FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[BallFrog Demo]

Pretty fun game! Certainly a fun core movement concept that reminds me of foddian/fumblecore games where the whole fun is getting better at the exotic control scheme. The controls are a little wonky to get used to, especially since it doesn't seem to explain anything, but I found myself getting addicted to the gameplay, enjoying the process of getting more efficient with the controls and being able to tackle the more bizarre obstacles like chaining grapple points. Game also had a lot of nice goofy touches (beyond the obvious goofy frog) like skeleton bones in the background pointing the way.

If I were to have any complaints, and I know I'll sound shallow in saying this, it's that the general presentation is very bland. The game's graphics and style give off, if I were to sum it up, a very 'my first Unity game made with a bunch of free assets' to it. The levels are mostly boring rocks, The HUD is lackluster and layered weirdly where some elements overlap when others don't, the game lacks satisfying visual and sound effects for moving around, the tongue HUD remains even after you die, the death effect is a boring white circle (sphere?) and the death text is a bland system font, etc.

And it's not just the graphics either: the game was clunky in other respects, like how there is a weird and overly punishing pit in the first level that sends you all the way back, giving you the awkward choice of killing yourself to respawn where you were before you fell in or venturing all the way back unnecessarily. Also there was no real charming story or objective to the gameplay to keep me interested in progressing. All of these little things just added together to bring the game down a peg: make it seem unfortunately unprofessional. Again, though, the core gameplay is really fun, so if the other side of the game were to pull its weight a bit more, I think it'd be a match made in heaven!

rhys510 responds:

Thanks for playing and the critique. This is just a demo and some of these concerns have been fixed / updated in the main steam version and some are just artistic choice but we will improve on these in future games, thanks for the review! :)

[CFrogger!!: Arcade Mode]

This is a bit of an odd duck. I do like how authentically it recreates that arcade feel, what with the pixel graphics (except for the weird frog on the start, the titular 'carge' I suppose), attact mode, inserting of coins, and so on and so forth: very neat stuff. Gameplay was solid and recreated that classic Frogger feel as well, with nice touches like being forgiving on making the final step (you can kind of clash with the walls and it'll still count you as making it all the way successfully).

But at the end of the day...it was just Frogger. I was really confused, as I expected the game to change things up a bit with the gameplay, remix it or something, but it didn't. I mean, it's not bad or anything...but that's because it's literally Frogger, so...I dunno, I'm never quite sure how I'm supposed to feel about this situation. I mean, obviously it's impressive and nice that the game was recreated so accurately, with the minor twist of having a new character involved and maybe being a bit more difficult, but am I supposed to give points for doing nothing but just recreating the original? There's a subtle line between making a game in a similar genre or with similar mechanics and then there's this. I dunno, maybe I'm overthinking, haha. It's still good work.

AtreyuGilbert responds:

I wish I clarified, but carge has slightly different stats from Frogger himself. He just hops a bit faster. Also, this is a demo of what'll be the "Arcade Mode", and the final product will have a lot of neat shit. Arcade Mode kinda just compresses everything... Thanks for the feedback!

[Puk]

Neat little adventure! Quite the spooky game in some sense, being put in the position of monsters/cryptids, but it was funny and friendly to interact with all the others around. Game has a lot of charm to it, what with the various funny dialogue and events found about the woods, as well as the quips and such that would appear from hunters and upon game over, among other places. I liked roaming about and solving the various puzzles, like forcing the monster to remember how to hide and so on, as well as setting up my first human kill. Quite the adventure with a lot to explore.

Game was a little bit confusing at times: I had no idea how the float powerup worked since it seemed to just freeze me in place, with me only realizing way later I had to have a head start. It was a bit tiresome to have to keep going into the menu to swap abilities around. Game was also a bit aimless at the beginning with just the vague idea to get livers from humans, though once I died it all made sense to collect various powers. There was also some weird issues with movement, where walking into a wall would kind of have you slightly bounce off it or something? Also it's a damn shame that the game doesn't seem to have a save feature: it's probably not the longest game, but still, when a game has a task list, I think a save is critical, haha. Achievos were also a bit fincky: for example I definitely got the map, but it never gave me the achievo for it.

