FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[PICO VS BEAR DX]

Wow, what a blast from the past! Overall I found it quite impressive and smooth to play: I loved the fresh coat of paint over everything that makes it more readable and pretty, and I loved the cool additions like new boss fights, new point-n-click puzzles, charming voice acting, remixes to boss mechanics, and so on!

I do have to say, though, that as much as I like it in general, there were some more questionable design decisions that make it a bit of a lesser game than the original for me.

For one, I found it really odd I couldn't hold down the trigger to keep firing the machine gun like you could in the original: having to tap fire each shot not only is illogical, but it really wears down my old man hands. Tap fire makes sense for the shotgun, sure (which I had no idea how to switch to manually), but for the machine gun, I wish I could hold it down.

While I do like a lot of the additional bosses and changes to some of their mechanics, some of them were worse overall for me. I didn't like how you couldn't skillfully shoot the grenades out of the air anymore like you could before in the first boss fight, I didn't like how the attack telegraphs for the grenade rolling down the stair were behind the player making them difficult to see, I didn't like the awkward spawning for the bear duo boss where sometimes the minion would instantly respawn giving you no time to shoot the main bear at all, and so on and so forth.

But the biggest one for me was the inclusion of the point-n-click adventure parts: don't get me wrong, I like me a point-n-click, but when you combine it with the hard difficulty boss fights and fact that death means starting all over, it can get really monotonous to redo those sections over and over again: the original was just a boss gauntlet so it didn't have this unnecessary busy work. Yes, you get a few lives to ease the pain, but really, I almost feel like the game should just have infinite lives instead of relying on this awkward half-measure.

Also the hint system was really silly and pointless: it gave me a hint on how to beat the shadow boss when I was already way past that, haha!

Again, I have to reiterate that as much as that is a big block of text right there complaining about everything, I still did overall have a ton of fun with this and, no matter how much I died, I never wanted to quit, I wanted to get right back in there to see what craziness happens next! Just, uh, let me rest my carpal tunnel for a sec...

Dungeonation responds:

The shadow hint must be a bug then - what enemy did you die on? :O
EDIT we talked and I’m lookin into it

[Indirection]

Pretty cool game! I found that the combination of the interesting one-direction movement concept, along with the way the puzzles kept ramping up the complexity by introducing new machines, obstacles, and general size, really hooked me to keep wanting to play more. While at first I was annoyed and frustrated with some aspects like having a teleporter maze (never been a fav for me) and the controls being a bit slippery and wonky at times, I nevertheless found myself trying hard to work out the puzzles to get to see what would come up next.

That being said, I did get a bit burned out at the end. The combination of the incredibly busy landscape, tiny characters, annoying droning sound effects for the lasers, and the levels being too large did frustrate me. One annoyance in particular I found annoying was that the camera wasn't zoomed out enough for certain levels to let me see what buttons are connected to what elements on the map (and even if it was zoomed out enough, that would unfortunately have the side effect of the tiny graphics and very busy and difficult to parse landscape/graphics becoming even more troublesome). Also, as a unrelated note, I did find the tutorial a bit annoying with the way the screens only showed a few words at a time and if I showed up in the middle, I'd need to wait the whole time for it to get back to the start so I could read it, haha.

Basically, it's a little rough and could use some polishing up, but I think it's got a good foundation in terms of interesting levels and game mechanics.

[Tankmas ADVENTure 2021]

Quite the nice collaborative experience as usual! I was a bit unlucky in that I was following it at first but then lost track (due to sickness and work) and missed out the later days, including Christmas. So really, all I got to experience was the initial period where there wasn't much to do (though I did like the cool intro experience where you discover the village), and then the after period where I missed all of the potentially cool events! Sigh...well...maybe next year, haha!

Anyway, if I was to have some feedback, it would be:

*When opening presents, I found the text at the bottom (title, artist, link to page) to be both a) very difficult to read due to it being gray on gray (either outline the text or make the difference between text color and background color bigger to make the text pop) and b) not obvious that it's a clickable link due to the pointer not changing to a hand and the text not highlighting when hovered over. These mistakes just made it look a bit unprofessional, especially considering its the main selling point and surprising it was overlooked.

