FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Punch It Deluxe DEMO]

I certainly like the idea behind a destressing game where you can de-stress by whaling on someone, and I am quite impressed at the technical achievement of getting this to work in RPGMaker, but I still feel like this game is quite lacking from its intended goals.

While the game has had some minor improvements from its previous version, such as the introduction of new damage states for the character as they get beat up, the gameplay and gamefeel still remains overly simple and repetitive to me (and even the damage states, as new as they are, are incredibly sparse and not all that exciting).

The two game modes kind of mess up the goal in their own way. In the normal mode, the game has you beat up the guy in a rapid-fire matching game until you mess up: fun in concept, but the game mode has the guy immediately get his revenge by pulling a gun when you mess up, defeating the whole point of destressing since you will lose in the end eventually. Meanwhile in the freeplay mode, while you never need to fear losing, the game quickly gets repetitive as the actions you can take are incredibly limited and there is no fun game logic to spice things up as in the regular mode.

Ideally, I think that the game requires at least two major things to achieve its goal as a stress reliever:

One would be a more interesting and tactile way to attack the guy that gives more pleasurable feedback. For me, I'd like the game to be like the intro to Mario 64 where you can tweak, pull and slap Mario's face around, but in very intricate and freeform ways. You could make it so you swish the mouse around to simulate slapping the guys face with a virtual hand, for example, and have the guy reel back and get smushed and warped depending on the strength/direction of the mouse movement. This would make the game infinitely more replayable as it would increase the amount of actions you can take rather than the static three.

Next would be allowing the user to customize the guy you're attacking. I have no emotional attachment to this Howie Mandell looking guy: what I'd like to do is customize the guy to look like someone I know, so I could get pleasurable revenge in attacking them.

Unfortunately, I do feel like all the things that might make this game good might not be possible given that this was awkwardly made in RPGMaker, so I understand that my feedback will most likely be for naught.

WeirdRikert responds:

Thank you for the in-depth analysis. This game was a lot of first for me, and moving forward I have more information to apply to future games.
There is certainly more that could be added to this game, and I hope to do a proper sequel that impliments all the mechanics at some point.

[T.V. Boy]

Bit rough around the edges at the moment, but I suppose that's to be expected for a demo.

Certainly, you've got all the key pieces for building a good shooter: you've got the basic game logic of a wave structure with shop inbetween, you've got a basic variety of enemies, you've got basic collisions and destructable objects, basic amount of bullets/guns, and so on. It's all there, and that's certainly impressive in its own right, but it's just very basic and unexciting at the moment, as well as being a little clunky.

It's difficult for me to tell what you already know is lacking, but there was a general lack of feedback and sounds in the game, making it overly boring and muted when shooting enemies or exploding barrels and such. Hitboxes and collisions were occasionally very weird: a lot of the time my bullets would just collide against something in the environment that I felt they shouldn't or something I feel like they shouldn't collide against at all, like the fragments of debris left from a crate. Enemies bullets would appear awkwardly as well, farther from the enemies that I would expect them to. It also felt really unprofessional in how the game doesn't pause when a level is complete and you're in shop: every click has you shoot the characters gun. And so on.

Additionally, I could forgive the game all of its bugs and jank if it had a fun or unique concept to showcase, like some sort of cool movement, neat abilities, or all-new game mode or something, but there isn't anything like that from what I could tell.

At its current state, I'd say it's more like an alpha instead of a demo since it's pretty much just a proof-of-basic-game-engine instead of proof-of-fun-game-concept, but hey, you've got all the building blocks you need to potentially build a great game out of this!

[Unstable Towers]

I understand the concept and I want to like this game, but it just felt really half-baked and frustrating to me. First off, the game just looks and feels overly bland with barely any interesting graphics or sound to enhance the gameplay. The stacking also felt really janky and totally up to luck on whether I'd get good blocks: even if I lined up a block perfectly to fit I found it would always cause a bit collision/quake that messes everything up, and with no way to rotate or shift blocks in a Tetris style it just felt unnatural and impossible to work with. Might be funner if you could continue even if a block falls over instead of being forced to restart from scratch, I dunno. Didn't take long for me to just quit, which is a shame since I think this could be a fun game with some more thought and polish into it.

[1000 Nerds]

Not the greatest game, obviously, as it is just rather basic with no difficulty or challenge to it and starts off painfully slow, but I appreciate the sentiment and I had to admit it was rather addictive to see all the different people pop-up and give 'em the ol' COD hit marker of death. I found it a little confusing that your character has HP, but doesn't take damage (but I gotta admit that I too would want to avoid dying and having to start all over, haha, and I do see the note about it now as well). Anyway, keep on truckin', Plufmot! Oh, and cheers for letting me know about Newgrounds Radio!

[Estresamente]

Very cute game! I rather like the Inside Out-esque concept of managing the body's stress as a worker/janitor, and it was cool seeing all the funny ways the body is represented, like opening up the eyes one at a time to light everything up, shutting off the projector to stop the dreams, or helping a bunch of bugs on the bellows jump in unison to breathe properly. I was definitely quite intrigued to see where everything was going to go, especially by glimpsing all of the various shortcuts and objects that'd require future abilities, but I do think it lost me in the end unfortunately.

I think the biggest issue for me is that the game feels a bit too overly large, with vast swathes of it dedicated to fairly basic and repetitive platforming. Felt it could definitely do with reducing the size of the world and distance between interesting objectives to keep the pace up, or maybe introducing more fun, smooth ways of traversal. I mean jeez, it was only act 2 and the game sends you down a giant pit that you have to climb all the way up! Something so drastic like that felt like something that should be saved for near the end of the game as a finale: with it being so early in the game and me not being immersed yet, I just lost all motivation when I saw how much I needed to climb back up and how much of that would just be rather repetitive.

