FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[BOBA]

I'm a bit conflicted on this one! For the most part, I felt like it was a great game, and it was wonderful to see another charming game from this team that delivers solid graphics, catchy music and an interesting concept.

But while usually I would say this game is all that and a bag of chips, this just felt a little lacking to me. The main culprit is the level design and the boba mechanic: it just felt really underwhelming and underutilized to me. The levels would go back and forth haphazardly in terms of quality: some levels used the boba in clever and unique ways, some levels felt like they were desperately trying to make up excuses for the boba to exist, and other levels...just didn't even use the boba at all, forgoing it completely to just focus on bullets and sawblades and such. It was all still fun, for the most part, but it was just a weird experience where I wasn't even sure what game I was playing anymore. Perhaps I'm being silly and focusing too hard on the boba, but can you blame me since it's supposed to be the selling point? Whenever boba's not being used in a level, everyone should be asking "Where's boba?" (ok now i am getting silly)

To me, this feels like the Dark Souls 2 from this team: it's still a solid game and above many others in its genre, but if I were to rank it against the other games from this team, it'd have to be last place (hopefully that's not too overly dramatic, haha).

[Pink]

Another nice and chill puzzler! I love the whole minimalist approach to the puzzles where you need to experiment to figure out the rules, poking and prodding at the various pieces. Definitely ended up addicting me! In terms of negatives, the only thing was that I felt a bit disappointed to see some of the same puzzles repeated from previous games (such as the hanging curtain pull puzzles) as I hoped for all originals. Still, had a nice time with this overall.

[Rushdown Rivals ZERO (2021 Version)]

Wow, I really enjoyed the heck out of this! It was definitely a lot to get used to at first: the character moves so fast and there were so many controls to know and use very quickly (and it feels like a game you NEED a controller for, as there's too much for a keyboard). The game doesn't pull any punches either and throws you right into the deep end to the big boss fight.

But god, if it didn't feel good to get good at this! I definitely love the crunchiness of the hits: lots of satisfying feedback to them. I liked how all of the moves, for the most part, aren't throwaway moves: instead each serve their own best-use purpose against the various enemies, all of which give you a lot to have to juggle. TomBot is no slouch either with a nice moveset that feels hard, but fair, due to the great telegraphs and animations. It all just added together to make an incredibly kinetic and frantic combat experience where you gotta think fast and improvise, kinda like Doom Eternal, and you better believe I felt proud when I destroyed TomBot at the end!

It's a little janky in some respects: sometimes the physics would be a bit wonky, the hitboxes a bit vague, player damage not being as clear, and I felt like the interact button wasn't necessary (just attach to the rope if you jump at it, you can always jump off) but I had a blast. Would love to see more of this, or more like this, in the future!

[ONE BTN BOSSES]

Really cool game! I love me some boss fights, and I loved the creativity on display in terms of making such a cool boss fight with such minimal controls, yet still having much strategy and challenge to them! And all with some bumpin' tunes as well! The combat reminded me a lot of MMO-esque combat, like from FFXIV, where most of the fights involve dodging around various target shapes on the ground in all sorts of interesting patterns and sequences: fun stuff! Some of the telegraphs could stand to be a bit more clear in when exactly they are going to materialize, however, like the windmill/fan one.

The first basic switch-direction movement felt the most intuitive to me. I loved the balancing act of safety and risk that came with it: you can play it safe by switching constantly to stay still, but really you want to try to not switch as much as possible so you can speed up your fire rate (at the risk of running into obstacles).

The dash movement was alright: it ended up being a bit too easy since you're moving fast constantly, and since moving fast means you shoot fast, the boss ended up dying before I knew it (which was a shame since I wanted to test more). It was here that the game started to get a bit clunky: I couldn't gauge how much remaining dash I had or even if it mattered, since the gauge would regularly go into negative numbers without me being able to tell what that meant, and there were a lot of times where I thought I should've taken damage but I didn't (since I think it only counts as damage when first touching/entering an obstacle, but not turning off invincibility when still inside it???).

The ghost movement...absolutely sucked for me. I hate-hate-HATED it, haha! I like the idea behind it but it was just executed so poorly: maybe it could work if time screeched to a halt or, at the very least, drastically slowed down when you are channeling your teleport. As it was currently, moving so fast and some of the obstacles being so long meant it was impossible to account for the channeling time required to dodge.

Definitely exciting to see where this goes: hope the feedback helps!

EDIT: Argh! Can I not go back and play with the original methods? Please, get me outta ghost mode, please!

[Tower of Towers]

Pretty cool game, but a little bit of a mixed experience for me! I quite like what this game is going for in terms of challenging platforming, and I loved some of the variety in obstacles and little touches like left over blood from deaths, but the controls, while decent, weren't quite tight and intuitive enough to make me feel confident and, well, 'in control' going through the challenges, and that's when the game started to cross the line from 'challenging' to 'frustrating' for me.

I can't quite explain it, but it's just a lot of little things missing like input buffering, and the character movement being a bit odd, with one of the primary culprits being the dash: for me it was just way too fast, zippy and annoying to gauge and account for the exact distance it takes you. I loved playing Celeste to 100% because as hard as it was, the controls were so solid that I always felt mistakes were on me and I could win: I can't say the same for this.

Don't get me wrong, I still had an alright time with this, and I'm gonna try to get farther if I can get used to the controls, but right now, that's a big 'if'.

