FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Drone Head]

Cool concept, but felt a little undercooked to me! It definitely made a good first impression on me. I like the two separate modes that you have to juggle, and the unique way that both modes operate to move around. Putting that together with having to navigate through tricky terrain and a bunch of enemies while swapping your weapons makes for some manic gameplay with a lot of improvisation. Having said that, I couldn't help but feel slightly disappointed overall: as cool as the character and their abilities was, the game world and content surrounding it just felt very shallow and didn't live up to the potential that I was anticipating when going through the tutorial. For me, the score attack just felt like it wasn't good enough, and I was really hoping for some crazy levels to play through: I'm not sure what the ideal world for this character is, but I could see a lot of potential, like challenging precision platforming levels, maybe some cool coop levels where you need to separate forms to squeeze through some vents as a drone to open up a door to proceed, and so on and so forth. Hopefully you can take that as a compliment, haha, I understand that probably this gameplay was the most that could be made in a game jam timeframe.

[Timedox]

It took a bit for me to learn the concept of the game as it spends a bit too long on simple levels that don't interact with the paradox mechanic at all, but once the game went into full swing with levels were you can crash into your selves without planning, it was quite fun! Definitely a good concept at its core and has a lot of interesting level designs to go through, creating a lot of novelty. Unfortunately for me, the games controls and design were a bit wonky and it made the game a bit overly difficult and unfair. Wall jumping was a bit sketchy at times, and my character would get stuck inbetween "gaps" in blocks a lot (probably didn't place the key blocks close enough to each other so as to create a seamless collision box). In a weird way, this game might actually be a weird case-study of the dangers of being too overly generous: my character was constantly getting stuck to walls I wasn't intending to touch, leading to a lot of frustrating stops. I tested it and I could literally get attached to a wall in mid-air, not even close to it! If the controls and collisions were just a bit polished up, this would be a definite hit for me, but as it is, it's just a bit too frustrating!

[Super Ball & Chain]

For me, THIS is what I think of when I think of game jam! Certainly, the game is a bit rough and not long on content, being just a simple score attack with graphics/sound clearly picked and scaled up haphazardly from asset packs. But gosh, I had so much damn fun with the core combat! Swinging around the flail had such a great feeling of weight and impact to it, and I loved the strategy and improvisation that occurred during gameplay due to the various enemy types, balancing movement for dodging and attacking, as well as having to deal with distances and momentum and bounces and so on and so forth! This is a game which I feel has a solid, satisfying core that could be expanded upon in all sorts of ways: with how good the game already feels, if this had some more polish to it like, for example, the hit freeze impacts from a game like Lethal League, it could be really incredible! My only complaint might be that I feel like the enemies should be a bit more consistent: skeletons went down in one hit, ghosts in two, and giants in three, but if the ball was moving slow, skeletons sometimes took more than one, and while I understand the logic of this, I wish they were more consistent as the game is challenging enough, haha!

[Cats n Wires]

A great puzzler! Definitely was a bit difficult to grasp the whole 'wire' mechanic at first when it was introduced in that weird isolated tutorial, but once it was put into the context of the world, I loved how interesting it was and all the different challenges you got out of its usage! Definitely got very mind-bendy at times, so I was glad that the levels were titled in such a way to provide hints for my foolish self, haha. Levels felt like they had a great escalation in difficulty to them, and it was enjoyable to collect all the kitties, so well done! A <3 to you as well!

[Onward Blocks]

This one really grew on me! Game was a bit tricky to learn since the tutorial threw a lot at me to digest: took me awhile to get over my instinct to match blocks with the enemy instead of countering them, I kept expecting to hold-release to drag and drop blocks instead of click to pick up and click to drop, and I totally forgot about the rotate mechanic until way later on, among other things. But I'm glad I stuck with it because I ended up having a lot of fun with this! I found the bosses to be very fun and charming, both in a mechanical level where they have their own unique special moves and combat patterns, and in a personality level with their battle quips and artwork. Apart from the confusing intro, the only thing I think could be worked on is the feedback; as I fought and stacks up the blocks, I never felt there was enough feedback for me to tell how the fight was going, like sound cues or something like that, as everything felt quite muted. Still, this was a very fun surprise for me!

[9111]

Quite the interesting concept! I like the goofy nature of this world you've set up, along with the goofy gameplay mechanic of controlling multiple cars simultaneously, all with their own strategic purposes. Trying to play the game cross-eyed keeping track of all the cars and the chaos going on was quite amusing and challenging!

