FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[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.

[/tilt/]

Wow, pretty cool game! A little wonky to get used to controls at first with the way you need to wiggle for speed, and the way you lose control in the black zones (despite dying in the real game, which is a bit inconsistent), but it didn't take too long for me to love the challenge of balancing my direction with the speed needed to clear these tricky shortcuts for faster and faster times! Everything about the movement just felt very slick, and speaking of slick, I also really liked the intuitive and slick story progression that the game had, with the cool cold-open that throws you right in while teaching you the controls, and the inevitable time-out that points you to retrying the levels quicker to have more time to spare for the levels you have yet to beat. Couple that altogether with the cool and somewhat mysterious presentation the game had, where it has these fast-paced bumpin' music racing interspersed with the brooding atmospheric music galaxy map, and you got a heck of a game!

If I had one complaint (beyond that the game is currently too short and I want to keep playing, haha) it's that I do wish that it was more satisfying to get a new record time on a course: would love if it did something cool, like showing your previous record bar and cutting off or shattering the difference you just shaved off of it in a nice animation/sound. Other than that, most of my complaints are minor, like the boost is a bit confusing to use (can you only boost once?) Great stuff here!

[OVERDOSE (0.38)]

Pretty cool game! It definitely tickles that Hotline Miami/Ruiner/Katana Zero/Madness/etc part of my brain where you can just get in a satisfying, haphazard yet efficient trance-like state of crazy violence. Love the insistence on speed from the bloodlust mechanic, love the cool and stylish techniques you can pull off like dashing, deflecting, grabbing guns and so on. Game also had a pretty neat gritty aesthetic and charm to it all for the most part.

Of course, while I did have fun, it wasn't all sunshine and gumdrops. Here is some feedback, categorized for major and minor:

Major---
*As fancy as the effects are, I felt like the game is currently overdoing it to the point of hurting visibility and making combat more difficult than it has to be. The constant overall blurriness, the camera being so zoomed out that everything is so damn tiny, the long flashbang effect that happens with every hit and blinds the player, the disorientating camera zoom-in when picking up weapons, it all makes it hard to keep track of everything and reduces critical information that the player needs in a twitchy game like this.
*Incredibly difficult to see enemies and gun pickups in the level both due to the environment/colors being too dark and the aforementioned constant flashbang effects and zoomed out camera.
*Lack of threat indicator as to where the closest enemy is to keep the chain up (technically I think the eye next to the player is this, but its so tiny and difficult to keep track of, would prefer to scale this up or instead use an arrow on the side of the screen or something more easily apparent). Also would like an arrow to where the exit is too.
*Character movement/physics was a little wonky: didn't like how it had this weird slow acceleration to it.

Minor---
*Would like if the game gives you a different death when you time out instead of dying from an enemy so its more clear.
*Would like ammo counters for weapons.
*Would like if the reflect was a bit more consistent in how it works: would prefer if I could better aim where the reflects go, or if the reflects would just go back in the opposite direction they came from.
*Would like if the dash effect was more prominent, like having a different animation or creating a line or afterimages for it, instead of just a puff of smoke where you were. Without a more prominent effect, sometimes I wasn't sure if I even dashed since it barely looks different.

Hope this feedback helps as I do find the game to be really cool in concept and I found myself getting addicted to it nonetheless despite my complaints, so I look forward to the final version!

EDIT: Already loving some of the changes that have been put into place since my first play!

POLYCEPHALY responds:

thanks! yea all the stuff u suggested makes alot of sense and im planning to implement alot of that, the game was tested in a fullscreen mode so when things are shrunk down on the newgrounds player things are way too small and unreadable, im going to increase the scale of everything to compensate. also gonna increase the acceleration alot too and downscale the strobe effects or make them more subtle. ammo counters, dash effects and a different death for timing out are also planned as well!

[Perpendicular Monkey]

Not too shabby: a decent puzzler! I felt like the game did a solid job at introducing the concept of moving around while the level rotates around, which was neat to experience and get good at working around. Game also had a good variety of mechanics to spice things up that were introduced at a good pace to keep engagement up. I also like the cute animations for the main character, especially the touches on the victory animation.

Having said that, it is a little bit bleh in some respects, some of them being minor (no keyboard shortcut for restarting a level, graphics a little bland) and some of them being major (symbols for trampolines are strange and look like buttons instead, confusing as to why trampolines you step on grow while all others shrink which seems to imply that they've changed somehow when they haven't, trampoline physics inconsistent in how far they push the player between levels, confusing as to why being pushed by something counts as a 'move', etc). Game can also get a bit monotonous at times with the levels eventually just being the same size and with the same assortment of obstacles pasted around: different, but looking very similar nonetheless. Basically it's just a bit wonky: understandable since it was a jam game, I suppose, but still, it is a bit of a bummer that it is holding back a pretty neat puzzler. All around solid job though!

Biebras responds:

That's a really good response and we really appreciate your feedback! Thank you for playing the game.