FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Return to Castle Penistein]

Hmmm, this is a really rough one for me: I definitely think it's a solid prototype for a NG Wolfenstein 3D type game, but at the moment it's lacking a lot of crucial touches to make it fun and exciting.

Don't get me wrong, I think that the game in its current state is very impressive. It's got all the necessary mechanics for a decent shooter in place, and I love the presentation with old-school DOS/shareware menus and such. Definitely some kudos are deserved for getting this skeleton into place that you can improve upon.

But yeah, while the core engine might be there, the game is seriously lacking. First and foremost are the obvious things: there's only one level, and its very boring because it only has one type of enemy and the same graphics plastered everywhere. Even Wolf 3D would shake the levels up a bit with different enemies and different props/walls such that it didn't feel like a bland maze and had some actual landmarks. But moving on from that, what I definitely felt was lacking was the shooting feedback. While enemies would die in impressive ways, I hated how they would not react to being shot/taking damage: made it confusing to tell if you were even hitting them at all (and in fact, sometimes I didn't hit them because I hit a wall corner off to the side, but without any puffs of smokes or bullet holes, there is no way to tell). Getting pickups like ammo and armor off the ground was bad as well due to awkward hitboxes and a lack of feedback: need a screen flash or a sound at the very least. Movement also felt pretty stiff and lifeless. Also there is the issue that it is pretty much just a Wolf 3D clone, and doesn't really bring anything new and exciting to the table: I always felt like Wolf 3D was quite boring and could really use something new to jazz it up, and I didn't see that in this.

I could go on, but I'm very glad to see that you say that the game is super unfinished at the moment: gives me hope that my feedback can help make this into an incredible finished product! I'm only being harsh on it because I love shooters and there is definitely a lot of potential here for a great game, so hopefully no harm no foul!

[Pico-Cross Collab]

An interesting twist on the picross genre by fusing it with an art collab! Usually I would think that the art collab part would involve the finished picture in the end being something someone drew, but the idea to have the art pieces be found within the filled parts of the board was quite unique. For the most part, the game works well and provides some decent picross fun while allowing you to see some cool artwork (and the artists behind them as well!)

There are some awkward aspects to it, though. Because the artwork shows up for filled spaces immediately when you complete a row, it allows you to 'cheat' the usual Picross rules by just brute-force filling in rows until you see art pop-up: usually you don't get that type of confirmation until the very end, so this is a lot easier than typical Picross. Furthermore, it feels like the usual thrill of a Picross game, where you want to see the end result, is gone because it's second fiddle to seeing the tons of art within the tiles. Viewing the art is also a bit odd: when you click on it you can zoom-in, but only on the center and not anywhere else, why no dragging or scrolling? Also in general I wish the game had a bit more pizazz to it, like special effects or sounds for filling a row or completing a puzzle: felt pretty dry without it, just listening to the same music over and over. Because of these issues, I did feel like I found myself not getting too addicted to this as I usually would for other Picross games.

Despite my complaints, I still think the idea is pretty neat and there is a fun game here, so kudos on the rather special way you choose to have this art collab: certainly more creative and unique than your typical gallery!

[Toggle Cube]

Solid puzzler! It ain't the greatest thing in the world or anything, but this felt really decent in all aspects: cool concept, great level design that intuitively teaches and expands upon the large variety of mechanics it introduces, decent visuals/music/sounds, and so on. Certainly found myself getting addicted and wanting to see what pops up next in the game, and never got frustrated from failure since the levels were nice and bite-sized. Very nice work!

Only complaint I can really think of is that the difficulty curve, while overall good, did have some awkward levels here and there that either went too hard or too easy suddenly: like they'd retread concepts already covered or suddenly introduce new mechanics that it'd forget to use again till way later. Also some of the way the levels would utilize the mechanics could be a bit weird, like levels where you'd need to turn on/off cubes when people are inside them.

[The 1000]

Hmm, it feels like an interesting concept, but unfortunately felt really underbaked to me.

I think there is a lot of cool stuff going on in this game. It certainly is quite a spectacle to see these big mob fights happen, and there's a little bit of strategy to it where you try to get in there and fight but keep yourself safe at the same time by dodging bullets and keeping a human wall between you and the melee units. I also appreciate the nice little touch of integrating NG avatars onto the characters. There's also a bit of fun progression in getting new upgrades and weapons and such every fight.

Unfortunately I felt like the game lost me rather quickly. The tutorial was confusing: it went past a lot of the tips before I could finish reading them and even had some tooltips overlapping each other which made them impossible to read. While there is some minor strategy to the combat as I spoke of before, in the end it really felt super mindless and repetitive due to the lack of abilities or direct control, lack of enemy variety, lack of a story or some goal to go for, and lack of satisfying feedback for attacks and damage and such. It didn't help that stuff that could help pep things up, like skills, were gated behind large amounts of money being required that I wasn't willing to grind to acquire. All in all, the game just felt bleh: combat was vague and unsatisfying as everything got lost in the crowd and the sense of progression or a goal was not there to keep me wanting to grind.