[PullyWog]

I gotta admit, I had a really rough start with this game due to the controls. Based on the way the controls are displayed, I kinda had it in my head that I needed to use one button for tongue, and another button for jump. This made me think the only way to cancel a tongue maneuver midway was with a jump which felt like an awkward process to time. Or something like that? Gosh, I can't really remember, because once I discovered that I can just hold down the tongue button and cancel a maneuver midway by just letting the button go, then everything clicked for me.

With the control issues out of the way, I was really impressed with this game. I found it to be a very fun challenge to overcome and get skilled at (at least once I learned the controls and got over the annoyance of not having air control and such), and I loved the level design in that the platforms always seemed smartly placed to naturally form funnels and checkpoints for the journey. I was also blown away at how bloody charming the game was: the sound effects were top notch, especially the satisfying smack and pop of hitting the ground and getting up, and I loved all the little touches like falling through the roof and later having a carpenter show up. Having said that, I was a little confused that I couldn't interact with any of the characters on my journey up: maybe I'm missing something?

[STATION.60]

Wow, this game has some rough edges, but I found it to be really cool and impressive! Reminds me of a Zachtronics game and I think the stylish presentation and great level design that ramps up the mechanics and difficulty at a steady pace even makes it stand toe-to-toe with them. I easily found myself getting addicting to going through the puzzles in this, and might I'm not gonna set any records anytime soon, I appreciate the game giving you scoring for optimizations. I feel bad because I kinda lost interest in the story since it was so slow: I just came for the puzzles, so get outta my way, haha!

It definitely had a really rough start for me as it kinda just dumps you in without any instructions: I know it's part of the mystique and you can call me dumb if you like, but I was stuck on the very first puzzle for a long time since I had no idea about the play button all the way in the top right corner, because it is barely visible due to the curving and chromatic aberration and easily mistaken as a pause/options button.

Unfortunately, while I think the game is super cool, I did find my experience incredibly crippled by the terrible save system: got all the way to unlocking AND for example and not only did it not give me my achievement, when I started the game up later on it lost my progress and booted me back to Ch6 for no reason.

[panic]

Rather interesting rhythm game! Once I deciphered what the heck was going on after a brief period of confusion (main menu and gameplay kinda just dumps you in with no explanation or windup), I quite enjoyed listening to the tunes and watching my guy go as I got skilled at using this rather unique control scheme. Could totally see this concept get developed further on with more levels and tunes, but I do feel like it has some questionable parts that need to get ironed out. For one, I was a bit disappointed that there were no scoring in the game to judge my progress and flex on others: no points, no high score table, no miss/ok/good/great note scores, and so on. I also found it very strange that the game just allows you to hold down a button to hit all notes coming from that direction, instead of tapping the button for each note: felt like it went against all natural impulses to do this and completely negates the purpose of having multiple notes with different timing if you can just hold. If you feel like you must keep the holding as an option, perhaps tapping could be a way to get bonus points as it entails more risk?

[DRIFT APOCALYPSE - Drive Over Zombies]

Pretty neat game: any game that promotes smacking enemies with the backend of a car from a sweet drift gets a thumbs up in my book. I will say though that while I like the concept in theory and I do think there's some fun arcade gameplay in here to enjoy getting skilled at, I found it a bit frustrating to play due to the weird controls (it felt so unnatural to press both directions to boost) the overly slow and slippery feel of the car and the lack of variety in enemies/obstacles/etc. Eh, maybe I just suck at it, haha. Also I found it really weird that the tutorial is stuffed away in the options: feel like it should be a main menu option instead given its importance.

Also, and this is a silly pet peeve of mine perhaps, but I really don't like the inclusion of coins and continues and such: it just makes it feel like the game design has been compromised to promote this weird crowbarred-in grinding aspect.

torrydev responds:

First of all, thanks your review, I appreciate a lot this feedback.

I agree the controls are a bit weird, as well as the coins / unlockables / continues system. But that´s because the game is originally designed for Android Play Store and I wanted to have like 2 button gameplay to be comfortable to play on touchscreens. (As well as including some kind of monetization to get a bit of revenue at least)

The main problem the game has is that drifting over zombies it´s kinda hard because of the controls, so a lot of enemy ideas I had to add a bit of variety couldn't be implemented because it´ll be too difficult to deal with them.
I also noticed that most people improve a lot when they play and get used to the controls and told me that the game experience improved a lot for him.
So I prefer to leave the game as it is now; a short, fun with a bit of depth arcade game, and focus on a future project where I´ll apply all of the feedback I'm getting!

[Crazy Cauldron]

Cute little game! Found the concept to be solid with a very charming presentation, and I had a good time making the combinations for the customers, especially when I needed to try and make the certain gradients they were going for in addition to trying to make the color they want out of whatever ingredients I could scrape together.

Only problem I had was that sometimes it was difficult to tell what the customer was looking for: sometimes they'd be overly forgiving and take my bright green despite wanting a dark olive green, and sometimes they'd be overly critical and want something that I swear I gave them but they don't want (usually I feel they'd want a black potion that might have a subtle bit of other color that's impossible to tell since the black overpowers it, I dunno).

That, and while I understand that most likely the idea of not having all possible ingredients available in the garden is to make the user improvise (not seeing the green frog but need green? make green by grabbing the yellow/blue items instead) I just found it very annoying and frustrating since the time between rotating ingredients in the garden is short enough that it makes me not want to improvise, but rather just wait for them to rotate so I can get what I want. Would probably prefer that all color ingredients are always available but the instability comes from them moving about or hiding and being difficult to pin down, perhaps, as it would be less annoying and still add that bit of chaos.