One sticking point for me that was a little interesting to think about, was the fact that I was able to kill a human and take their liver without any extra power ups. I was tempted to see if I could get away with doing this for all of the livers, but I decided against it because 1) it didn't seem like what the game intended and 2) it probably would've been quite boring and grindy, potentially making me unfairly dislike the game. I wonder if it would be better if the game was more forceful to make you get powers to get the intended, smoother experience, or if it's fine to allow them to potentially crash and burn with no powers? Perhaps its a strength that it lets you approach it however, ala what BOTW is lauded for? Anyway, not really a point against the game or anything, it's just a thought experiment I was rambling about, I guess, haha.

[Super Pickleball Adventure]

Wow, what a great adventure! Game is knocking out of the park with everything: not only does it have some solid pickleball gameplay with intuitive controls, simple yet complex strategies, creative challengers to fight, and satisfying feedback for hits, it also adds on a wonderful, cute story and world to explore with all sorts of comical characters to meet and items to collect in order to solve puzzles and such. Loved all of the crazy events that would happen, like getting forced into a doubles match with a lazy partner, as well as the sheer amount of optional interactables and flavor text scattered around the world: really helps liven it up and is a wonderful thing that is never noticed when it's there, but the effort has to be appreciated since missing it can really affect how alive the world feels.

If I were to have any complaints, it is missing the ability to hit a button mid-text to speed it up to completion: there were times when I talked to someone to see if they had something new to say, saw they didn't, and was disappointed I couldn't mash to skip forward. Other than that, great stuff all-around!

[Picokaiju]

Wow, this one really surprised me! When I saw that is was going to be turn-based, I was worried it was going to be way too slow for me and not satisfy my kaiju demands, but I was surprised at how fast-paced it was! I love the graphics and how satisfying the effects for crushing buildings and such, and the powers you get for blasting eye lasers or snatching up people/vehicles to eat or throw were so intuitive and fun. There was a lot of fun strategy too in deciding whether to throw or chomp enemies, finding time to roar to regen health, dealing with different enemy types and so on: challenging stuff!

There are still some slight annoyances here and there: being turn-based instead of full action, there is the awkwardness of having an enemy spaced just far enough that you can't walk up to it without being attacked, and the game can get a bit bogged down with constant menu usage once you get a lot of enemies surrounding you. There was also a bit of minor confusion with the attacks only highlighting the tile directly in front instead of all the tiles it would effect. But for the most part, I found this game to be very fun and very impressive for a Pico-8 game.

[Peter's Quest]

Oh man, this is seriously driving me crazy. I want to love this game so bad, but the way it starts off...oh jeez...

Ok, to start off, this game is incredibly well put-together. Much props to building such a solid and sleek interface: everything about it felt so smooth, be it scrolling around the map, dragging and dropping items, hovering over items or attacks to see their tooltips, all of which had very intuitive wording and imagery, and so on and so forth. Really professional-level stuff. The only issue I had with interacting with the game was not being able to exit a treasure chest by clicking on open air. Other than that, it made for some great adventures. I could argue that Darkest Dungeon did all the heavy lifting for you and you just copied their homework, but I won't be an ass about it, haha: it's great, and I think it's something to be proud about!

There are some minor nuisances here and there: for example, I don't like how fast the combat is, as the combination of enemies attacking so fast with such minor animations, along with the numbers quickly leaving the screen, would barely give me enough time to process what even happened. And speaking of that, I didn't like how lazy the animations were: c'mon, when I do finger guns as Pico, I wanna see finger guns, not just see him nudge the enemy with his idle stance! Hopefully you can take that as a compliment that I was surprised to not see that, considering how much effort and skill was put into the rest of the game.

But the biggest issue, the hugest problem I had, was the fact that the game only starts you with one character. Why, god, why? You've built an entire combat system where the best part about it is jockeying for positional advantages and building a great formation that can modify itself to meet the various challenges you face. But in the beginning, all you get is one character, which means all of that potential strategy goes out the window: all you can do is mash attack while the enemies mash attack right back at you. It's completely brainless and a waste of the system, regressing to the worst RPGs of yesteryear. Even worse, you start with Pico, who, while having no problem with attacking the front rows, has no interesting stuns or other abilities, and is completely at the mercy of back row enemies, as his only recourse is an attack which only hits 1/6 of the time: miserable. I mean, you got three slots, why don't you just start with Pico, Nene and Darnell, it would be a match made in heaven! Maybe you do get them eventually, I hope, but it just makes for such a bad first impression. I keep reloading the game hoping it just glitched out or something and it intended for me to get a full party, but to no avail.

I mean, I understand if I sound a little bit overbearing, but seriously, I would consider finding however had the idea to start with one character and accuse them of deliberate sabotage of this potentially great game. I want them tried in The Hague! It's a war crime that I don't like this as much as I should!

