FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Claret]

Argh, I feel like I really like this one, but I admit I felt a bit conflicted! While it had a bit of a rough start where I didn't understand how the game worked, it didn't take too long for the game design to clue me in to the mechanics through the way the levels were designed. From there, the game whisked me away with its slick and smooth gameplay and I was having a blast! The graphics, while minimalist, I felt did a great job at adding a lot of punch and pizazz to the game with the way the character bends as they move and shakes as they get damaged, and the special effects for collecting objects and such. I definitely think the game concept and core is solid, but the execution felt a little messy to me. The kicker for me was the level design: while a lot of the levels felt well designed and fun to play, the difficulty curve was all over the place with tons of super hard spikes inbetween super easy levels. Plenty of the mechanics that got introduced, like the turrets, just felt super annoying to fight against. While I did get frustrated and stop halfway, I do feel like I want to revisit the game just because of how good it felt to play in general, so well done in that regard!

SlickRamen responds:

Thanks! Levels were a bit rushed because I just wanted to get the game out, so I'll admit I could've spent a bit more time refining the mechanics and stuff, but I'm glad you had fun.

[R&C: Research and Chicken]

It's a rather simple game, but I had a few laughs and did find myself getting addicted to going through the various combinations and seeing what goofy new results would happen (both in text, art and animations), so well done!

[Highschool Bathroom Simulator]

Funny little game! While it doesn't really have any major challenge or interactivity to it beyond just moving forward and talking to people, I nevertheless found myself getting addicted to it due to the way it kept the novelty and pacing going with all sorts of events. Love all the various gags in the game, both the direct ones (such as through dialogue) and the more subtle ones, like the girl's bathroom door being all fancy-like.

Was happy to see that, while bathrooms have changed in some ways from my time with vaping and the like, some things never change, such as people thinking axe body spray is a replacement for hygiene. God, you'd think the bathroom had been raided by SWAT with the way kids would gas it up with axe body spray back in my day...anyway, thanks for the trip!

(btw it's principal not principle, but whatev, it's probably part of the humor)

BobbyBurt responds:

haha yeah, part of the humor...

[The Posh Show]

Cool little warioware-esque minigame! I thought that both the minigames and the concept/presentation had a lot of goofy charm to it, and I had a blast figuring out the mechanics to each of them, all while laughing at the various gags inbetween. Though having said that, it definitely had a few issues: for one, it felt like the quality was a bit uneven where some games had funny failure conditions (the monocle guy bugging out) while others just played a sound and went red with nothing special. I also felt like the hat tipping game became impossible to complete when the difficulty gets harder as you're not given enough time to tip for the third person, while the toasting game actually became easier the harder it got since you have more chances for the knife to pass the glass. But the only real complaint I had was that there just wasn't enough meat on this game's bones with a mere 4 minigames, but hopefully you can take that as a compliment that I just wanted more and more from this charming little game!

AndrewDavidJ responds:

Hey, thanks for the review!

I've been collecting a lot of great feedback since this game's initial release (I made this in two days for a game jam :P) and I plan on implementing some of those notes into the game's next update! The failure state thing hasn't been mentioned before, so thanks for that!

Hopefully I can get an update done soon with all these improvements as well as more mini-games!

[Wika Wicked's Egg]

Certainly wins a lot of points for me in terms of presentation: definitely made a great first impression with the visuals (although I'll admit that might be due to nostalgia and such, haha). And while the game does start off a bit hard by frontloading with a lot of obstacles and not much direction on how to play, I found myself getting into it and enjoying myself.

Having said that, though, I felt like gameplay was a bit of a mixed bag. On one hand, I thought the game was fun and challenging, despite the simplicity of the mechanics. Flying around, dodging obstacles, conserving stamina, finding a good route, and so on made for a fun mix that kept me engaged. However, I felt it was a bit clunky in some respects. For example, I wasn't quite sure where or what I was supposed to be doing as I didn't know what items to collect and whether they mattered, and there were a lot of paths to take as well pointing in all sorts of directions and I didn't know if there were for story progression or just bonus challenges or whatever. Also, the hitboxes for enemies seemed way too large and the egg seemed too easy to crack from falling the slightest bit, leading to a lot of frustration.

I definitely feel like I still had a positive experience despite the rough bits and I plan on coming back to this to complete it, so well done!

As a side note: I had some real issues with using a controller for this, as for some reason, despite the up key being the key to fly up on keyboard, my controller expected me to press down to fly up. Wonder if it's because I'm using a ps4 controller instead of the more standard xbox controller? Weird.

[Cookin' Daddy]

This was a real odd duck for me. Initial impressions of the game were very strong: the presentation, UI, music and so on gave off a very professional, charming and polished feel, especially the very fancy title screen that zoomed around the 3d environment for every option you selected. It looked like so much effort was put into everything that made me really excited to see what the gameplay was like!

