FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Matchkey]

Another solid puzzler! Challenging as usual, though maybe with an odd difficulty curve: I could be wrong, but I swear the first five or so levels had some pretty big difficulty spikes, and then it dips back down to normal/easy difficulty. Could just be a case of me overthinking it: maybe I played so many puzzlers from you I try to guess what the solution is from previous habits before actually finding it and screw my train of thought over, haha.

[Meow Merchants]

Pretty cute game! I certainly like the graphics and the simple but addictive gameplay of rapid-fire trading: it's a decent concept! However, I didn't quite agree with the execution. I feel like the game would better be served if your time meter only got refreshed when you actually make a trade for money: in that way, you would need to be strategic by scanning the field to be on the lookout for the fastest way to trade to get the coins and keep your streak up. As it stands currently, though, you get a time refresh for every trade you make, which makes the game trivially easy to keep going forever as you can just keep no-brain juggling any trade you want with no clear goal. Felt like a missed opportunity for me, and I just ended up bored unfortunately. Also, I was really bummed out that, after getting a bunch of money, I still got a depressing ending with a dead cat in the rain: why you gotta do me like that, haha!

[Lines On Sides]

This one was a tricky one for me to review: it really didn't make the best first impression as it started off slow. Really slow. Waaaaaay too slow. Seriously, a huge amount of levels are dedicated to brain-dead puzzles that practically solve themselves: while the levels keep increasing in size, the difficulty or mechanics involved do not, making it feel pointless. I was so close to just quitting the game thinking this wasn't my jam, but then finally the game actually started to introduce some cool mechanics: being able to move around tiles to different locations, having to ensure there are matches for tile to tile instead of just worrying about the edges, and so on. I ended up really having a lot of fun! I like the minimalist design where you figure stuff out not by 'how to play' controller instructions, but intuition and signals the game gives off, and I love the satisfying subtle sounds as everything clicks into place. It gave me a real sudoku feel where you gotta really think ahead, as while a tile might seem good in one location, it actually fits elsewhere better. So yeah, bit of an odd egg where it's good, but takes way too long to actually get good.

Mandigondo responds:

Thanks for the feedback. I wrote down your observations and I will use them in future projects. :)

[Yemita]

Argh, this was a rough one for me! In theory, I really like the whole concept behind this game: starts off strong with a good title screen, the game's very charming and stylish all-around, and I love the whole chaotic energy of racing around a restaurant smashing everything while keeping your combo up, all while hunting and collecting all these little secrets and achievements. Gives me a vibe of like Katamari crossed with the old Tony Hawk games.

But man, the execution ended up really grinding my gears. It's just so difficult to control the slippery little bastard! I know it's probably intentional that you can't stop because you want to give the game a sense of chaos, but man, at least let us hold back to maybe slow down a bit at the very least! The game seriously made me physicially ill with the way I just couldn't stop ping-ponging off the walls all while the camera kept whipping around in a frenzy to keep up. I was just begging for the ride to stop the whole time I was playing: begging for the slightest bit of control! I feel like I got pretty good at getting used to the controls in the end, but I felt like that was only begrudgingly and not a satisfying victory, haha. So yeah, unfortunately a bit of a mixed bag.

[Static Cling]

Super cool game! Very solid and impressive in all aspects, making it very addictive and satisfying to play. It really surprised me: I didn't think much of the puzzles at first, but they just kept building on up and up with all sorts of neat aspects and new mechanics, and I liked how intuitive it was to learn due to the nice visuals on aspects, like the battery having a gauge, being able to see the pulses of electricity run through the wires, etc. I did find the tutorial aspect a little annoying: the chalkboards were super tiny and I don't know why you don't just show the control inputs on the chalkboards, instead of forcing the player to have to stand still and wait for the controls to appear (feel like the controls showing up after idle should be a last ditch effort, not the only way to see the controls in the first place). Great work on this: got a heck of a team here!

[0]

Challenging game! This game was definitely quite a doozy with its hard difficulty and trickiness getting consistent physics for the egg, but I wouldn't say it was so hard as to be frustrating as I couldn't help but get addicted to this (though I certainly wouldn't mind the game being a wee bit slower or having more control over aiming, haha). This game got its hooks in me deep due to its ceaseless escalation and introduction of new and interesting mechanics, all arranged in some great and unique levels. Game also has plenty of charm with its goofy concept, visuals, and nice touches like seeing all the egg splats stack up over time. Cheers for this!