But yeah, cool game, hope it gets even better.

SlickRamen responds:

Thanks for the in-depth review!

[Bunbun's Delivery]

Bit of a mixed feeling on this game! Overall I'm very positive on it, but I was let down by some elements of it.

In general, I found it to be very solid and charming: the graphics, animations, sound and altogether general presentation were very cute and wonderful, giving off a really professional feel. Shooting was fun and had a little bit of strategy to it with switching between the two weapons (though I did find the second weapon to maybe be a bit too weak to make it useful), and there was a nice variety of enemies to fight all with memorable patterns.

The biggest issue I had with the game were the normal combat segments. Usually a SHMUP does their best job at making these parts like a cool interactive movie, where there are all sorts of cool waves and patterns of enemies and obstacles that form a series of standout events that all create a great flow, a story of combat. This game, unfortunately, didn't have any of that. Yes, it did have some interesting enemies with unique moves to them, but all the game did was constantly recycle the same waves, over and over, even after passing the checkpoint and transitioning to a new zone: just more and more of the same. It didn't take long for those parts to get incredibly repetitive, which was unfortunate.

The boss fights were a whole different story, however. This is where the game really shined, with a very cool boss fight with fun patterns to get good at dodging around. It wasn't all perfect: I didn't like how the boss constantly 'no-sell'-ed being shot, and would've preferred them to react a bit whenever they got hurt. And more importantly, I wanted more, more boss fights! I was so bummed out that the game ended after saying 'level over' since it made me believe that it implied there were gonna be more levels! Basically, I'd love to see more of this game.

...also as a side note, I think it's SHMUP, not SCHMUP. Unless maybe that's a new acronym? Haha, anyway, it's all good.

ShortCakeCafe responds:

Thanks for the solid criticism!
The level flow was done last minute as more of an afterthought since this game was made in a week and i barely got it done in time.
But if I do ever do more with this game, I agree that the level design should be optimized a lot or just cut entirely for a sort of boss rush type of game.

(also the schmup error is because i've never played a shmup in my life so i didnt know how it was spelled, gamer moment)

[Piece by Piece]

An interesting little experiment! I found the game to unfortunately be a bit shallow at it is: while building up the ship is very interesting in how customizable it is, and the game did have some great feedback for shooting enemies and a cool missile swarm special, it felt a bit hollow because the game never escalates or progresses in such a way to really require you to modify the ship in the first place. Yes, I still enjoyed building a ship for the sake of building a ship, but all I could do with it was live in this small fishbowl, fighting the same boring enemies over and over for a slow trickle of gold. The game was also a bit confusing at times with its feedback: the way enemies that crashed into my ship would burst into hearts made me almost think that they were dropping health for me, not that they were hurting me. For me, this seemed like not a good game, but a great proof of concept of this modular ship building and how satisfying it can be: would love to see a full game make use of it to create a grand adventure! I could easily see it being like a fish game, where you go to a universe, beat enough enemies to power up your ship to challenge a harder universe, and keep going onwards and onwards!

YaenGames responds:

Thank you for your detailed review & ideas. I always like to read about your perspective on things. I agree that it gets a bit dull after a while and there is too little content to back up the lengthy balancing. Hard to make much more in so little time ^^
More enemies and maybe even unlockable ship parts would certainly make things more exciting over the course of a run or maybe even multiple runs... This is essentially more of a prototype than a finished product as it stands, due to how it was made. But I agree that there's potential here!

Thanks again and have a great day!

[LOVE and KILL]

Not too shabby! I enjoyed my time with this adventure as I found it pretty creepy and immersive. The gameplay was solid, going around and investigating, and I loved the way the characters interacted with each other, both in the focused dialogue scenes and the little quips as they walk around: felt very nice to see them build a rapport. The game did a good job with building a creepy atmosphere for me through the visuals, sounds and pacing, and I loved some of the stand-out events like the mannequin room.

It's definitely a little wonky: the translation is super rough so it was hard to get in the mood since it was confusing to understand what they were saying sometimes, the use of stock sounds for things like screams were really bad and ruined the moment, there were glitches like the camera panning so hard the text went off screen and I couldn't read what they said, and the ending was a bit abrupt and a let-down (I just shot the guy and it was all good?) but I still did like the adventure leading up to it, so I think that you definitely got some chops for building these stories, and I'm looking forward to the next one!