FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[SMUGGLER (30XX)]

A little bit of a strange game to grasp, but in the end it was a fun, goofy little adventure with some hidden depth to it! On first glance, while it was fun to go around and talk to all the various weirdos occupying the station, laughing at their dialogue, it did feel a bit pointless as it all boiled down to just grabbing the erdium and skedaddling to face-off against the checkpoint guard. But lo and behold, it turns out there are actually a lot of interesting endings you can acquire by typing in responses you learn from clues all around the station. Felt quite clever figuring that out, but I do wonder how many people stick with it enough to notice all of them since it can be a bit unclear (though I suppose that is the appeal). Anyway, this game was a pleasant surprise! By the way, as a side note, many kudos for implementing text skip if you hit a button during dialogue: always like it when a game includes that little touch!

[Blockade Runner]

An awesome action-packed game! The game starts and ends just the way I like it: an explosive start straight into some gameplay with intuitive, easy-to-pick up mechanics that increase in intensity, all building up to an explosive finish with an epic boss fight! There were some slight nuisances in the game: for example, the final boss was a little trial-and-error-y that might've benefited from some more checkpoints, but on the other hand I did feel like it was well-designed enough that it could totally be beaten on first attempt by a focused player. Was really impressed that this was a game jam game as it had so many impressive set-pieces, cool level designs, and great game feel with stuff like the checkpoints. While I would've loved to see more, I loved my short and sweet time with this nonetheless!

[Archery Run]

Hmm, definitely a decent concept, but felt very underwhelming to me unfortunately. I like these single-button games as they can show a lot of creativity in trying to make a very complex game out of a very simple control scheme: it's definitely a noble goal as a lot of games should try to minimize control complexity whenever possible. And in some ways, I felt like the whole shooting/aiming mechanic being on a single button was interesting.

But for me, the game ultimately felt really annoying and clunky to me: instead of feeling genuinely challenging, it felt more like I was fighting against the game's own controls and only getting through obstacles by sheer trial-and-error. Jumping was inconsistent since it didn't look like there was any buffering or coyote time, the time-slow-down mechanic of shooting was annoying as it also inexplicably slowed down your forward momentum as well instead of keeping it consistent, the arrows seemed to awkwardly inherit character movement at times making them go off-target, and so on.

It's definitely not all bad or anything: I do think the concept is nice and the level design shows some nice creativity which made me want to keep trying, but it didn't last long for me. All in all, though, this is what game jams are all about: prototypes some concepts quickly to see how they end up, and I think this was a good experiment!

[Doktor Panic!]

Oh man, I really want to like this, but I felt a bit mixed about it. On one hand, I like the concept and overall presentation of the game: the hectic juggling of managing your patients while dodging all sorts of obstacles, all while listening to the funny bit-crushed voice sampless and manic sounds/music, made for some fun times. There's definitely a lot of style to this game, and I do feel it has a good concept to work around.

But during it all, I just felt so annoyed at the randomness of the game, as it felt like the ability to treat patients wasn't up to me, but sheer luck. So many times there was a patient that needed a heart or some color of medicine, but in all that time, it never showed up in the first place, dooming them without my involvement. I mean, the game does a great job at spawning a toilet immediately when you need it: why is it not the case for anything else you need in the game? I know you can probably just say that I'm being too much of a perfectionist or something and that the game is light-hearted and you should expect to lose some, but the game doesn't seem to agree with the whole score-tracking and such. But even putting that aside, there was the frustration with not even knowing I could empty my doctor's hands of useless pickups at first, and the hitboxes being annoyingly small that made my doctor not pick up items they were right on top of, all giving a feel of clunkiness to the movement and controls.

Again, I really like the idea behind this game, but I just felt like the execution left me frustrated, so I'd love to see it revisited. Maybe a sequel in the future, perhaps for the Sega Saturn instead of the Master System this time?

[Machine Gun Gardener]

Some great hectic fun! The game's a little goofy and I didn't have the best first impression from the title screen which looked very generic and mobile-gamey, but I'm glad I stuck with it as I think it delivers some crazy and classic arcade-style shooting goodness! At it gets more and more intense, I like juggling the various power-ups to deal with all the situations: blast some bombs over there, send a black hole over that garden, spray some flames widely, and so on! Though I have to say that while the black hole looked awesome, I didn't find the flamethrower and the bombs that satisfying: the flamethrower just never felt like it was making contact a lot of the time, and the bombs were confusing as they look the same as if it was a bomb power-pick-up, causing confusion. Still, that's just some small nitpicks.