I'm a little conflicted on the execution though. Part of me thinks that I just need to accept the fact that failure is inevitable and that's it's just seeing how long you can prolong that inevitability: the deck is intentionally stacked against you and there's no real way to 'get good' at it. But another part of me feels like maybe there should be some way to win, like maybe the game could have a series of levels that escalate in difficulty, in terms of how many vehicles you're controlling, how long you need to survive, how large the part of the city you're covering for that day is, etc. Like you're the new mayor and you're trying to help your city survive long enough by manually controlling the cars until the programmers patch the AI bug for the vehicles. That might be a bit more satisfying to play and progress through, and allow people to get better at experiencing this very interesting world you've constructed. At it is, though, it's still a very interesting prototype that could be iterated and expanded upon.

[Frogeiner]

Hmm, definitely a bit rough to play. I don't mind a challenge, and this game doesn't wait a second in giving you a challenge by starting off with cars going so fast that you have to really time your movement and be quick about it. Unfortunately, the bigger part of the challenge is fighting against the controls itself: so many times I'd be trying to do quick maneuvers that the game requires me to do to live, but the game did not have enough input buffering or forgiveness, making it discard my input and causing me to stand there like a fool and die. For me, the harder a game is, the more refined the controls need to be so that it feels fair, and this missed the mark for me. It also didn't help that the game had a lot of mechanics like the bottles being thrown from cars, which the only practical way to get through is by dying from it and remembering to dodge next time; felt very cheap and unfair. Again, seems like a decent idea and concept at its core, but needs a lot more smoothness to its controls.

[On Being Undermined.]

Really goofy and fun adventure! The world you've crafted is very charming with all sorts of wacky characters and fun twists and turns on the usual puzzles: this game keeps the novelty up by constantly flipping the player's expectations (maybe too much that it becomes normal, haha)! I love the attention to detail, such as how, instead of a catch-all 'that didn't work' response for using the wrong item on something, there are unique responses for all the times of objects: I love that amount of flavor text! Definitely a really neat game: the introduction was well done to pique my interest and teach the controls, and while the gameplay mechanics are simple at their core, I felt like the feeling of jumping around was satisfying due to the squash and stretch, among other things. I was only been able to get one orb for the gate so far, and unfortunately it didn't save my progress, but the game is so fun I'm definitely going back in to finish it.

[Neon Amazing Dasher]

Decent, but a little bare-bones at the moment. The content on display at the moment reminded me of a developer room or something like that, where it's just a simple room with some obstacles to test collisions and basic mechanics. Now, the game being so short and light on content, essentially being just a speed-run isn't as much of an issue for me, though. What is an issue is that the gameplay itself wasn't that fun or innovative in anyway: the controls were awkward to get used to with lots of weird issues with walljumping in particular, the camera was too zoomed compared to the speed you could move and the distance of the platforms that it was difficult to navigate, making me rely on a lot of 'leap of faiths', and the gameplay didn't really have anything neat to it beyond bog-standard platforming. With something like rollerblading, I was expecting maybe the character to make some fun momentum and sliding to play around with, some sort of gameplay with an emphasis on flow or style, but it and anything else wasn't there. Basically, I wouldn't have a problem if it was just a prototype, but this prototype was only a prototype of the bare essentials instead of some new and fun mechanics. Obviously all of this is quite understandable since it's from a game jam, but still, just felt like I should describe my impression without as bias as much as possible.

[Monitor Maze]

Maybe I'm being unfair, but I felt like this game's execution was a bit strange. With the game's theme centered around hacking and monitors, and with enemies with visibility mechanics, I really felt like it was going to be a stealth game where you try and avoid enemy contact. You know, you try and rearrange monitors in a way that you can either avoid or lure enemies away in clever ways, like trapping them into a monitor that you shove to a corner as you collect the keys. But with the melee slash, there's no need for any clever strategy: you can easily go through every level with the same strategy of mindlessly collecting keys, easily slashing any of the slow-moving non-threatening enemies. The levels might get bigger in terms of monitors on-screen, but they never advance in any meaningful way. I actually tried playing the game a few times pretending I didn't have the slash and had a good time! Well anyway, perhaps I'm being unfair judging the game on what I think it should've been. As much as I had gripes on how overly simplistic the game was, I still did think it had solid presentation and a good aesthetic, and still had a decently fun time making my way through.

(oh yeah and there is a slight bug where if you stand inside an enemy, an enemy can only hurt you once since it seems they are coded to only hurt on initial collision, but not if you remain within collision. i've also had some slight bugs where enemies ignore walls, mostly after a quick monitor switch)

kypello responds:

Thank you! Yeah I think you're right, it definitely is too straightforward with being able to kill enemies so easily.

I guess I was so focused on making the game that was in my head (which wasn't really a stealth game), that I didn't notice when the mechanics I had created would be more interesting for a stealth game. That and, I was worried it would be too challenging without the ability to attack, but that doesn't seem to be the case as you and a few others have said it works better that way.

Thank you for playing and for the feedback!