FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Medieval Cop-S2-E3]

Not quite my cup of tea as I find the characters to be a bit too quippy/fourth-wall-breaking and altogether similarly edgy, but I can appreciate the effort in constructing a huge story like this. For as much as some of the jokes didn't land with me, there were plenty of cool and funny moments where I did laugh at the cleverness, such as the intro with the water/sword choice, so I suppose it all balances out. I do wish there was a bit more of a focus on interactive moments where you're in control as a player instead of just being ferried from one wall of text to the next as I do enjoy the detective gameplay when it gets a chance to do so (and being in control more gives more opportunities to save and take a break).

[CryptoCoaster]

Very amusing and rather deep game once you get into it past the initial bumpy entrance (pun intended): really fun and addictive stuff, thankfully with none of the risk of actually doing it for real, thank god!

I was a little bit annoyed initially where I'd buy but then get stuck with no way to sell positive for a huge amount of time. I was also annoyed about the penalty for hitting buy/sell when midair as it felt unintuitive, and I wished I could break/speed-up the cart to take advantage of highs/lows I'd sail over. However, once I accepted those annoyances as intentional design, I learned to embrace my inner day-trader and do more rapid-fire buys and sells on short sets or even single hills and the whole game opened up: really cool and fun to experience the evolution of strategy and the risk-reward in trying to hit that sell at the peak but not when you're mid-air!

I think the game has been pretty cleverly designed with a lot of risk-reward and time-pressure to both lead the player towards that rapid-fire day-trader strategy after seeing how the classic sit and wait strategy doesn't work, and to show the player just how crazy and stupid all this crypto/stock/day-trading shenanigans can be and how easily you can fail (I wouldn't blame you if the game was subtly designed to push that message by always trying to screw you over, making it trend downwards right when you buy and trend upwards right when you sell, because it sure felt like it haha). Smart and funny stuff!

0x6a61686e responds:

I considered dropping the price on buy, tried it, unfortunately had to scrap the idea. No deep thought behind it tho, I just thought it'd be funny.

[Block Collide]

Wow, not bad at all! It's rather simple in concept and lacking in pizazz, but I found the game to be really fun and addictive to go through the levels and figure out the ideal sequence, thanks to the well-paced difficulty increases of each level. Something about planning everything out at the start and making the boxes go was just very zen. There were a few wonky aspects to the game, such as how the diamond checkpoints could be put over intersecting paths, creating confusion on which path it applies to, and some collisions happening where the squares barely even collide with each other (honestly, just place the objects so its more obvious there will be a collision like you do 90% of the time in the levels), but nothing too serious.

[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.