FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[As one against our end]

Bit of a mixed bag for me! I like the whole concept of building up your party, strategizing an ideal formation, and dealing with the issues that the geometry brings in having to improvise new formations as you move through it all, among other things. Quite the goofy adventure with a lot of interesting characters to deal with!

But on the other hand, it felt like it was just really weird to play. I kept expecting to attack immediately when I cross my targets over something instead of having to wait an extra turn, and I keep losing track of everything as my targets flip-flop as I turn around and there's so much overlap. Considering the theme as well, I found it odd that you could totally leave behind party members as they go off-screen, and you only need one party member to reach the end gate instead of requiring to gather them all up. In general, the game felt strangely executed to me and unrealized, like it was just really haphazardly designed with the bare minimum, leaving it up to RNG to do all the heavy-lifting, instead of designing interesting levels with cool enemy formations and clever geometry obstacles to wiggle your party through. Part of me wants it to be more like a puzzle game, almost like a Sokoban game or something where your party members can be both helpers and obstacles to your progress, but maybe that's me wanting it to be something it's not.

I guess I was a little confused, and maybe I'm being unfair. It's like I was at odds with myself: part of me felt like it could work if I was just patient and took the time to keep rearranging my party into optimal formations by running into walls and such, but another part of me just felt like the game was too chaotic, difficult to parse, and annoying that I just gave up and went with a more reckless approach where I kept pushing forward and operating off instinct (which worked for awhile but eventually led to my death). Maybe it's just not my cup of tea at the end of the day. Still, quite the interesting one that I'll most likely go back to and give it another go, despite my gripes and confusion.

adriendittrick responds:

thanks for the well thought out review!
The RNG does do a lot of the heavy lifting and I really didn't design this as a puzzle game, more as a roguelike with a core movement premise.

I initially wanted this to be a game about interesting formations but really it became a game about levelling up and growing with various characters hhaving to micro manage them all!

[MOLE]

Had a blast playing this! Felt like a very smooth and challenging one-button version of Super Meat Boy! Definitely a very interesting approach to the game: I always enjoy seeing these minimal-input experiments and I felt this was a great example of them at their best. Level design was quite varied with lots of fun obstacles, and I loved the little touches to the game, such as the way the mole belly-flops on death: with a game as tough as this, it's good that even death is fun, haha!

My only complaint was that, as smooth as the game was in general, there were a few annoying parts where the time-freeze from collecting keys threw me off my jump timing, and sometimes the game would eat my jump inputs for some fast-paced jumps, requiring me to input way earlier than I expected. All in all, though, very solid job!

It's not necessary, but if you make some bonus levels for this, I'm down to play 'em because I really want more of this!

[Jumphase]

Very nice game! It's not as much of a brain teaser as some of the other puzzlers you make, especially the top-down tile ones, but that wasn't a downside for me, as the fun action of the platforming made up for it in spades! Felt like the game had a good momentum to it where you can go through levels at a fast pace: not saying it was easy, but it had a nice smoothness to the difficulty curve for me where it wasn't a brain-buster but it wasn't a no-brainer either. Another good edition to the more action-platformer side of Rob1221 entries!

[Space Thread]

Fun little game that's short and sweet! Felt like it had a good tutorial that taught the mechanics and way to progress very well, and it felt fun to race around using the dash strategically to win. I only had minor confusions during my playthrough with me not realizing I could pick up items other than white things, and with me thinking that carrying items was burdening the character for some reason: other than that it was great! Oh my god, though, I was literally 1 pixel away from home with my haul that would've completed the game and I died to time over, aughhh! But even with that defeat, I had to come back and beat it, and I did on my second try with a whole minute and change left!

Elastiskalinjen responds:

Thank you :)

Yep, maybe I should have left some random debris in the ship, then it would have been more clear!

[Trail Of Pigs]

Damn, it's got a rough start, and the game can be a bit frustratingly hard at times, but boy if I didn't end up getting enraptured by this! It's like The Last of Us meets Oregon Trail or something, haha!

