FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[James]

It shows some promise with an interesting color-matching concept and nice introduction, but for the most part, the game ends up being rather bland and uninspired to me, unfortunately.

A big problem with the game was pacing for me. It felt painfully slow to read text in the game from the signs or the boss since it scrolls so slowly and you can't skip or fast-forward. The introduction was crazy as well: usually an intro is either a slow scroll of everything, or a sequence of screens where it stops/starts on the players command. This is the worst of both worlds: it only shows a single screen at a time, waiting for the players command, but its still scrolling everything off so what's even the point of waiting for the player?

Next was the actual gameplay. While color-matching could've been interesting and lead to some improvisational or fast-reaction combat where you need to match quickly and efficiently, all of the combat scenarios were against brain-dead easy AIs that you can shoot from a distance with no risk, and there were annoyingly spongy as heck. I quickly found myself avoiding combat by jumping over everything since it was just so boring to bother shooting all the enemies, and that wasn't a good sign to me that I didn't even want to engage with the system.

The boss fight was also a let-down for me. Not only was it frustrating how easy you can die from a single mistake, the boss fight could've been interesting: maybe you could've had to shoot the enemies it spawns before the boss kills them in order to turn them into helpers that damage the boss. This could've been a good use of needing to get good at color matching fast enough. But no, you can just ignore the enemies and shoot the boss directly. Felt like a waste of an opportunity.

Could be nice and I appreciate the attempt, but at the moment this game just feels a bit thin on content: it didn't take long for all of the maps to just devolve into a boring series of gummys and bear traps that I would just avoid, avoid, avoid. Hopefully it can get improved and I look forward to the full version.

[Potion Mission]

A pretty decent game with an interesting presentation and kooky atmosphere that is kind of let-down by various small things.

As said, for the most part, I think the game had a solid first impression with its colorful, goofy world and premise. While the world didn't blow me away as I kept getting further, there were some interesting obstacles here and there, a dungeon with a boss fight, and a funny ending, so it was a decent adventure all-around.

But man, there were just so many little annoyances with this game that make it really wear on me, death by a thousand small cuts style.

First was the jankiness of the controls. There were a lot of times where my character would get stuck on things in the world that were very odd and strangely placed that didn't feel like they should be blocking me. Firing was weird as well where the game allows you to keep firing, but no bullets come out unless you wait long enough between fires (why even allow us to fire if nothing can potentially come out? it just makes it feel bad and confusing) There were also times that my character would be very unresponsive in weird ways. I didn't like that you couldn't move diagonally, and if you try, it leads to weird results: for example, if you hold left and press up while holding, you'll go up, but if you try and hold up and press left, you'll just keep going up. Furthermore, if you're next to a wall and pointing away, and then press a direction into the wall, your character will not face the direction you point, they'll just keep pointing the original direction (nothing bad, but just strange).

Looking past the controls, the world also just felt kind of bland and repetitive. The game isn't big, there's not many paths or places to go, and none of the screens really offered any interesting arrangements of enemies to fight or puzzles to conquer: most were just very basic and slapdash with only two very simple enemies to battle (not counting the boss). Despite going into different locations like a dungeon, it didn't help either that the game just kept playing the same one song the whole time, further intensifying the repetitiveness of it all.

It certainly shows some promise and is impressive given the time constraints and such: just needs a lot of smoothing out and more interesting gameplay to make it more interesting, to me at least.

[Sub-Uber-Marine]

Cute, solid little game! Definitely a great take on Crazy Taxi: feels good to sub around and try and balance speed and smoothness to get bonuses, and I like that it includes all of the various different modes like the traditional mode where you get time for fares, or the fixed mode where you're just seeing how many you can get in a set time limit, and so on. Everything felt nice and it had a nice bit of polish and pizazz to it.

For the most part, I had a good time, so most of my complaints are just minor nitpicks. The first one was that, while the map isn't anything super maze-like and you can learn it quickly, it can be frustrating at first that the camera is so close and there is no map, meaning you could be following the sonar straightforwardly and not realize you had to go around something else first to path correctly and just get stuck in dead ends. Second, the apps felt a bit superfluous as well since they're already automatically displayed when you drop off a fare so why even bother giving them a button: felt like the app should've had a better use, like locating fares which can be frustrating to find blindly. And finally, for a sub game, I do think it would be cool if the game was a bit more physics-based with a lot of momentum and tank-turning and such that would make you feel like you're in water in a huge sub: instead the game has very simple cartoony straightforward physics which makes it a bit bland and too basic, nothing to really get skillful at manuevering.

Extar responds:

I initially wanted the app to be a lot more involved, like you say for locating fares or something like that, but as the game took shape it ended up going more in an arcade direction. So the app basically got relegated to an occasional extension of the HUD with fun little stats on rather than something that you interacted with.

The handling of the submarine is an interesting one, it started off with much more momentum and slower acceleration which made the handling of it more weighty and realistic I suppose. Gradually, every slight adjustment ended in the submarine being made faster and probably less submariney. I like the idea of heavier sub handling but yeah that wouldn't line up with the arcadeyness elsewhere in the game :)

I always look forward to hearing what you think, thanks for playing!

[Cursed Travels: Flame of the Banshee]

Neat little adventure game! Gives me a lot of La-Mulana or Simon's Quest vibes, what with the hunting around a big world for clues to figure out some cryptic puzzles. The little combat scenarios aren't the best and the puzzles could stand to be a bit more cryptic at times (whereas others were way too cryptic, like how I feel lucky I figured out I could jump on those trees), but it felt like a cool adventure all-around, especially when coupled with the intriguing story and the fast start into gameplay.

