FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Clocks of the BBS 2021]

Always nice to see a bunch of art from so many newgrounders, so cheers for putting this collab together. I quite like the main menu which displays all of the framed pieces, and the way you can click on each to zoom in and glean more data on the title and author. I thought at first that you didn't put in any next/previous keys which made it annoying to keep going back and forth to view the next piece, but lo and behold you do have next and previous keys but they are hidden: maybe make those a bit more apparent either with some subtle shading or some arrow buttons, haha, I'd hate to see someone get frustrated thinking that they aren't there when they are.

[PIGBOY]

Hmm, it's a nice little visual treat to see that retro tiger electronic/game n watch aesthetic, but I unfortunately feel like it wasn't that satisfying as a game and might've benefited from breaking free of that limitation: for example, I would've loved if the sprite for the farmer changed to be holding a bucket on the return trip, and if the pig would grow larger with each water, but I feel like you decided not to do that because it would be against the aesthetic (even though I feel you already broke it by having reversed direction sprites right on top of where the regular sprites would be). But even more than that, the main issue I had with the game is that it was very confusing to tell whether you were safe or whether you were going to get hit by a bird: it would be much easier to tell if the birds divebombed straight down in easy to intuit columns, but due to the arcing nature of their movements, I was never sure if I was going to collide. I couldn't glean any logic in how to dodge: at first I thought if I was always behind where a bird is facing, it would be fine as that symbolizes that I'm not in the direction they are moving, but nope, I'd collide with birds facing both ways, so I was at a loss.

[Trailer Trouble]

Pretty fun and goofy game! I always appreciate an opportunity to recklessly weave through traffic like a madman, and this game delivered! But while it was quite fun and gave me a chuckle, there were some confusing and frustrating aspects of it. For example, I had no idea what the health bar was for the game, and felt like the packages in the back of the trailer, while an interesting idea, wasn't that intuitive. Furthermore, I found it a bit frustrating that even the slightest of grazes on another car will cause it to explode/vanish and make you lose a full life point: I feel like it would work better and make more sense if the health was more granular, with the amount of health you lose and damage you cause to another car dependent on how violently you crash into it: if you just bump another car, maybe lose like 5% health and you bounce off of the car, but if you hard smash into it, then yeah, major explosions, car reduced to atoms and maybe lose tons of health. Speaking of all that, as a small nitpick, I found the explosions for cars to be quite unsatisfying: would be nice if they had some more extensive damage, cooler explosions, and left behind mangled wrecks instead of just disappearing in a puff of orange like they do. Anyway, thanks for the bit of fun!

[Gyro Gear Tournament+]

Seems like it has some cool stuff going for it! I quite liked the unique style of combat with what seemed like multiple viable strategies, like go straight for clashes, fake them out, jump to hit them in the body or bounce on their head, knock them out of the ring, etc. I also liked that the stages mixed it up a bit with not only arena combat, but this kind of race combat as well.

Unfortunately, the game overall felt very rough and confusing to play. Don't get me wrong, I like when a game jumps into the action quickly, but this game overdid it by just immediately dumping me into combat without even teaching the controls, and even once I did learn the controls, I never felt like I could tell if I was playing correctly as it all felt so random and the potential feedback for seeing whether my hits were working wasn't visible or it was tucked in the corner where I wasn't able to look since I was fighting. It could definitely benefit from more explanation on fighting techniques and more feedback like damage numbers and maybe color sparks indicating whether an attack worked or failed or whatever (maybe it does this but I couldn't tell).

Not only that, but the AI seemed to be very subpar: eventually the AI seemed to get smart in the later stages and mixed their strategy up a bit, but a lot of the early fights just had the enemy come straight at you like a robot and just constantly clash over and over. I think there is a lot of potential in this game that maybe I'm missing out on just because I don't know the mechanics since the game never taught it effectively: very unfortunate.

rotcivsette responds:

Thanks for playing and for giving feedback! The game's nature is indeed very chaotic, so don't worry. It seems I didn't succeed in communicating the mechanics through gameplay overall very well, but I'll state here some information in case you're still curious: the sparks does indicate feedback (yellow: damage deflected; red: damage inflicted; orange: body hit). And there are words giving more feedback to you above your RPM bar. Thanks again and I'll try harder next time!

[Brood]

Very slick and fun game! It was certainly an odd one to get used to at first (I would constantly get mixed up on which side I was coming out of from an aiming sequence, haha) but in the end I found it to be a really fun and addicting sequence of challenging stages with a rather unique set of simple yet complex controls to master!

If I had one thing to gripe about this game, is that I really, really hate that when you are fired out, you need to click once to break out of the egg, and then click again to go into aim mode: it just adds so many annoying control issues as since the game is so fast at times, it can be difficult to tell in the heat of the moment whether your click will be an egg-breaking click or an aiming click since you can sometimes get de-shelled by brushing past a wall or what-have-you without realizing. Just either don't bother with the egg phase and skip straight to being out, or keep the egg phase but let me just click and hold once to both break the egg and go straight into aiming without needing to force an extra click. Without that consistency, there was a lot of frustration from inputs being misread or lost from what I intended (luckily the game was good enough in other respects that I kept wanting to play, haha).