15:47
481 eggs broke
damn that last level was a doozy haha

[Adventure Boy: Jailbreak]

Haha, I do love these types of games where you explore the land and figure out this way to trade one item for another in a crazy chain to get to your goal, and this game delivered that well! A solid adventure with good presentation and an amusing world to explore, filled with tons of interactables with funny flavor text. Speaking of the flavor text, I was definitely impressed at the level of effort on display: not only was there a lot of interactables, they surprisingly had a second line of dialogue if you talk to them again, and there were all sorts of responses for giving them items. For example, I couldn't believe the game actually recognized the logic of my attempting to trade soda to the kid for their sugar since soda is practically sugar! Stellar stuff, this.

[Chikiana Jones and the Golden Eggs]

Seems like a decent concept that was pretty fun, but a little clunky and confusing with its execution to me. I definitely did like getting past all of the various traps and obstacles and then running back through a more challenging version of them: pretty cool stuff. There was some minor jank here and there with hitbox confusion and such, but for the most part it was fun.

The weirdness came to me with the toolboxes and bridge implementation. On one hand, I feel like I understand the idea is that you can strategically choose what bridges you want to build in order to skip some challenging parts of the level. However, for the most part you are given so many toolboxes so easily that it becomes not a choice, but a foregone conclusion that you can just skip huge parts of the game. I'd prefer if the toolboxes were either scraped altogether so as to make people experience the whole game, or to be either severely limited so you need to make a strategic choice of what bridge to build and what bridge to neglect, letting you only skip one part of the level over another. Additionally, you could make it so that the only way to get toolboxes is from challenging branches of the level: then you'd need to decide if it's worth the risk to go through an optional challenge for a toolbox to make your escape easier, or if you just need to get better at the required parts of the level and not skip them. Just feels like the concept wasn't fully thought out and executed in a positive way, at least to me personally.

Steventus responds:

Hey thanks for your detailed review on the gameplay. I've had hunches on the loose ends on the gameplay but I could never pinpoint on exactly what so thank you for verifying them for me.

The strategic choice of toolbox/bridges mechanic was something I wanted to explore but I wasn't able to explore with my limited level design skills. It is a critical skill that I should focus on more if I were to do more big-picture strategic kind of games.

Appreciate your thoughts alot!

[Sunnyside vs. the Eggies]

Pretty good game! Certainly very impressive from a visual standpoint: the title screen, cinematics, feedback from shooting, all the characters, the HUD and so on and so forth just ooze charm and really create this wonderfully goofy world.

Gameplay was a bit of a mixed bag: on one hand, there were a lot of interesting enemies to fight and the escalation of difficulty definitely hooked me, and there were some cool techniques you could pull off like shooting down during a jump to hover. But on the other hand, it did feel like it was a toss-up on whether the fight was going to be fun or not for each room: some of the rooms actually allowed for a lot of fun verticality with platforms and such, and the enemies were arranged in an interesting formation, but most of the time the rooms were very boring, flat, and cramped rooms with enemies just bunched together in a messy mass: no strategy, just shoot and pray they go down. There was also some confusion with corpses: I actually thought the enemies were jumping at me some times, not realizing that they were already dead and it was just their corpse falling about randomly (maybe consider greying out corpses or having them always fly backwards from the shot).

All in all, its shortcomings to me were quite understandable given that it is a game jam game, and I still did have a lot of fun playing this stylish game!

Stepford responds:

Thanks, FutureCop!

I definitely agree with your feedback and I appreciate you taking the time out of your day to review all these games!

[Embryo Go Go!]

Pretty cool run n' gun game! It's a bit short unfortunately, but I, for the most part, enjoyed blasting my way through it. Graphically, I felt like the game was really solid, polished and cool looking, loved the feeling of feedback from shooting, I thought some of the arena encounters were pretty cool due to the good variety of enemies, and I always appreciate a cool boss fight, so cheers for that!

I definitely did have some small frustrations with the game however. I felt like the camera was way too zoomed in (or perhaps you could argue that the sprites are too large) that it just felt so claustrophobic and suffered from the old Sonic problem where you just can't see far enough ahead to see danger coming (I appreciate that you put the flashy warning signs up, but I feel like the fact that you needed to put this in should've been a clue that maybe the root of the problem could've been solved by zooming the camera out instead). Everything being so tightly packed makes me feel like this game should've been a beat em up instead of a shoot em up, as it's so close-range! I also didn't like the way the camera instantly flipped around when the character turns: there would be times I wanted to back up a bit from enemies on the right so I'd go left, but in doing so the camera would instantly whip around and I'd lose sight of the enemies (and feel a little sick). Also I feel like it barely fits the game jam theme: feels like you just wanted to make a shooter and then made the slighest inclusion of an egg to justify it, but hey, I love shooters so I'll let that slide, haha!