FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Distraught Ground]

Very short game, but I felt it had enough decent elements to it that I'd like to see more added to it! Highlights for me were the animations (both sprites and background), enemy variations, neat overall aesthetic and the feedback for hits: the explosive effect and seeing the enemies get knocked back was quite satisfying. Also, I felt like the boss was pretty good for a first boss: decent pattern that is balanced quite well to be a little tricky, but not overly complex to start out, with some cool little touches like being able to reflect its shots with your whip (note that until I realized I could reflect shots, though, I was having a frustrating time fighting it in melee range, so perhaps something should teach the player they can do this in the first place). Gameplay as it stands right now is a little repetitive, but I think a lot could be added to this, and the gorgeous background with all sorts of little touches in it does help to elevate it. It takes a lot to make me play a game that dares to utilize the incredibly heinous jumping physics from Castlevania (no air control), so kudos on that, haha!

[Chez Bernie]

This one's an odd duck for me! I like these kind of 'smithing' type games where you manage shops and craft items, and this one was pretty neat. Lots of interesting complexities to the job like getting coal and ingots ready, timing your bellows only when the coals are hot, hammering the iron dead center for perfects, and so on, were quite fun to get good at managing. While it only has one item to craft at the moment and simple deliveries, it's fun to build up your renown while running around and listening to the goblin moan and groan, haha.

The crux of my mixed impression was in regards to the tutorial/instructions. On one hand, while the game does help out somewhat with environmental storytelling, like symbols next to the stations and little feedback touches like the coal spitting out fire if you time the bellows, it was really confusing to figure out how everything worked. For example, I still don't know if there is a way to keep the fire going, or if you just need to have it run out and resupply with coal. I didn't even notice that there was a very tiny 'instructions' billboard in the corner that was trying to help, and even when I did notice it, it wasn't much of a help at all as it was way too small and vague. But on the other hand...I kind of ended up liking figuring everything out on my own through experimentation and making good guesses so...it might actually be the game's strength, in a way? I dunno: that's the tricky part of game design! But it's definitely something I thought you might want to consider.

I do think, at the end of the day, while this is currently lacking, this is a pretty neat proof of concept that I had fun with, and I would love to see this expanded on: stuff like more recipes, more orders, quests, and so on. We need more of this goblin smithy!

TealRocks responds:

Big Big Thanks for this detailed feedbacks :D!

We're really conscious about the repetitiveness of the gameplay over time,. Complexify orders (add new weapons), add several kinds metals, add customers and fidelity system, complexify the inventory, add a reputation system for weapon, and others. This is a sample of ways we want to upgrade the game. We heard and took seriously and constructively your comment :).

Also we've a very cool idea that is create a "Weapon Test Zone". The purpose of this zone will be : You will be able to test weapon on "victime" (like humans ^^) in a mini game to increase its reputation. Really love this idea ^^.

So, when we started, we didn't think to continue the game but we received a lot of good feedbacks and we've many ideas to improve the game. So be sure we will continue to develop it :).

[TOYROGUE]

Once I figured out how this game works, especially in regards to the interesting design choice of having cursed items still be useful since they can be thrown at enemies to reduce their stats, it became somewhat fun. But for me initially, it was way too confusing since it lacked any way to learn of these concepts in-game. Couple that with the drab environments and repetitive gameplay both for picking up so much junk and fighting being overly simple stats bonking against stats with odd randomization and I can't imagine many people getting to the point of having fun with it.

I think the biggest oddity is the random maps. I had an interesting experience on my first playthrough. The first map was just a simple room with an exit and one warrior. I thought the warrior was my friend, a fellow campmate, but suddenly I ended up fighting him, and realizing I didn't have a weapon, I ran. Exiting the level and moving on, the next level was much larger with tons of monsters which blocked access to the exit and the only weapon. I tried to be clever and 'ran' through the monsters to get the weapon, and upon finally getting equipped, began my quest. I died shortly after though, but despite that, I thought that was actually a bit of a cool 'story' experience, very rough and survivalist with tons of improvisation, teaching me certain mechanics. However, on my next playthrough, the first map was huge with tons of easily accessible loot, upon which I was immediately geared up and clobbering enemies. It left me confused on what the intended experience was, and I think it would be better if you either constructed some maps manually to help serve as tutorial sections or guide the player in a general way, or at least reigned in the randomization so maps aren't quite so...well...random. As random as roguelikes can be, they are still generally built to tell some sort of story, but this didn't seem to have that.

Like I say, I think there are some nice ideas in here, and I did like a lot of the presentation in regards to the menus, transitions, and so on, but the gameplay execution is a little lacking for me at the moment: too confusing and random to get the intended experience.