The only thing that really brings it down for me is that the aiming can be quite wonky at times: due to the game getting really crazy at times and lagging, sometimes my aim go way off point, over-shooting or under-shooting my intended target. I know the game says sometimes about tweaking sensitivity but that ain't the issue for me: it's just that due to the lag and maybe other factors, the way the game treats mouse inputs can be very erratic and confusing. An unfortunate blemish on an otherwise great experience!

studio11508 responds:

Thanks for the great feedback. I will look into making the pickups and actual bombs look different as I didn't notice that until you mentioned it. The flame thrower is designed so that you have to hold it on the enemy for a second or two before it can catch fire (but plants light up immediately), but I think I could throw in some feedback to let the player know it's working so it doesn't feel so wonky. The lagging is something I'm still working on. Due to the nature of the enemies exponentially increasing over time, that means animations, scripts and lighting do as well. I'm looking to remove this type of mode in a story mode version, hopefully eliminating this issue. Thanks again for the feedback!

[Hare Egg]

Pretty neat game! I like the painting mechanics and how satisfyingly simple it is to grasp, but nevertheless addicting and kept fresh by the introduction of things like the monitor shorting out which creates a fun memorization element to it. Also, I really like the diegetic/in-game interface for the various brushes, colors, and submission button, among other things. I didn't really grasp what was going on in the story at first, but I like how it mixes everything up by utilizing the same painting mechanics from the main game in a new subversive way, and integrates your art with the world in future events. Furthermore, I appreciate the small touch of letting you speed up text by clicking during it.

In terms of negatives, I do find it a bit annoying that you can't see the score for the last egg you do since it gets interrupted by dialogue. I do also wish that the game added some more mechanics do deal without beyond just the screen shorting out. I also find that the scoring can be a bit weird at times: wonder if it should be a bit more flexible or forgiving with general grades so not everything is some weird percentage. Could just be me being sore though: felt like it gave me good grades when I didn't even try and bad grades when I really knuckled down, haha!

[A Cannoneer's Curse]

Argh, this was a rough one for me! I think the concept had a lot going for it with the way you need to escort your cannon around, and the various multi-use scenarios like how your cannon can be both a gun to kill enemies and a shield to block enemies, and how you can be your own ammunition. But man, it was so frustrating to play: I hated the difficulty in moving the cannon around due to the way it rolls and bounces about and can get stuck, I hated the limitations in aiming the cannon only in 8-way directions, I hated how zoomed-in the camera was which made it difficult to see even two steps ahead, and I felt like the cannon mechanics were so weird and confusing in how you can load yourself or other bodies and such. I did stick with it enough to beat the game in the end (which I was a bit disappointed in, cmon, no cool death graphic for the boss or nice ending cinematic for us?) but it wasn't the most pleasant experience to get used to the controls. I think it is a really cool idea that has some legs, but I just felt like this execution of it wasn't the best: good attempt though!

[Toonio]

Coming from using Flash, this felt like a great application for making some simple animations! I liked how simplified and intuitive it was: buttons and features were where I expected them to be, the undo button surprisingly worked by pressing ctrl-z (though I guess it's just z), and it had a lot of key features like onion layers immediately turned on instead of hiding it away like Flash does by default. I also liked how easy it was to save the result as a gif! Felt like it did a great job at being a great introductory app for some easy animations that you can save and display on the ol' social medias. I did have some minor issues though: I couldn't figure out how to rearrange layers, and I couldn't figure out how to get the fill or drag tools to work, and there were some things like how I expected the animation to stop playing when I hit buttons like go to first frame or move to prev/next frame, and how when I hit backspace to type in a width it annoyingly autofilled with 1 (I wanted to enter 5 so I hit backspace to blank it out and then hit 5, which resulted it in being '15' instead of '5'). And I imagine it might still be a little too complicated for some people, despite the simplification from more robust apps. But overall, I had a great time with this!

kr0tyara responds:

Thank you for your callback! Sadly, there's currently no way to rearrange layers. You can only copy and paste the frames from one layer to another. The 'Fill tool' draws a filled shape, try to just draw a line as usual! Drag tool is for moving the canvas (doesn't affect the actual drawing), it works only if the stage is zoomed.

[Flip Palace]

Very solid game! I loved the concept and felt like it was done very well by having a good set of levels with both a great difficulty curve and good pacing at introducing new mechanics. Found myself getting really addicted to making it through the levels, enjoying the eureka moments as they came. The game, while quite minimal in terms of graphics and such, still had a decent amount of juice to it with the animated buttons and death animation, among other small touches. I did have a bit of a frustrating period where I kept expecting 'down' to always be the 'flip' action and 'up' to be the 'jump' action, instead of them being reversed after flipping, but I got used to it, so nothing too bad. All in all, feels like a well-executed game!

08jack responds:

thanks for the detailed review!