FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[First Break - Demo]

Wow, this was a pretty interesting game! The vibes given off by the combination of the immaculate art, music, and story were fantastic and made quite the impression on me: everything just had an air of intoxicating mystique that made me want to play more to figure out what's going on. When it wasn't the atmosphere, it was the puzzles that had my interest as well: the game kept introducing new mechanics at a steady pace, and the way puzzles can get messy which makes you improvise was rather unique. The little touches like rest stops, hidden lore, and other secrets added a lot as well. Really cool stuff!

I have to admit, though, that as cool as the game was, there was something about it that made me not as compelled to keep playing as I thought I would be. Don't get me wrong, I still like it, but I didn't like it as much as I thought I should've based on how good it looked...if that makes any sense. I can think of 2 things that might be contributing to this, but in truth it might be something else altogether I lack the ability to describe. Nonetheless, the two factors I can think of are:

One would be the fact that it's very easy to put this game into the ever-growing pile of other 'artsy' indie games, the ones that are all so moody and depressing and contemplative and mysterious. It's not necessarily fair, but there's just so many of these that one can become dull to it and think that many of them are style-over-substance, that the reward for trying to keep track of all this hidden lore and meaning will not be worth all the hassle. I just don't think that this game has some sort of special quality, some hook, some elevator pitch that makes it stand out amongst the crowd. I know I'm sounding like a pretentious git right now, and I don't think it's necessarily the case with this game, but it's just what happens when you become a jaded old one like me. I dunno, maybe I'm being overly harsh because you're putting it on Steam and I think that means I should be more critical.

The other factor is that the game gives off a very puzzle game impression, but due to the action mechanics like tracking enemies and shooting projectiles, the solutions to the puzzles in this game are not easily reproducible: one minor adjustment to the way you move, one degree of difference between how you shoot, and suddenly you've butterfly-effected your attempted puzzle solution into an unrecognizable state and you're lost. Now, one could argue that this is actually a unique merit to the game: indeed, some of the ways that I've improvised myself out of a messy situation live in my mind as noteworthy achievements, more so than a regular solution would. But on the other hand, it can suck when you know what you want to do but you flub the execution in minor ways and lose, especially when there is a lot of pre-setup that you have to re-do which is the case for some levels. The common refrain would be that I've already had the eureka moment and now the game is wasting my time! In addition to this, certain elements like the deadly trails that enemies or bombs give off can be so annoying, especially when again, you try to execute cutting through them right when they're fading but time it wrong.

Anyway, I do believe you have something special here and I look forward to seeing the release on Steam. Best of luck!

[Apple Worm]

Yowza, this is a fantastic little puzzle game! An interesting but mind-bending concept, intuitive controls and level design, great sense of progression/difficulty as the levels go on, fantastic presentation, and I especially love how charming the game is with little touches like how the worm gets so excited as you approach an apple! All-around solid work: the only complaint I could think of is the usage of overplayed Kevin Macleod music, but eh, it happens!

[Ballies]

Hmm, this is a bit of an odd one!

My initial impression of the game was very positive, as the vibes it was giving off were fantastic: so nostalgic, flashy, and polished! The general gameplay was very simple yet satisfying, and I thought the color matching mechanic was pretty neat! It looked like I was in for some great arcade fun!

But once you play it for a few seconds, it feels like you've seen everything it has to offer. I kept playing, hoping for something like a speed or difficulty increase, but nothing came: it just seemed to stall out, and so early on as well. It didn't help either that it was so easy to run out of bombs and then be stuck waiting for properly-colored balls to come by that you could bump into to get a bomb, only to shortly run out afterwards again and be stuck waiting more.

I think it's got a pretty good foundation, but it's a bit style over substance at the moment: with some more mechanics or a greater sense of progression to add depth, I think it could really shine!

[Enter the Dungeon II]

Huh, this is quite the interesting one! In a world where I constantly find style-over-substance games, this might actually be the opposite!

As you can probably guess, the game didn't have the best first impression to me, as the style felt very discordant as if it was jumbled together from a bunch of different asset packs: for example, you've got these background pillars that have been awkwardly resized so the pixel size is all over the place, but meanwhile the general effects and characters are a bunch of super fancy particle systems. It didn't help either that there was no music, the levels all looked pretty much the same, and even when you get past the visuals, the classes felt very unbalanced and the sense of progression wasn't great due to the same-y looking environments as mentioned before. To put it short, the game just seemed rather ugly and bland.