Extar responds:

Thanks for the detailed response! Your first playthrough sounds rad, having to run the gauntlet of enemies without a weapon sounds pretty cool. :)

I think a problem of making small games, especially that people are just going to play casually for fifteen minutes or so in a browser is that the further you stray from conventions (and it feels like RPGs are made up almost entirely of conventions at this point) the more you're going to either have to explain things to the player or drip-feed things into them, or you're just going to throw them in at the deep end and leave it up to them. My general experience of rogue-likes like Nethack, Zangband and such was that they tended to go more for the 'in at the deep end' approach. I was hesitant to even put the game onto Newgrounds because of the fact 'steep learning curve' and 'casual fifteen minute games' are a difficult match. :)

Like you suggested, it would be best to put a tutorial into the game, and I did think about making some constructed maps, however there really wasn't much in the way of token space or time once I'd got the 'core' parts of the game actually working. Pico-8 limits projects to a certain size, so all the code has to come in under a token limit for it to run. The last time I made a proper tutorial for a game it was easily 10-15% of the total code, and as it stands now the game is basically using 100% of the token space, so I'd be looking at making the code a heck of a lot more efficient, or just cutting bits out.

I'm glad you appreciated the menus and transitions, because it felt like that's all I ever worked on during the project. The inventory alone took absolutely ages! :)

Thanks again for the detailed review!

[SUPER IMPOSTOR BROS.]

Hmm, this one is a bit tough for me. On one hand, I really like the presentation of the game. It seems to ooze charm from every orifice: I love the artwork for the cutscenes, level transitions, sprites, and so on. Additionally, the music is catchy, and I love seeing these type of experiments where a game's theme is recreated in a separate genre, you know, like a demake, and I do feel like this was a neat attempt that captured a lot of the essence in a funny way.

Basically, I like practically everything about this...except the actual gameplay. I might be being a bit unfair as maybe these were intentional design choices to emulate GB aesthetics, but nevertheless, it just felt a bit lacking to me in a lot of departments. The movement and controls in the game felt really off and unresponsive to me. The game seemed to lack feedback, both in terms of visual and sound, for simple things like picking up items and attacking. The general gameplay was just a basic platformer without anything really special granted to it by the Among Us theme. The physics too were very wonky with me having to end my game after I softlocked myself by glitching through a platform and getting stuck without any way to get out. And so on.

For the most part, I still did have a good time, and like I say, I do understand if some of my nitpicks were just due to the GB limitations, but still, I felt it should be expressed as for me, it ended up being a bit of a 'style over substance' situation.

[Rainy Day]

Pretty interesting game! The ascii aesthetic is fun to look at, especially the way the character actually moves, well, character by character instead of pixel by pixel. The rain was very impressive as well, especially since it looks like it technically treats every raindrop as a individual projectile that can kill you, instead of just treating the general rain area as a zone of death. Game was pretty simple at first, but I enjoyed the escalation of difficulty with level design, learning techniques like jumping and then gliding, and the amusing monologue that the character had throughout helped to push me forward.

As cool as the ascii aesthetic is though, it kinda works against the game in some respects though. In particular, the movement is a bit janky to handle, especially against the later stage challenges. It felt like the game really escalated the difficulty once you reach the big fall, and it wasn't always fun difficulty. The big fall, in particular, was way too tight to reliably get through with the weird stuttery ascii movement. This, as well as many other way too tight and overly pixel-perfect (or should I say character-specific?) jumps made the game a bit too frustrating to navigate at times.

Still, in the end I had a nice time despite the jank as I do like a challenge and the game was charming enough to keep me hooked, so well done with this unique concept execution!

[Tuggowar]

I'm not much for card/deck games most of the time, but this one actually got me hooked a bit! I think the reason behind that is how well-designed the UI is: while there is a tutorial to guide you through the process, it's more that the UI has so many little touches in it to help you learn everything. For example, I love how you can hover over almost everything, even things that are not cards, to get a info pop-up. Also, I like how certain elements are animated, such as when you use a medic to support a card, you see the wrench icon get dragged over, increase the attack, and then disappear, which visually shows you how the process works. My complaints are mostly minor: for one, I missed some of the tutorial information since the text and some of the guided selections didn't pop as much as they should (maybe increase their text size or give it a background, and increase the pulsing glow of selections) and two, the gameplay could use a little bit of extra excitement, you know, little special effects and animations for attacks, maybe some cool banner transitions for phase changes, etc. For the most part, though, very solid job!