Would love to see something like this improved upon: I think the concept of these big mob fights can be fun and it's certainly a neat prototype, but this just had so little content to it at the moment for me.

jefvel responds:

Thanks for the thorough review! I agree with you on all points, there’s a lot more I wanted to have fixed in the game, but sadly just didn’t have the time to do it.

[The Life and Death of Boe]

Cute little game! Certainly a lot of fun animations and crazy deaths to go through: found myself getting addicted to see what new sequence (and new art style from another animator) would how up next.

The flow of the game is a little awkward though at times. I was kind of expecting it to be like, I dunno, Henry Stickman, where there's an overall sense of progression as you try to get to a goal, where you select the death responses until you get a good one and then proceed to the next set of choices, but here you just exhaust the choices which all end in death and then go to the next set for...some reason...to get to some unclear goal.

Speaking of, the animations can be really confusing and uneven at times: some of them make sense and have deaths involving the object in question and are short and sweet, but some of them are overly long and go on weird non-sensical tangents. But then again, some of those weird tangents were amusing in their strangeness, so it's not like it's all bad that it went weird places like that: certainly kept things interesting!

Phaox05 responds:

Maybe one of the no sense is mine, and I also noticed that the message didn't come up well, what I wanted to show is that you cannot brush your teeth and drink orange juice because of some chemicals mixing in your body but with exaggeration, doing that doesn't kill you irl

[The Railroad to Elsewhere]

Pretty neat game, but felt like it was too short to let the rather heavy themes it was playing with have any chance to effectively hit an emotional nerve.

I definitely was rather impressed with the game's construction: graphics and animations were very lovely for the most part, and as repetitive as it could've been to enter every single room, I enjoyed seeing the smooth animation of my character entering a room every time it happened. I will admit graphics-wise it wasn't all great: a lot of the train was copy/paste assets, particularly the last dilapidated section, but still, overall very nice. The rooms were quite interesting as well with most of them containing some quaint little games that test your skills and memory.

So overall it was a nice little adventure. But the way when you get to the end and suddenly it is delivering this super judgmental epilogue where it rates how you interacted with everyone and compared its to how you treated people in your previous life and so on and so forth: it just comes outta nowhere and felt so silly! I can definitely see what you were going for and I think it's pretty cool that it was tracking all that, but it just didn't work for me. It's like you saw what games like RDR2 did but you only saw a speedrun of it: Arthur's redemption and about-face works in that because it took the time to build it up and showed you the before and the after. This game goes by so fast and you never get to see any of our previous life through gameplay or even flashbacks or hints: it just makes it feel so damn shallow, like you're giving the cliff notes version of a Shakespearian tragedy.

Your hearts in the right place, of course, and again I see the gist of what you're trying to do and it could work, but something this heavy needs a lot more meat to it to make it work, in my opinion: would love to see a more fleshed out non-game-jam version of this, as I feel like you've already did a great job building the necessary core assets for it.

Also was it even possible to interact with the broken door section? I dunno if the game was playing with me there or if it was a glitch: difficult to tell.

[Rampster!]

Not too shabby! Pretty cool busy game that, despite the simple graphics, does a pretty good job at intuitively teaching the mechanics through how it shades everything (while still having some cute animations for victory, haha). Apart from my brain always trying to get on stairs sideways and failing (I know, I know, that's my fault, but I couldn't help but keep trying) I got pretty addicted to this game and how challenging the puzzles could be. Felt like it wasn't afraid to ramp things up quite quickly and seriously, compared to most puzzlers nowadays which increase very slowly.

Speaking of that difficulty curve: it was a bit of a mixed blessing. I gotta say, while I like a challenge, I got really stumped at level 6 because I did not realize the game had the chops to simulate a box rolling down stairs by itself: most likely something about the simple graphics made my brain hesitant to ever believe it would have that level of physics simulated. In that way, figuring that out finally felt less like a "eureka" moment and more like a "wait, what? bullshit!" moment. Might've been nice if there was a level before that could've taught that in a more easier-to-see way, somehow: but I did figure it out eventually, so hey, it still works alright (but I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people dropped off there)!

Pjorg responds:

Thank you for this thorough review! It seems like you really "got" what I was going for here so I appreciate you sharing that experience.