Like I said, first impression was definitely pretty rough. The tutorial just vomits a wall of text at you (without even establishing context through story) that is difficult to read and remember everything (would be helpful if there was a button where you could bring up the tutorial later to see if you forgot something), the menu functionality can be a bit confusing at times (why does the button to pause have a play symbol and the button to play have a pause symbol?) and the controls can be confusing to grasp (Sneaking is a bit confusing and I thought for the longest time that once someone gets close and starts stabbing you there's nothing you can do: turns out it was because I was running and apparently you can't shoot while moving).

Once I got past that initial hump though, I had a blast! Well...as much of a "blast" as someone can have going through a traumatic and depressing journey of brutal survival, I suppose. The game really immerses you into the direness of the situation with all of its aspects and makes you consider every action due to the limited resources: stealth wins out over shooting if you can handle the risk of it (and my god do you want to avoid seeing the horrors of shooting). Sure, it ain't perfect: the game can be a bit annoying at times with how sometimes a hunt is just a total wash with nothing found due to RNG, but it does fit the theme you're going for, so hey, I guess it works. Man, the places my mind went as I started to get into my role in this game: my god, the darkness of it all! Again, really cool game you've got here!

Stopsignal responds:

Awh man, i was really hoping i'd get a review from you, you always hit the nail on the head when talking about places to improve! I was kind of afraid you wouldn't see it, this makes me happy, hahahah

Thank you so much!! I think what i learned with this game is that, even if the mechanics make sense to you while making the game, you still need to tutorialize everything correctly, there is no other way. Stagger tips, inmerse people slowly, always have a way to show tutorials and help if people need it, if the mechanics are complex enough.

Also learned that people can endure and play a hard game even if it is incredibly punishing, if inmersed enough on its world (at least i think that? it does seem that the inmersion played a really positive factor with lots of people, and that's awesome!)

I really have to give a second try to this concept, make it again from the ground up. One day. Still, it was fun to do for now! Thanks, Futurecop! I still hope your name comes from that one mech game, FutureCopLapd, hahahah

extra: i am still seeing all reviews from everyone, even if not replying. it's just too many reviews to reply for now, but i'll try to get aorund to it! :)

[SACRIFIGHTS]

Pretty neat game! Loved that it was basically a really cool boss rush where you get stronger and stronger as you fight in order to fight a big boss at the end: definitely my cup of tea! Loved the whole atmosphere to the game and all the cool touches to it, like the way the house shifts as time progresses, how you can't eat your own heart if you try, and how the timer changes on the last day.

Combat was decent, but a bit of a mixed bag. It's certainly alright, and has a lot of neat upgrades as you go, but it felt a bit annoying to not be able to move in a separate direction than you can shoot, and the camera just feels way too zoomed in. A lot of the fights started to feel very samey as well: mostly devolving into the same strategy of circle strafing very similar bullet patterns in the same cramped cellar you have to fight all of the demons in.

Pretty odd at times: really didn't grasp the systems initially as it dumps a lot on you quickly and I didn't like how you can totally softlock yourself by running out of resources which forces you to sleep over and over with no way out. Maybe it'd be nice if you could get yourself out of a softlock by sacrificing some blood/health to summon a boss as a last resort, or at the very least, maybe instead of being forced to sleep bit-by-bit, the game notices you softlocked and just fast-forwards you to the last day?

This is a bit silly to say, but it might actually be a bit too easy? I was just playing around and intentionally softlocked myself early on by wasting resources and just slept until the final boss since I was curious how hard it was gonna be. Well, the answer was that not hard because I destroyed 'em on my first try even with my gimped character (well, he still had a few upgrades, but still)!

Anyway, I griped a lot there, but I still had a great time with this, so well done!

[PICO NIGHT PUNKIN']

I'm always a bit mixed on these demakes. I mean, on one hand, the game is awesome! It plays very well and it is an incredibly faithful remake to Friday Night Funkin'. But on the other hand...it's so faithful in its recreation that it copies everything, even the things that could've been improved upon (for example, there is still no result screen for seeing your score and sick/great/good/bad tallies, and you aren't penalized for not holding hold notes, among other things) and at the end of the day, the reason it is fun is because it is based on another game, and if I just wanted to play Friday Night Funkin', I can play Friday Night Funkin', haha! Most of the time when I think demake, I think Daikatana being changed from an FPS to a Zeldalike in order to fit on a Game Boy: to me, that's a really neat case of trying to capture the essence of the game in a genre that fits the lower platform better. This game is just straight up as good as the original and is made in the same form as the original, which is good but...oh whatever, I'm rambling.

