FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Going Down in Fishstory]

Cute little adventure! Made it all the way to the bottom and enjoyed my time making it through the challenging obstacles. The story was a real emotional rollercoaster with all sorts of novel events that kept me glued (dunno if I needed that ass-pull happy ending as I quite liked the grimness, but eh, I can understand haha). There were some minor issues, for example I definitely got a little bit annoyed at the pacing: there were a ton of constant stops and starts to hear the fish talk to each other and I much preferred the few times when it didn't freeze me in place to force me to listen. I also feel like some of the obstacles that came up didn't quite live up to their potential: there was this one cool arena with a thick wall to break through and a chaser which I thought would force me to loop around and take the wall out bit-by-bit, but actually I just kinda brute force bulldozed through it in one go. Overall though, it was a great short and sweet adventure!

[Team Commander]

Pretty fun strategy game! It definitely doesn't make the greatest impression with its very plain graphics and presentation (default system font, asset pack sprites, bland game board, lack of SFX/VFX for actions, etc.) but there is a lot of strategic depth in the game and I found myself getting quite addicted to building up the ideal army and their equipment to make it through these puzzling fights. I especially loved how you could hover over objects for info, especially for both enemy units and their equipment so you could get all the info you need on how they operate and what to look out for. Having said that though, there was still a lot of information I felt like I was lacking and wish I could've found, like what the heck the speed stat does (the other stats seemed self-explanatory). And I definitely would love if the presentation was polished up a bit more, not just to make things look pretty, but for feedback: when I started, it was very difficult for me to parse what was happening in fights since there were no sounds or visuals like slashes or +/- HP and so on to help see what was happening: it all just goes by so fast and very plainly. Graphics aren't everything, but I definitely feel it would help readability to elevate this to live up to its potential!

[>> FWD]

Some fast-paced fun here! I liked the smooth and exciting feeling of speed as I raced through the tracks. Was some confusion on how the whole lock-on rocket mechanic worked at first, but I liked the added combat and strategy it brought to the table. While I had a bunch of fun, there were some frustrating aspects through. For me, this game kind of ran into the old Sonic the Hedgehog problem where you end up going so fast and build up so much unstoppable momentum that you can't really dodge projectiles or drive efficiently. A lot of the time, it felt like I would get through levels on pure luck rather than skill because I just move way too fast and ram into bullets (but maybe I was just impatient and dumb and I got into the flow more than I thought, since I did beat it after all). Definitely a blast overall, and I'd love to see more levels to something like this as I was really bummed out that the line at the end didn't expand to a whole new map!

[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.