*I kept thinking I could click on things to interact with them and move around due to the presence of a mouse-pointer on screen, but I found you could only move with the keyboard and interact with space bar. Why even have a mouse pointer then? Though I swear when I started, I thought I could move and interact with the mouse, so what the heck is going on??? (Now the mouse is working again? Dunno why it stopped working for awhile...though even with it working, it can be difficult to figure out where to actually click on things to interact with them)

*For such a potentially social game where you get to walk around with other people opening presents and hanging out at cafes and such, I found the game to be incredibly anti-social: from what I could tell, the only method of communication was a heart emote and that was it, no other emotes, no chat, no coop mini-games or activities, nothing! I could understand not wanting to have a public chat that just gets spammed with racial epithets or what-not, but it still felt odd that, for the most part, you couldn't really communicate or play with each other. (Though of course, I got in late and never got to experience the theatre, so maybe there was something there and maybe the cafe as well)

*Are the cafe graphics glitched or something? All of the images for the drinks and food are exactly the same (it's kind of understandable for drinks, but all the food is just the same image of a plate of mish-mash). Perhaps it's an intentional joke and I'm not getting it, but it just seems odd.

*There were periods where I visited where there were tons of clone avatars lined up in odd formations, like a wall of Pico clones and what-not. Wasn't sure if it was intentional or not, like whether it was just a funny joke set up by the developers or people hacked the game or something: just made me confused on whether to laugh or be worried, if that makes sense.

Anyway, Merry Tankmas all!

SantaDrella responds:

Rest assured about the clones. It's festive tradition that we've been doing since the release of this game! Everyone can do that by opening more tabs so it's pretty much not hacked lol

[Pico VS Peter The Ant 3D]

Quite the funny experience, and an interesting take on alternate history! Certainly quite interesting to see Pico's School in 3D, but unfortunately it also made it feel even disappointing that certain things weren't brought back in 3D as well, such as the cool boss fights or exploration or just other easter eggs/references in general (I know its not the main focus, but still). Also where's my first person raising hand action in the intro: I really wanted that!

Moving aside from that and focusing on the Peter the Ant action: it was simple, but I enjoyed my time trying to crush the ants, and loved how you could hit the corpses (both the ants and other corpses) even after death to have them splat blood: that's some classic, old-school gibbing action I like to see. Though having said that, I did find it a bit disappointing that hitting the corpses, or indeed hitting the ant initially, didn't have a satisfying splat sound: instead it just plays the same bonk sound effect which wasn't as satisfying.

All in all, it was good for a few laughs. But for the love of god, please explain to me how you can code a trigger to fire an event that gives you an achievement saying you've killed Peter the Ant and beaten the game, but you can't use that same trigger to display a victory message in game! Not realizing I had already beaten the game, I got so lost that I ended up smashing all of the shit with a hammer to try and progress. That shit is on your hands, plufmot, your hands!

Happy Peter the Ant day!

plufmot responds:

I got lazy ahaha whoops. Happy Peter The Ant Day!

[The Blind Hero]

Hmm, it feels like it does get some interesting story built up eventually once you get to the first boss, but for the most part the game felt very bland and empty, and very confusingly constructed.

In terms of game design, the game had tons of weird oddities to it. First and foremost, the hitboxes of the player and the enemy were way too damn big, like three times larger than what it looks like, leading to getting damaged from unreasonable distances. Damage was inconsistent as well, where touching some enemies (even when they are dying!) can end up damaging you, while touching other similar enemies doesn't hurt at all. The game actually does a good job at showing animations for enemy attacks, so I have no idea why you can get hurt by touching them when they're not attacking. Speaking of damage feedback, I also found it odd that things like hitting enemies produce sparks, but hitting the health totems is absolutely silent, which felt so bad in terms of feedback.

In terms of adventure and story, the world felt quite bland and repetitive. I did enjoy the goofy dialogue here and there and some of the setup once you get your first power from the boss and see the note left behind, but in general, traversing the world was just boring. I'd regularly try to avoid combat whenever possible because it was such a slog due to the enemies being damage sponges, and the world never seemed to have enough landmarks, interesting locations, or slick movement to keep my interest.

I think it's a pretty good attempt: had some small hints of nice design like bosses and enemies with attack animations and so on, but right now it just feels way too shallow in terms of the moment-to-moment gameplay.

[FIG]

Hmm, this one started out strong but kind of lost me at the end.

I loved the intrigue and completely absurd yet foreboding story: there was so much mystery to what the hell this fig tree was, who the green haired girl was, where am I, why does everything keep looping, who's the maniac that is chasing me, so on and so forth. The gameplay wasn't much to speak about at its core, but nevertheless I found myself enraptured to find the keys and figure out the mystery behind this strange world.