This is obviously quite the technical achievement and very impressive at the end of the day, and I had fun playing and listening to the new remixes, so I'm rating it highly, but yeah, just wanted to ramble and share my confusion on demakes, so, uh, there ya go.

[Loihtija]

Decent puzzler! The worst thing I can say about it is that it is a very slow starter: the beginning felt incredibly bland and way too easy: just felt like it took way too long to introduce any semblance of challenge or interesting mechanics. Once the game gets going with the spells and I got into the later levels, however, I started to really enjoy the puzzles, and it did kind of work out in the end because the puzzles did work off of the little aspects and strategies it subtly taught in the boring beginning so...I guess it worked out for me (but I still definitely feel like the game could be helped by upping the pace a bit). The only other complaint I could see is that I didn't feel like there was any strong theming or visual aesthetic to the game to make it unique and stand out, but it still kinda had that classic Kultisti style, so again, I guess it works out somewhat.

[MADNESS: Off-Color]

Not too shabby, but gave me a bit of a mixed impression. Overall I think it was well put-together: presentation is very crisp, controls felt fluid, combat was decent, and so on. But in the end, I also had a lot of issues with those. For example, while the presentation was good, there were some weird issues like text being damaged by scaling issues, and the size of the weapons led to confusion on how they hitboxes worked (melee weapons actual reach was much shorter than their visual size, but on the opposite end, guns actually can hurt someone in front of you even if your barrel is past them). The controls were fluid for the most part, but I felt like picking up was really awkward (I would much prefer that right-click pick up what is below you instead of making you have to point at it with your crosshair), and I totally forgot about blocking for a long time since it felt so unimportant/against what the game stands for. Combat was decent, but it felt very basic and didn't really evolve anywhere: the bosses were cool, but the basic arena fights against mooks were just the same all the way through, with melees being very dumb and easy and gun guys being incredibly annoying since they just insta-shoot you the second they're barely on screen and they can still shoot you even with an empty gun!

I feel like I am perhaps being a little unfair: the game built up my expectations so high with the initial impression that I felt a bit let down, and that is a little bit on me. But still, I do feel that while the game is pretty solid, I felt it could be much, much more, especially if it had more novelty and variety to the combat.

Stepford responds:

I definitely agree with your feedback! We wanted to have more enemy types and we also had an entirely different melee system in the works, but we just didn't have enough time.

Thanks for playing, though! <3

[Pico Untamed Demo]

Not too shabby as a Pico's School clone: got some interesting point-and-click adventure aspects along with some neat combat scenarios, but at the moment it's definitely a bit rough around the edges.

In terms of feedback, here's what I could see:
1) Would love if there was some more interactions in the world beyond just clicking directions and inventory items. For example, it'd be great to click on BF or Tankman and get some dialogue from them, or get some hints by clicking on their locks to see what item you might need, and just flavor text in general would be nice.
2) I feel like the buttons and interactables in the world should glow/highlight when you hover over them.
3) Weird game layout where you go east and then the directions are reversed on the next screen?
4) HUD, text, and other elements aren't consistent and it's confusing. For example, you've got a sectioned health bar normally, but suddenly in the boss fight you've got a different health bar in a different place on the screen. Buttons and text change from scene to scene for some reason instead of staying the same, leading to a slightly hacky unprofessional look.
4) Boss fight and hide/ambush felt a little bit too simple and awkward at the moment: you barely have any time to read how the hide/ambush system works and the boss fight is a simple mashing race against time. Basically, not much strategy to them.
5) Transitions can be a bit wonky: people who you've killed show up for a second while you're transitioning only for them to go away once it's complete.
6) Felt it makes more sense to click on the object that needs the item instead of the item themselves (or maybe you should be able to click on either one, or maybe drag the item to the object it needs to be used on?)
7) Picking up items was so sudden and I had no idea what I got and where it was needed.
8) Boss fight dialogue is difficult to read: could maybe stand to use a text box around it or something else to increase readability.

Looking forward to seeing the full version of this game!

TrickWithATwist responds:

Thank you so much for your feedback. We will make sure to use it as a reference as we develop the final product :))