Level 6's fatal flaw is that in trying to make it fit to the strict scale of the level maps (9x9 tiles) the space is not used as efficiently as it could be. The earliest version of level 6 was only 5x5, and looked like this. (Pretend the hamster and the cheeses are elevated)

🟦🟦⏫🟦🟦
🧀🟦⬛⏫🟦
⬛📦📦⬛⬛
🐹⬛⬛⬛🧀
⏫🟦🟦🟦🟦

This compact and more clear design was ultimately sacrificed so I could make all the levels a consistent size. Why do I put such arbitrary constraints on my levels? I don't know. I guess I just kind of prefer the way they look and feel. Did you also notice that the hamster begins each level where the previous one ended? Similar story there, it's mainly my own aesthetic satisfaction. I suppose I could have boxed the original level 6 off in a more obvious cage or something and fill the remaining 9x9 with empty space, but I used something akin to that motif in level 5 and level 7 and I think I was worried about it getting stale. Were these the right trade-offs to make? All the reviews telling me "I got stuck on level 6" suggest it wasn't. Then again, there's no telling. Maybe making level 6 more clear would have just resulted in a dozen reviewers saying they got stuck on level 7! Ah well. It is what it is.

Oh- and to your earlier point about having to get your brain into the habit of reading the map correctly- the overhead perspective certainly takes a moment for everyone to wrap their heads around. I have been thinking about what sort of opportunities could be had if I had the option of using three dimensional art... I could have the hamster run under archways for example without being hidden. Perhaps a spiritual successor someday in the future?

[SHOGUN TRIAD DEATHNINJA]

I know I have a history of not being the biggest fan of joke/troll games like this. Perhaps it's unfair, but from my experience, I feel like a lot of game devs make their game jokey or troll-y as a cheap way to deflect criticism and give them an excuse for low effort development. But this one is different: this is what I consider the ideal joke game that should be aspired to, in that as much as it tries to look low-effort as possible, it isn't low-effort at all and actually has some considerable effort and clever construction to it all. In that way, the low-effort veneer is actually an effective way to elevate the humor by acting as a rug-pull, instead of being all there is to it like others.

So yes, I enjoyed my time with this game and was quite impressed with it. Yes, it still has some bad signs in that, technically, the game play is quite simple and can be boiled down to talking to people, walking, and dodging obstacles over and over. But despite being a simple game, the game did so much to enhance the rather simple gameplay with charming design touches. I loved how animated and goofy the game was in all aspects, I loved the deeply layered amount of dialogue present for each character you encounter (and how you were rewarded for expending their dialogue with marriage opportunities), I loved all the little events like climbing the rope/ladder as well as the hidden events like stepping on the craps and eating the urinal cakes, I loved the subtle music references, and so on and so forth. Reminds me of playing a game like Monkey Island: so much to explore and laugh at.

So, uh, yeah, pretty epic, dude.

Also I got married to the wrong dude by accident: thank god the priest blew 'em up, did me a solid.

[The Last Construct of Edos]

Pretty neat idea! Reminds me of games like Deathloop or Majora's Mask, where from repeated trials and research into the layout and rules, you eventually build up enough knowledge to be able to execute a perfect plan on your last run to sacrifice everyone and break the loop. I did have a good time trying to put together this perfect plan, and the goofy nature of the game was amusing.

That said, I feel like in it's current state, this is a good concept, but not a great execution, mostly because the game is pretty darn buggy. I know, it's probably because it's a game jam game and all that, but still, it's really rough in unacceptable ways: I had tons of times where invisible blocks would be blocking a lava pit (they wouldn't turn purple or make the god laugh or anything, it'd just be invisible for no good reason) or where the god would not block a lava pit that I used previously, allowing me to double-kill with it, or block a lava pit I haven't used already, and numerous other weird stuff like that. Because of those bugs, I had a lot of what should've been winning runs go awry, and it felt really bad and unfair to have that happen. Would love to see a nice concept like this get expanded upon and polished to reduce the bugs: definitely some nice potential in this.

[quest of for the epic!]

Cute little goofy adventure! Well, I should probably just keep it as that: it looks like it's a troll/joke game not meant to be taken seriously, so I don't think any super criticism is needed and I'm just supposed to be "it's ebic" and all that. Still, though, while it was a funny little game, I have to admit that I did find myself disappointed: I actually was hoping that the game was gonna be something big in the veins of Battle Kid, I Wanna Be The Guy, or other similar trial-and-error trap games, but other than a few little traps and some precise jumps, the game ended in two screens (not counting the cat screen, lol). What a shame: I always like to be surprised and appreciate a game that looks low-effort but hides an actual high-effort game within, but for this, unfortunately, it is what it is. Maybe if you feel like it, it would be cool to see a more fleshed-out version of this!

Though maybe I'm just missing something? I haven't found the 'yum apple' achievo...

SomeApe responds:

cool