[Deepest Sword]

Very nice game! A fun series of challenges that escalate as your sword grows bigger and bigger, all wrapped in a wonderfully funny story.

The controls were a bit frustrating to get used to at first, as they weren't quite intuitive to me. One, I didn't expect the sword controls to be around rotating the sword and it took some getting used to: I expected to be able to control the exact positioning of the sword a bit more with the tip of the sword being synced to the mouse pointer, similar to 'Getting Over It' controls. Two, it threw me off constantly with the way the player 'adjusts' by automatically walking forwards/backwards when you rotate the sword around them: yes it does add some weight to the feel of the sword, but it's a bit annoying to have to account for and I would prefer they just stand still. Also the level design/physics was a bit wonky: I'm still not exactly sure how I wiggled past the 2nd level obstacle and whether it was intentional, haha!

Still, all in all, I had a blast getting used to controls despite their initial confusion/frustration: it was all just part of the challenge with this charming game!

[EFHH]

Felt like a pretty charming game! I really liked the whole goofy premise of it all, and I am always down for some adventure gameplay.

Gameplay was a bit awkward though. I couldn't tell if punching people was doing anything to them and if it was even possible to kill anyone: I think it's just to stun them as a last resort so you focus on stealth, but then why make it so you can punch forever and rack up these huge combos with all sorts of fun messages if it's not the focus? Just felt like a missed opportunity where I would've liked if the game was either just a beat-em-up or just a stealth game instead of this awkward mix where you just walk past and bop people with no consequence.

Also, some of the puzzles were a bit...pointless? It's like, very early on you've got three people right next to each other: you find an item for one, they give you the item for the next person, and they give you the item for the next person. Boom, done. There wasn't anything clever or hard about it: at that point, it just felt like unnecessary padding and would probably better be reduced to just trading with one person. I know that's how a lot of these games work where you trade items but...at least try to distance them a bit so you need to remember their locations or think about routes, or add a bit of a puzzle element to it so it's not so obvious and tedious, haha!

[Pico-8 VS Uberkids]

Pretty cool to see Pico VS Uberkids made in Pico-8! Quite the faithful recreation which rather impressively recreated all of the little bits and details from the original. Definitely a graphical tour-de-force!

That said...it was maybe a little too faithful in that...it was just literally Pico VS Uberkids once again, just a little pixelated this time. As insulting as it may sound, it's kinda like: what's the point? For me, a demake is usually a creative exercise in which you try and reduce a complex game to a more simpler format, but still capture its essence (for example, Daikatana being demade from an FPS to a top-down Zelda game for the Game Boy). Perhaps I'm being a bit silly and pedantic: I was just hoping to see something added for this version. I can understand if a straight recreation was the intention though, and if it was, well, you definitely succeeded in that respect.

Nene and Pico lived in my playthrough. Poor Darnell... (though it was funny to hear the sound effect play for his death!)

[Newgrounds Snowboarding]

Not too shabby: felt fun to hit the slopes and build up a big combo (though I do wish there was a clock or something to show you how long you have to do a move to keep your combo up). Menu is a bit drab and confusing though, and the game does get boring pretty quickly, especially due to the small amount of tricks, small amount of variation in obstacles, and the endless random generation. I'd end up killing myself intentionally just so I could get back to the shop! Maybe consider, instead of randomly generating mountains, hand-crafting a few mountains as levels with a start and finish to them. That way, people could ride down the mountains and try to create a best combo route for maximum points, which you could store in high score tables for people to compete.

Oh, there was also a funny glitch: I found that you will grind on a rail no matter what, even if you are completely upside down in the middle of a flip (it'll just automatically insta-adjust you). Feels like that shouldn't be possible, haha!

MSGhero responds:

We started to make hand-crafted levels, but we didn’t have the time. Deadlines!

[Wife Quest]

Game is quite charming from a story/presentation/graphical perspective and that does make me want to play more to see what happens, but the game itself did feel quite clunky, unpolished, and overly bland in some respects.

First, there was a lot of confusing aspects to the controls and text. Tons of text was very awkwardly phrased in english and I could barely tell what was being said. In particular, the whole part about dogs crushing bones or whatever in the intro had me so confused. It could really stand to have a proofreader go over all the text to fix it up. Not only that, but text was sometimes sequenced oddly: think about reducing the length for some of the monologues to keep the pace of gameplay up, and also reduce text so it can all fit on one text box, instead of having so much you need to put the last 1-2 words on another text box pop-up (which feels so awkward to read). Controls were confusing as well: the hologram tutorial landmarks for jump and attack both said to use the A button on my controller, but that's not right since they clearly don't use the same button in reality.

Gameplay was a bit overly simplistic and dull with just basic jumping and attacking. It's not necessarily bad to have a simple game, and it did have some nice touches like coyote time for jumping, but the feedback for hitting monsters just didn't feel good, and there weren't any great platforming/jumping challenges. Also, as cool as the finishers for monsters are at first, it gets really annoying to do them over and over just so you can get some hearts or gold (the skipping prompt didn't seem to help skip them in any way).

Again, at the end of the day I think I will continue my playthrough to try and get to the end of the story, but I just wish the gameplay was a bit more satisfying. It's definitely got a decent core and with a bit of polish I feel like this could be a really neat game!