If I had any complaints, it'd probably be that I wish the game would've taught me sooner that I could pick up candles and that there were pretty much infinite: I spent too long thinking that I needed to preserve my candles as much like the first five were the only ones I was ever going to have, haha.

[Creature Mixer]

Cute little gadget! Love the crisp, professional and intuitive design of the HUD/menus, and appreciate that even though it's a tool, not a game, it still has some slight hints of juice to it like how the character reacts when you make changes. The export options are wonderful as well, especially with them being in so many flavors. I had a bit of confusion with the tool in terms of colors being a bit confusing (why do some hats use one color while other hats use another) and the weird cropping if you try to move some of the elements around even the slightest bit (why even make there be a move option with so little space), but overall it was nice. Many thanks for making a neat little tool for people to use like this: makes me want to abandon my top-down game and start working on a platformer immediately just to keep playing around with this, haha.

[CCMMYY]

Wow, this one really surprised me! I'm not a big fan of Sokoban games, and I also found it quite difficult to remember what colors could interact with other colors, so I thought I was in for a really frustrating time. But lo and behold, I ended up getting really addicted to making my way through these puzzles! Much kudos to the level and puzzle design in creating a great sense of progression and wonder at what was gonna happen next: kept me hooked with an iron grip!

[Drillionaire]

This is a bit of a rough one for me.

On one hand, I really like the look and feel from the game. I like the way it points you towards the guide at the beginning, I like that the menus are very smooth and crisp with tooltips and easy access to help everywhere, and I think the drilling gameplay can be quite addicting. Yes, there are a lot of grammar mistakes and the guide can be a bit wordy, but overall it gives off a solid, professionally put-together vibe.

On the other hand, I felt like the game could be really overly grindy and unsatisfying. The game kind of just throws you in the deep end at the start: it tries to help by giving you buildings one-by-one, but the guide is very haphazard in the way it delivers information and can really overload you at the start. I found it tricky to figure out how to even start getting money, since I figured I might need to save stuff for crafting drill bits and other confusion. Drilling felt very unsatisfying at times: as fun as it was to move it about, the combination of rocks being so tiny and haphazardly placed along with your fast moving drill makes it really difficult to pick up anything in a run. I just think the game would really have a better, smoother, onboarding process in terms of learning the mechanics and building up resources bit-by-bit.

I think this is one of those games that a lot of people will like, people who can stomach the slow grind and buildup: I just don't quite have the patience for it nowadays, haha.

[Neon Souls Demo]

It's certainly visually interesting and has some nice elements to it such as a cool (if a bit suspect) boss fight as well as decent platforming, but it didn't really leave me hungry for more from the full game.

For one, the paint mechanic seemed a bit underbaked. While it was certainly neat to see an invisible world come to light through paint splatters, it rarely added much to the game apart from visual pizazz: for every level, all you need to do is just spam double jump and bam, everything's painted and you're just left with a very basic platformer. It's basically just smoke and mirrors: apart from a few occasions where you need to use paint as a bit of a scouting tool, in the end it just felt like busy work before we can actually play.

Apart from the paint mechanic, I wasn't really seeing any hints of other potential abilities, or anything else for that matter that intrigued me and got me thinking about what the later levels could be, since it already felt like levels were just repeating themselves now in this very demo: just paint everything, jump past few spikes, bounce on a few dudes here and there, repeat ad nauseum with minor token shuffling of those elements to try and make the levels feel different.

I still had an alright time playing it, but for a demo, I just felt like it didn't hook me enough to consider getting the full game.

[Spooky Bat]

Mmm, this one was a bit bleh for me unfortunately. I really like the concept of finding items and such hidden through echolocation, and it provided some interesting strategy to think about. Or at least, it would provide some interesting strategy to think about, but really it just felt like an incredibly simple mechanic that can just be spammed for no consequence. With that, all that was left was just a very bog-standard game with aimless direction, repetitive levels, unsatisfying collectibles and bad, dull controls that led to me constantly getting stuck in walls and just feeling janky as I flew about. I was surprised that the echolocation mechanic wasn't used to more creative lengths, such as maybe having to bounce it or even use it to find the walls of the level in the first place, I dunno, something, but even then I dunno if it could elevate the bad game feel from the weird controls.

[Ringwaves]

Wow, this one really surprised me! It ain't winning any awards for beauty or anything like that, and the concept ain't exactly deep or unique, but something about the game was very addicting, satisfying and just plain ol' fun! A good example of solid level design and core game feel winning out in the end over pretty graphics (though it did still have some nice effects for death and the shockwaves, for example).

If there were any issues I had with the game, it's that I did feel like there was some confusion over how the shockwaves work. Because the shockwave graphic shows the shockwave fading away as it gets larger, a player could easily think that the shockwave loses strength over time. However, it seems like the shockwave, no matter when it hits during its expansion, will always hit the ball with the same initial strength. I didn't mind it when I realized this fact, and I liked the consistency, but there was some initial confusion where I thought I could tweak the power by distancing the shockwave.

If there was something I felt was missing from the game, it mighta been a score system like golf where you get more stars or something if you win a level with minimum strokes, or shockwaves in this case. But I had fun trying to go for minimal strokes on my own terms, haha.

Jordio94 responds:

Glad you had a satisfying experience! Yeah, the graphics certainly didn't get priority, but at least the gameplay kept you hooked.

I've got mixed feelings about having the shockwave lose strength over time. It would make it feel more natural, but it could also make it harder. The player would have to charge the shockwave for exactly the right amount of time AND have it at exactly the right distance. But as it is now, I agree having the shockwave fade is a bit misleading.

I very nearly did add stars, and I still might in the future. It'd definitely be a more rewarding experience for passing levels with minimum shockwaves.

Thanks for the feedback!