However, in spite of that, I felt like the gameplay was pretty dang solid! The feedback for attacking is very satisfying, and the variety of attacks you can pull off as the various classes were all very unique and interesting to experiment with! The enemy variety was impressive as they all seemed to boast their own unique behaviors and attack patterns with clear telegraphs. I also like the UI with all of the tooltips you can get when you hover over items and abilities. It all comes together to create a very fun and addictive Diablo-esque experience where you have fun turning enemies into paste and collecting all of their loot.

In a way, I feel like this is a good example of a 'grey box' prototype, in that while a lot of the visuals feel like mismatched placeholder art, the fundamental gamefeel shines through!

[SHOOT!]

Hmm, bit mixed on this one!

On one hand, it's got a lot of potential as a simple but fun arcade game. The game feels pretty nice with some good screenshake to accentuate kills, and the shooting has a bit of strategy to it with the charge mechanic. I was also impressed at some of the wild design decisions, like the pogchamp slow-mo that happens on close call shots, the revive mechanic coming at the cost of a boss fight, and left-over flames from kills detonating when they're shot: when you pair those with that mysterious cutscene that happens after you die, I couldn't help but get really intrigued!

On the other hand, the game is incredibly simplistic due to the lack of any sort of enemy variety or, well, variety at all (weapons, characters, levels, bosses) and didn't really have any sort of deep scoring system, nor does it even save my scores or allow them to compete with others. Because of this, despite the slightly intriguing bits I mentioned earlier, I couldn't get hooked to play more because it felt like I'd seen everything the game has to offer in just a few seconds. It didn't help either that the slow-mo zoom-in was very disorientating, and the noisy background was ugly and damaging to visual clarity, constantly making me lose track of where my character was.

Like I said, it has some potential and shows some creativity with its mechanics, but at the moment the gameplay is just too shallow to keep me interested for long. With some more enemies, a more complex scoring system, and so on, though, I'd love to come back and play more to make the Skullgirls-looking cheerleader happy!

[Gravitorium]

Wow, this was a fantastic little puzzle platformer you got here!

I'm not sure what feedback I can offer as it was generally solid all-around: a simple to pick-up but deeply interesting and intuitive gravity-rotation mechanic, nice bonus objectives for the try-hards like me while allowing the casuals more simple main objectives, great art design and presentation, fantastic sense of progression and difficulty as the game goes on, intuitive level design that teaches you core concepts, and so on and so forth! Well done!

If I were to have any feedback, it'd be that I find the default rotation controls very unintuitive, but luckily there is a swap option, so we're all good there (though I'd still say that maybe it should be the default instead because not everyone has patience to look into the options). It can also be a little annoying when you exit the level by accident before you've collected all the bonus objectives, but I guess that's part of the challenge. Finally, I did have a bug one time where I went through a portal and I started the next level with gravity shifted but not the camera, so yeah, there was a weird desync going on there, but it was just the one time and easily put back in sync once I rotated.

[Party Pooper]

This was a great little adventure game, like a spiritual sequel to that 'Don't Shit Your Pants' game!

Always down for a bit of a 'straw millionaire'-esque puzzle adventure where you collect a series of objects through quests to make trades for more objects and get to the end goal, and this delivered that very well with some very charming presentation, lots of funny characters and dialogue, some great setpieces, and so on. I was worried a bit at first that it was gonna be too overloaded with goofy non-sequitur nonsense, but if anything, I felt like the game was well-paced and balanced for a short and sweet adventure, and in fact, I wouldn't have minded a bit more!

A bit of feedback:

*I feel silly because I now realize you could ask that girl for a Russian dictonary, but I thought the only way to solve the cheesesteak puzzle was to pull out Google Translate camera, hah! Having said that, I wish the solution was a bit more puzzle-y than the text just automatically transforming to english once you get the dictionary: would've loved if, for example, it's just a scrap of a dictionary that shows you simple info like Russian numbers and the name of common food items, and you have to use that to find the keywords within the text while ignoring the rest.

*I wasn't sure how exactly one is supposed to win the video game fight: is it just that once you play long enough they will fumble eventually? If so, then similar to the above, I wish the puzzle was a bit more elegant and complex than that, like maybe you need to time your shots appropriately that you trap him, like firing a crouch shot quickly followed by a standing shot so he jumps into the second bullet or something, otherwise he'll keep perfectly dodging.

*I would say that the voice actors need to get better recording setups, specifically with pop filters and the like, but I suppose the goofy audio quality matches the goofy atmosphere and is thus actually a benefit to the intended experience, so, uh, stay the course!

popperr responds:

Thank you for the kind and thorough feedback, sir! Much love!