And then I played the game and I was like...was that it? I mean, it isn't bad or anything, the game is still alright, good even, and I liked the charming voice lines that came up and such, but it definitely was a bit underwhelming and short-lived. I was expecting some sort of level-based game like Cook Serve Delicious or Cooking Mama or something with a bunch of content and mechanics, but what I got was just a single score attack level for a very basic rhythm(?) game.

And to be fair, I would've been fine with that single level, except it doesn't have anything really exciting or compelling about it: where are the streak counters, the point multipliers, the satisfying sounds and explosions that increase in intensity as you rack up a big combo? What is the significance of the different foods that pop-up, as well as the different tiles? Where's the story or the multiple victory screens displaying the food we've cooked for our family, where it looks better based on how high our score was? What happens when I mess up: is there a combo point multiplier that I lose or is it just a time delay until I can continue? I got so confused at times where I felt like I did so much better than before, only to get a way worse score: perhaps this game does have some complex score mechanics, but it didn't do anything to communicate those.

Pardon the pun, but at the moment this felt a bit underbaked, or like a good-looking apple that's hollow inside: it felt like all the effort went into making everything surrounding the game look good, but nothing was done except the bare minimum to the game itself. I would love to see an updated version of this though since it seems liked you've got a good team going and this has a lot of potential that I'd hate to see go to waste!

ShycoticBunni responds:

Thank you for your very in depth comment! You brought up some very solid points here, and I vibe the most with your comments about the differing food tiles and the addition of extra juiciness via tile streaks and point multipliers! I'm gonna snap this comment up and present it with the team and see how they feel about this as well. :)
I'm glad you enjoyed Cooking Daddy nonetheless and thank you for your feedback, dude!

[You are red. You are blue.]

Call me a philistine or a monkey or whatever, but for the most part, this game didn't hit with me. Just felt like some pretentious wankery. It was a bummer, because I felt like the minimalist mechanics were pretty cool, especially with two (maybe three, I forget) later levels where you really gotta puzzle some stuff out by moving the camera and hitting all sorts of hidden panels. But those levels were few and far between the vast number of blah levels where you just crumble some structures and let the chips fall where they may to fill out some survey inbetween a bunch of inspirational quotes taken from instagram. I'm sorry I'm being so rude, it really isn't that bad or anything: I feel like the only reason I'm negative was because it felt like there were some really cool potential here that I really wanted to see expanded upon, but it never got off the ground and was just disguised with all the other fluff to puff it up and make a shallow game seem more impressive than it was. I am definitely a monkey who prefers his shoot-shoot bang-bang games though, so perhaps I'm just not the target audience.

[Piconjo Sp33ch]

Not really so much a game, but it is a funny little translator application that's good for a few laughs. One thing I noticed is that it was a bit inconsistent with its translations at times. While it was very impressive with converting phrases like 'portal' into 'pr0tal' and 'to' into '2' as you type it, I wasn't quite sure how it should handle 'too' and 'tomorrow' and such: in the case of 'too' it greedily converts it to '2' as well, and 'tomorrow' is translated as 't0m0rr0w' but I'm not sure if that should be different ('2m0rr0w'?) Wonder if it would be safer to have it only translate once you type in the entire phrase instead of trying to translate as you go since there could be further issues, but I understand why you made it the way you did because it does look quite cool to see it go as you type.

[Delivery Madness]

A goofy, challenging platformer which is fun, but can feel quite unfair and janky at times. I liked the concept of the game and the challenging levels you constructed, but even though I got through it eventually, I felt like it got way too hard way too fast, and most of the difficulty came from jank instead of the actual obstacles. A difficult platformer needs to work hard to have tight controls, consistent physics and logical hitboxes so as to make the experience fair and down to the player's own skill, but this game felt very wonky and unfair at times, especially due to some of the wonkiness with going down through platforms (why do I need to hold it for an awkward amount of time instead of just tapping to go down), weird hitboxes (why do I get hurt by acid or spikes when I'm standing on the edge of a platform above it) and inconsistent physics for springs and such. If all of that got ironed out, I'd say this is a wonderful short and sweet challenge, but as it is, I'd say player beware, since you are fighting not only the game itself, but its controls as well.

[AstralBirds]

A little bit bland in terms of presentation and concept, but I found it to still be a nice and chill experience overall. Took a bit for it to get going, but once it does, I thought it did a good job at introducing new mechanics (like the wind fields and green bubble fields) and escalating the complexity as levels went onwards. Some of the levels were a bit trial-and-error dead-endy at times which was a bit frustrating, but never anything too bad, with overall every level being great. The game was a bit glitchy at times however: had some weird collisions and funky physics at times, and a particular recurring annoyance was trying to phase through a field with blue powers, but some of my followers not going through fully and getting trapped despite me timing everything to the best of my abilities.