But then...I escaped, and that was it! It felt like a slap in the face seeing that victory screen: no mystery solved, so many questions left unanswered. It felt like such a let down! I actually thought it must be a joke ending or something and that I needed to do some secret objectives to get the real ending, but no, that really seemed to be it. It really hurt my impression and faith of the game: due to the bad ending, it felt like all of the intrigue and mystery wasn't anything thought-out or planned in the end, but just a mish-mash of random spooky stuff.

Hopefully you can take my disappointment as a compliment that I think you did a good job at creating an enthralling world: just next time create a conclusion that lives up to that initial hype!

[Hen in the Foxhouse 2.1]

Wow, very cool stuff! Was absolutely blown away by the presentation and story in this game: loved the epic intro and loved all of the ways it delivered story like the news station and the chatter from enemies as the situation gets more and more intense: really helped make me get into my role as an avenger. Gameplay was solid as well: felt great to cause so much chaos due to the satisfying feedback, there was interesting systems in place of outrunning the police parade and standing still to reload that made the combat very engaging and intense, and I liked the amount of variation in enemies and the way the city slowly crumbles.

If I had any complaints about the game, it would be that it doesn't teach all of the controls and rules very well (for instance, I was lost on how to create more eggs initially), and that, despite having variation and escalation in enemy design, the game did get a bit repetitive nevertheless, especially in terms of objectives and scenery being recycled. Still, very impressive stuff, and what an improvement from the previous version!

VerilyFine responds:

Glad to hear you liked it! I'll have those things in mind for future updates, thanks for the feedback.

[Jump and Hover]

Another solid action puzzle platformer from Rob1221! As usual, it's pretty solid in most respects, being a decent, fun concept that is improved upon in a nicely paced way so as to keep the player hooked. The only downside for me was the difficulty at times: there were a couple of difficulty spikes here and there where the game needed some really precise inputs due to how fast the character fell and how tight the required elevation you needed to hover at was. Luckily it wasn't too bad and I like a challenge, but still, it would be nice if the game was relaxed a bit, such as if the character was made to fall a little slower to allow for easier timing for hover activations: always a bit frustrating to know what the solution is, but to miss it due to overly strict input requirements.

[The Christmas Hustle]

It's very confusing to grasp what's going on in the first place without any explanation or tutorial (what little tutorial there is vanishes almost immediately), but once I did figure out what the deal was, I had a pretty fun time: though goddamn is this game hard!

Definitely reminds me of those manic order-fulfillment games like Overcooked, Cook, Serve, Delicious and others where you need to manage this conveyor belt of toys and mold/color/package them all simultaneously as they go back. It's definitely a bit frustrating to juggle everything at once, especially since you are so at the whims of the conveyor belt which keeps everything so annoyingly in sync to offer so little room for mistakes (I kept praying to be able to drag objects ahead to stations on the conveyor), but I did find the challenge of the limitations fun to try and get good at its mind-bending nature!

[Leap Peasant]

It's a decent attempt at a jumping ragequit platformer like Jump King, especially considering the short amount of time it was worked on, but it still felt very wonky unfortunately.

I think all of the basics are there and it works alright: there's a lot of clever jumps and setups you need to work through and while the world isn't terribly exciting as it doesn't offer any interesting hooks or environments to traverse, it still is somewhat fun to jump around.

What killed it for me for the most part was the lack of polish (which again, is understandable given the time).

For one, the charge bar is completely out-of-whack and an outright liar: after testing I noticed that you only have to fill it up to about half-way, maybe less, to already achieve the maximum a jump will allow, as filling it up beyond that to max will not change anything. This is not only confusing but also frustrating as it severely limits the amount of wiggle room you have to precisely tune your strength.

Next, I found that there were a lot of times where you had no recourse but to do a leap of faith, which sucks because other games like Jump King will at least allow you to jump straight up as a means of scouting ahead: in this all you can do is jump up into the other screen and fail and try all over again, which isn't fair.

Finally there were also just a lot of glitches, like times where I would charge up and jump while standing in the middle of a platform away from walls...only to not jump at all: only moving myself to the side a bit would fix this for some reason.

AnderssonKev responds:

Thank you for playing and taking your time to write this review. I appreciate the feedback and I agree with your points. The jump bar is strange though, it should work but I might have to look at it and see what's wrong with it.

I hope that you had fun!