring play: winning levels felt incredibly trivial since all you have to do is tip toe around and do everything slowly. I would've much preferred if there was some sort of power adjustment or aiming you could do for your vacuum power, along with a scoring/ranking system that tries to make you play faster and riskier for a higher score.

[Deal with Putin]

Classic newgrounds vibes apently! Gotta love topical humor and blasting apart big people in big ways. The game is a bit janky in some respects (don't know why the button to poke Putin is where it is, and why doesn't it move with him) and I felt like the weapons and death animations were a little understaffed and not as crazy and gory as I'd like, but it was still funny going through all of 'em. My favorite was the rifle kill: wish all of the others had that level of effort put into them.

[THE ZOO GAME]

Hah, quite the weird adventure! Felt like I was missing some of the humor here and there as it felt very non-sequitur purple monkey cheese dishwasher style as well as being inside-jokey, but I did enjoy the detective-esque feeling of figuring out how the game operated, both in terms of getting past the title screen and figuring out the tells for each animal to find where to pet them (gave me real Apollo Justice vibes). There were also plenty of weird twists and turns to the story to keep me engaged. A little short, crass and strange, but quite the novel experience!

[Wordly Defence]

Interesting fusion of games, but I dunno if the experiment was fully successful with this iteration. When combining two games like this, I would expect them to influence or synergize with each other somehow to improve them both, to provide some sort of flow to the back and forth. But apart from I think picking right letters which might've gave me turrets (wasn't sure if this was the case, and even if it was, thats the thinnest of threads to connect the two), the games just felt completely separated from each other and made no sense being joined like this: it just made it feel like you were getting interrupted from playing wordle with a rather shallow tower defense game every minute, like the equivalent having to answer constant phone calls while trying to do a crossword. Wordle with unnecessary steps inbetween guesses, as it were. As it stands, I'd prefer to just have the wordle game or just have a more improved and deeper version of the tower defense game. Still, I appreciate the attempt at a weird experiment like this.

Apart from all that, I feel like there was a bug where the game gave me an orange R and a green R in my guess. I kept the green R but tried to figure out where the orange R was meant to be placed but it didn't fit in any of the spaces I tried, it just kept saying orange R in all of them (expect in the already green R position, of course). This made it seem like there would be two green Rs in the end, but since the orange R didn't fit in any of the other spots, was the orange R just illogically telling me that there was a single R, but it wasn't accounting for the fact that I already had the green R in place? Hopefully I explained that correctly...

Also I would've liked if when you fill out your wordle guess, if it waited for confirmation before accepting the word: sometimes I found myself liking to type out a full guess to see how it looks before submitting, only for it to end up submitting because I typed it all out and it doesn't wait for me to confirm.

Also, there was a bit of a bug where I tried two practice levels today but didn't do a daily. I came back later in the day to do the daily (which again, I didn't do yet), and yet it told me I did and said I was impatient for trying. Well, I never! Harumph!

[Planetwo]

Very solid and fun game! Everything about this game felt very well put together: loved the presentation and animations (especially for how levels start and end), loved the slick way the characters felt to move around, and I loved the manic plate-spinning split-attention gameplay and how challenging it was. I also really love how the game keeps the novelty and pace up by constantly introducing new obstacles every level: I expected it to reuse the normal guns/lasers a few times, but lo and behold, every new level impressively had some new gimmick to contend with! I also appreciate, despite how short the game can be, that a save system was put in place so I can come back to finish this soon, haha.

In terms of anything bad, there wasn't much: for me personally, I felt like some of the levels were a bit out-of-order in terms of rising difficulty, but I could easily see that being very subjective. Also it was a bit confusing at times when you hit the flower once and it gets in that half-way color state: in the heat of the moment, sometimes I would lose track of what color orb needed to hit it next, and there was no way to tell besides memorization since the flower is 50-50. Oh, and I found it very difficult to see the HUD elements like the score/health bars: their colors blend in so much they are barely visible to me. Overall, great work!

[Time Dungeon]

It doesn't exactly put its best foot forward, being yet another tile-based simplified RPG game with re-used asset graphics, but I did find myself a bit surprised at how much I enjoyed myself here despite all that.

I certainly found the core concept to be quite interesting: the use of AP/HP for movement added a lot of strategic depth to all decisions and kept the pace up: is it better to dodge an incoming attack, or is the loss of resources from getting hit negligible compared to the loss of resources in trying to avoid it all? Is it better to avoid combat since it costs time, or can you kill efficiently enough that the level up would offset it? And so on and so forth. Couple that with some unique enemies all with interesting and telegraphed attack patterns, loot providing some different ways to approach situations, and a crazy boss fight at the end, and you'd got a game that's both a brain-teaser while still being simple enough that you can bash it out and have fun playing reactively and simply. The dodge and skip mechanics were cool as well with how they ready up ahead of time with a warning instead of only appearing when it happens. Neat stuff!

I do wish the game had a little bit more to it here and there: the loot started to get a bit monotonous, I didn't like how I wasn't sure what the stats effected and there was no way to figure it out apart from experimentation, the game takes a while to get going with some levels and enemies being more boring than others, and so on. I do also wonder if it would be better if the game didn't have a level up system as it does kind of incentivize combat when it might be better if combat was left as a last-resort and dodging was more efficient, but I dunno. Anyway, a pretty nice attempt nonetheless.