[Lily's Cafe in Nevada]

Man, I really liked the idea behind this. Having to manage a cafe that caters to deadly killers? What on earth could happen? Maybe you need to deliver food in the middle of a gunfight with bullets flying everywhere? Maybe you need to mop up blood from the constant fights in addition to food service? Maybe you need to keep everyone fed or else they start fighting? Maybe you join in on the fighting to calm them down? The possibilities had me excited for what was in store!

Unfortunately, what I found was rather underwhelming. I don't want to be mean, but how on earth can you have a food service game where customers have infinite patience, only come one at a time, and don't make orders and are satisfied with anything you give them? It goes against all logical expectations! The game is just so easily exploitable by filling up the plate with every single type of food and giving that to everyone for maximum points, because apparently you get 10 points per food. I quickly found myself losing interest as it all just felt so pointless.

I guess I got surprised by how the game turned out, but it wasn't a good surprise. It felt like a real nothingburger, if you pardon the pun. Please revisit this concept in the future and do it justice: I'm a big fan of cafe management games and I think one set in Madness is a novel idea!

TomaFokio responds:

We are currently working on a similar update. And I think your reasoning is pretty fair

[Madness: interlopers]

Oof, this game is in a pretty rough state in my opinion, a bit too rough for public consumption. It's super cool to see an attempt at a Madness FPS, and I do think it has a lot going for it: the gore effects from attacks are quite satisfying, there's a neat variety of weapons and characters to use, and there's some pretty innovative mechanics like being able to use a human shield and the 'last stand' slow-mo system that reminds me of Max Payne 3.

However, the game overall just had a really janky and unfinished feel to it, both from a design and technical perspective, and I found it really difficult to play. I realize that's somewhat vague, so here's some more specific feedback, though it's not necessary a comprehensive list:

*Damage feedback was terrible and I kept taking damage without even realizing. Sometimes I'd get hit by a melee enemy even though it didn't look like they made any sort of attacking motion towards me.

*Whenever I tried to shoot from cover or an enemy in cover, a lot of my gunshots would end up hitting the air next to the cover object, as if the hitboxes for these crates were much wider than it looks, leading to confusion.

*I kept getting put into slow-mo jail/hell, where slow-mo kept activating for either no reason or while I'm getting shot, which makes sense, but with no easy way to get out as sometimes I was carrying a melee weapon or an empty gun so it felt pointless.

*Melee attacks operate oddly in that they seem to only hit directly where the crosshair is pointing instead of the area in front of the player that corresponds to the sweeping motion the attack is making.

*For some reason, if you're carrying a type of weapon and try to pick up the same type of weapon (say your pistol is empty and you want a new pistol) it won't allow you to do this: it only lets you pick up different weapons.

*The human shield just didn't seem to work properly, sometimes their dead body being detached from me but still locked on somehow.

*Arena mode was very boring because it spend so many waves with only melee as an option: where are the weapons?

Hats off to you for trying to undertake making an FPS as it ain't no easy feat. You have my sympathy, and I hope that my feedback, as harsh as it is, helps you because I'd love to see a more polished and finalized version of this in the future!

[Fire Boy]

Hmm, for the most part, the game is a pretty decent platformer. The visual presentation is nice and lively due to the quality animations, there's plenty of wacky story moments and setpieces to keep you motivated, the game keeps introducing new types of obstacles and mixing them all together for some deadly courses, and so on and so forth. In theory, it should be great!

I have to admit, though, that while it has all of the basic necessities, I found myself quickly losing interest because the game was not only rather unchallenging, but didn't really have any sort of special hook or allure. I'm not saying it needed to do something mindblowingly unique, but I needed something to make the game stand out. I found it really bizarre that the game doesn't use any sort of fire-based mechanic, given that the game's main character is Fire Boy. At the very least, it might've been interesting if Fire Boy keeps running and you can't stop him, you know, because he's on fire and panicking, and you need to work around the platforming puzzles with that twist in mind, kind of like an endless runner.

Apart from that, the game could also be a bit awkward and janky with how it was constructed. For example, I found it very unintuitive with how you die if you touch a crusher that's idle on the ground. Likewise, it was really difficult to tell which way a conveyor belt was going based on the visuals: it looks like you tried to put signs to help with this, but they were wrong or absent a lot of the time.

I'm complaining a lot, but the game isn't bad and shows a lot of promise, so much promise that I guess I couldn't help but want even more from it: hopefully you can take that as a compliment!