[Roborazzi]

Interesting game! Certainly a bit on the nose with its concept, haha, but I nevertheless found it very clever and fun. Certain elements to the game, such as the character always moving in one direction, seemed odd at first, but I realized that it was part of the way the game adds challenge in trying to keep yourself out of the shot. Loved the presentation as well, with the pictures popping up on the side along with chatter, and negative chatter popping up if you blow it.

While I did have an alright time, the game did start to get a bit monotonous for me. All of the rooms I went to seemed to be the same thing without any means of escalation to them. Also, I couldn't work up the nerve to play again after dying trying to find the exit door on room 3: having to restart all over again from that just felt too punishing, especially considering I felt confused why your batteries still drain even when finding the exit: I was done, after all!

That being said, there was something else that stuck out for me. It's perhaps my fault for getting a false impression of it, but I thought the gameplay didn't live up to the concept as much as I thought it would. It's good as a fast-paced scavenger hunt and all that, but I felt like the concept that the intro was trying to build up to would be some sort of Hitman-esque game where you setup accidents to put people at their worst and then take pictures of them, or perhaps a stalking game where you try and trail people to snap a picture at just the right time when they're doing something bad. You know, I wanted it to get all Nightcrawler (the movie, not the X-men) on me. But again, perhaps I'm being too harsh on a jam game and unfair for judging it on what it wasn't: for what it was, I still thought it was quite neat.

['Brain-Toasting Dungeon']

What a charming little game! The whole "choose-your-own-adventure" style really takes me back to the past, so it's very apt for a flash jam, and this one certainly nails it with a lovely amount of funny scenarios all brought to life with goofy animations. The game doesn't necessarily have much depth to it and it's over so quickly, but it was fun while it lasted and I enjoyed every second of it, including going back to see all the alternative choices. My initial playthrough went through with practically no deaths: I think I caught on to the strategy too quickly of choosing the seemingly stupid choices, haha. Cheers for this!

Butzbo responds:

Wow, great to hear it was a throwback! and it's also fun that you figured the logic of following the weirder choices ;)
The good response makes me think of making a more elaborated story with something like this, we'll see. Thanks for the review!

[Vending Machine Action 2.0]

Whoa, what an incredible game! I love the intensity that this game brings: so many explosions, crazy gunfire, leagues of enemies to blast through, and the bosses, oh man, the bosses are absolute dynamite! When I saw the first boss running with those iconic gunstar-esque limbs, I knew I was in for a good time, and it just kept escalating from there with all sorts of cool variations in level design like battling through a level while being lasered at, or running down a collapsing bridge. Weapon-switching mechanic was pretty neat as well: I thought it felt really gimmicky at first, but I did feel it lead to some cool dynamic fights where you need to be ready to improvise at all times.

It does have some minor issues: for some reason the game's volume is incredibly muted, and even then, I think there is a distinct lack of sound effects in the gameplay, particularly for the enemy death explosions. Sometimes the readability of the game suffers from so much shaking and explosions that you can get hit from a bullet you didn't see. One of the stages just had me stuck at the beginning with no way to proceed until I selected to just skip: bit of an oddity. Finally, the controls can be a bit awkward to get used to, with weird things like having to stop shooting just to pick stuff up, even if you're standing right on top of the pickup when shooting.

Still, this game was such a trip! I'd recommend dressing up the title/intro a bit more as right now it is a bit drab: people need to see a hint at how epic the game can be!

EDIT: AHHH THAT ENDING SEQUENCE AHHH! I never thought a vending machine would make me feel so many emotions

toaster101 responds:

Thank you so much for the feedback :) i'm glad you liked it

[Noir: Deinitialize]

Someone really loves Nier Automata, haha! Definitely a pretty neat game that certainly has a great presentation to it through graphics and sound, though it's largely just ripped from Nier, so I'm only giving you half-credit for that aspect, haha.

But speaking of that, that's kind of the good and bad part of this game for me. On one hand, it's quite fun to run around, blasting and slicing enemies and bullets: feedback is nice, and there is some decent variation to levels in terms of enemies and setup.

But on the other hand, it does have a lot of the bad parts of the hacking minigame from Nier: because so many of the bullets can be destroyed by your attacks just like Nier, except now you have a sword as well as bullets, there's barely any challenge at all. Huge swathes of levels can be beat by just running straight at enemies and mashing to nullify their bullets: it's only until the end when blue bullets and such start showing up that you need to somewhat use your brain a bit.

Heck, even when blue bullets show up, your character has so much health you can still just tank and mash your way through levels. Due to this, the game has a lot of repetition to it that really dulls the experience for me.

Basically, it's decent, but I was really hoping for not just a recreation, but something that takes the idea from Nier and expands on it in a cool new direction. Still, for what it is, I had some good fun.

Yword responds:

Thank you very much for playing! And thank you so much for your great feedback too!