[Synthetic]

Pretty cool game and an interesting take on the Ape Out formula! It was definitely a bit awkward to get used to at first, such as with the left click attack not having any sort of animation to it, and some of the actions feeling unsatisfying, like not being able to grapple a shield and then throw the shield back or use it to block things temporarily (instead the shield just lies there once grappled). Exits were very difficult to find at times without any sort of navigation, especially for the last level (which I can see you noted in the description now). Grappling also felt kind of like an unnecessary addition at first to try and differentiate it from Ape Out, but later scenarios got harder and it did feel very strategic and cool to use then. Anyway, enough of my nitpicks, because while it had a bit of a rocky start and such, I overall really enjoyed my time with this and totally got into punching, grappling, throwing and just straight massacring my way through all the enemies to make it out for freedom! Very solid short and sweet experience.

[ULTRA FORCE: OBLITERATION]

Really felt conflicted on this! On one hand, the game looks and feels very stylish and cool: the intro was really neat as were the slick door transitions between screens, the graphics were low-fi but had good icons and general presentation, and in terms of gameplay, the guns felt very punchy, the enemies were varied with interesting attacks, there were neat power-ups like the extra drone and the planes felt so smoothly animated and controlled.

But on the other hand, I felt like the intro went by way too fast for me to read and could benefit from some voice overs to punch it up, the door transitions were oddly muted and would benefit from a satisfying bzzz-ka-chunk-vrr sound to give it some extra oomph, the graphics were incredibly bland and boring at times with repeating the same background over and over and enemies being so sparse to not allow for the usual fireworks, the power-ups were unsatisfying as most of them were just stat increases that are barely noticeable or only noticeable if you luck into getting a certain gun, and most of the enemies felt boring and badly paced to fight as there were not put into interesting waves or formations to fight. In general, it felt like while the game has a good and slick core look and feel to it, it just felt like the gameplay overall was very boring, slap-dash and had no sense of progression to it, making it all feel meaningless in the end.

Looking at the constraints of the jam now I can understand that maybe it was unfortunately hamstrung by size limitations, but I just want to give my opinion coming in as someone who isn't aware of that. I'd love to see this or another shooter by you all come out that is more fleshed out since this does show a lot of promise!

Stepford responds:

Cheers, Futurecop! I do agree that the game is a bit slow at times and the upgrade system can be frustrating due to how niche they can be at times - but yeah. We wanted to add different backgrounds and level variety, but we ran out of time and filesize.

I appreciate you taking the time to play all these games. <3

[Ann]

Reviewed this back when it was just a demo and I played the piano level. My thoughts back then were a bit mixed: I felt like the game was quite good in terms of presentation, as the cutscenes and graphics were quite impressive and the game had some good scares and atmosphere with an interesting little story, but I also felt like the game leaned too heavily on trial-and-error death sequences where you unfairly just have to die over and over to get through as there was no way you could prepare for anything coming, and that not only feels frustrating, but makes the game significantly less scary since death becomes so moot.

Now having played this, I went through chapter 2 with the sculptures and I was a bit more positive on my impression. I thought the chapter had some interesting story elements, a cool puzzle to solve, a neat chase sequence with some new mechanics, and overall a better case of feeling like I could potentially go through it without dying once since most of the death traps and obstacles are better telegraphed (meaning that even if I do die, it doesn't feel as unfair). Overall I do still feel like the game has already been compromised by leaning too heavily on deaths (and not even making the deaths varied and entertaining), but I can begrudgingly accept that maybe it's just not for me (after all, people love games like Ao Oni and such) and I do think there is some good effort put into this, and I'm tempted to go back and finish the rest to see if it keeps improving.

[Louie Loudmouth]

An interesting concept, but not much to see at the moment. I was a little confused at the start since I didn't even realize that there was a speech cloud mechanic to work with, which ended up getting me stuck and frustrated. Once I did find that out, though, I thought it was pretty neat and enjoyed making it to the end as it was quite the challenge and had a charming aesthetic. Unfortunately, it felt like it a) was over too fast before it got really interesting with its mechanics and b) got too difficult too fast what with requiring very precise edge jumps and such right at the start instead of letting the player warm-up (bit of a case where it felt like the game was made unreasonably hard to stretch out its short amount of content haha). Still, would like to see this come back in a more polished, expanded version!

[BIMSY DREAMS]

Oh man, I had a blast with this! I got so addicted to playing through the various microgames you've set up, and why wouldn't I: I felt like they were so varied in terms of novelty, intuitive to grasp at a glance while still being challenging, and above all else, incredibly charming and comical in their presentation and outcomes. Just couldn't help but play with a big smile on my face, especially when I saw the endless shuffle levels at the end. The only thing I'd say that it's lacking is difficulty: at the moment it unfortunately seems like the games only differ in speed and not any other aspect like changing/tightening the variables, which could make it a bit repetitive in long-term. Still, kudos to making this!

Also I keep getting to like 99 in Bimsy Remix and then losing, argh I want that damn medal!!!11