FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Valkyrie: Sacred Feathers S]

Interesting game! A little bit confusing because I initially had no idea I could shoot back and thought the game was just about survival and dodging for as long as you could (maybe the first playthrough should introduce controls more, or have a crosshair where the mouse pointer is) but I liked that the game got right to the action quickly, and once I got into it I found that it had a decent variety of enemies, power-ups and strategy to it. Some good ol' arcade action!

That being said, its greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. To me, it's very impressive that the game was made in RPG Maker, but if we disregard that context, we're just left with a merely decent twin-stick shooter that is brought down by the various chains that RPG Maker has. This feels like something that would be made for a school project: decent for a first start, but missing various bells and whistles to make it really stand out on its own.

If, for example, this was not a game on its own, but a game within a game, like a replacement to the general combat for a big RPG or adventure game, it could be rather cool, and from what the description says that might be the case, so looking forward to that in that regard!

ByEthanFox responds:

Thanks! Yep, as you read, it started life as R&D for a minigame to feature in a chapter of Nina Aquila: Legal Eagle, and I ended up releasing this version as it just ended up more fun than I expected, and I figured people might enjoy it. It also gave me a testbed to test some features (the version on NG is a later revision; the itch version went through a few iterations).

Thanks for playing!

[Valkyrie Command]

Wow, solid boss rush game! Love how it cuts straight to the chase and gives you what you want, and that's super cool boss fights: no instructions needed as the subtle intuitive touches like flashing the weakpoints as the start guide you the whole way. Gave me real Contra vibes what with the fast pace, high-energy music, explosive action and huge bosses with tons of interesting patterns that increase in difficulty as you go. I don't really have many complaints about the game as I found it to be pretty polished: maybe the only thing I'd like is a louder hit feedback for confirmation, as there were times where I couldn't have my eyes on the boss to confirm when I was hitting it due to needing to focus my eyes on bullets near me, and the hit sounds were too soft to stand out as confirmation that I was aiming right during all that. Oh, maybe one more complaint was that it was too short and I wanted more, but heck, I didn't even mind how short it was because it was such a blast: well done!

[Medieval Cop-S2-E3]

Not quite my cup of tea as I find the characters to be a bit too quippy/fourth-wall-breaking and altogether similarly edgy, but I can appreciate the effort in constructing a huge story like this. For as much as some of the jokes didn't land with me, there were plenty of cool and funny moments where I did laugh at the cleverness, such as the intro with the water/sword choice, so I suppose it all balances out. I do wish there was a bit more of a focus on interactive moments where you're in control as a player instead of just being ferried from one wall of text to the next as I do enjoy the detective gameplay when it gets a chance to do so (and being in control more gives more opportunities to save and take a break).

[CryptoCoaster]

Very amusing and rather deep game once you get into it past the initial bumpy entrance (pun intended): really fun and addictive stuff, thankfully with none of the risk of actually doing it for real, thank god!

I was a little bit annoyed initially where I'd buy but then get stuck with no way to sell positive for a huge amount of time. I was also annoyed about the penalty for hitting buy/sell when midair as it felt unintuitive, and I wished I could break/speed-up the cart to take advantage of highs/lows I'd sail over. However, once I accepted those annoyances as intentional design, I learned to embrace my inner day-trader and do more rapid-fire buys and sells on short sets or even single hills and the whole game opened up: really cool and fun to experience the evolution of strategy and the risk-reward in trying to hit that sell at the peak but not when you're mid-air!

I think the game has been pretty cleverly designed with a lot of risk-reward and time-pressure to both lead the player towards that rapid-fire day-trader strategy after seeing how the classic sit and wait strategy doesn't work, and to show the player just how crazy and stupid all this crypto/stock/day-trading shenanigans can be and how easily you can fail (I wouldn't blame you if the game was subtly designed to push that message by always trying to screw you over, making it trend downwards right when you buy and trend upwards right when you sell, because it sure felt like it haha). Smart and funny stuff!

0x6a61686e responds:

I considered dropping the price on buy, tried it, unfortunately had to scrap the idea. No deep thought behind it tho, I just thought it'd be funny.

[Block Collide]

Wow, not bad at all! It's rather simple in concept and lacking in pizazz, but I found the game to be really fun and addictive to go through the levels and figure out the ideal sequence, thanks to the well-paced difficulty increases of each level. Something about planning everything out at the start and making the boxes go was just very zen. There were a few wonky aspects to the game, such as how the diamond checkpoints could be put over intersecting paths, creating confusion on which path it applies to, and some collisions happening where the squares barely even collide with each other (honestly, just place the objects so its more obvious there will be a collision like you do 90% of the time in the levels), but nothing too serious.

[Punch It Deluxe DEMO]

I certainly like the idea behind a destressing game where you can de-stress by whaling on someone, and I am quite impressed at the technical achievement of getting this to work in RPGMaker, but I still feel like this game is quite lacking from its intended goals.

While the game has had some minor improvements from its previous version, such as the introduction of new damage states for the character as they get beat up, the gameplay and gamefeel still remains overly simple and repetitive to me (and even the damage states, as new as they are, are incredibly sparse and not all that exciting).

The two game modes kind of mess up the goal in their own way. In the normal mode, the game has you beat up the guy in a rapid-fire matching game until you mess up: fun in concept, but the game mode has the guy immediately get his revenge by pulling a gun when you mess up, defeating the whole point of destressing since you will lose in the end eventually. Meanwhile in the freeplay mode, while you never need to fear losing, the game quickly gets repetitive as the actions you can take are incredibly limited and there is no fun game logic to spice things up as in the regular mode.

Ideally, I think that the game requires at least two major things to achieve its goal as a stress reliever:

One would be a more interesting and tactile way to attack the guy that gives more pleasurable feedback. For me, I'd like the game to be like the intro to Mario 64 where you can tweak, pull and slap Mario's face around, but in very intricate and freeform ways. You could make it so you swish the mouse around to simulate slapping the guys face with a virtual hand, for example, and have the guy reel back and get smushed and warped depending on the strength/direction of the mouse movement. This would make the game infinitely more replayable as it would increase the amount of actions you can take rather than the static three.

Next would be allowing the user to customize the guy you're attacking. I have no emotional attachment to this Howie Mandell looking guy: what I'd like to do is customize the guy to look like someone I know, so I could get pleasurable revenge in attacking them.

Unfortunately, I do feel like all the things that might make this game good might not be possible given that this was awkwardly made in RPGMaker, so I understand that my feedback will most likely be for naught.

WeirdRikert responds:

Thank you for the in-depth analysis. This game was a lot of first for me, and moving forward I have more information to apply to future games.
There is certainly more that could be added to this game, and I hope to do a proper sequel that impliments all the mechanics at some point.

[T.V. Boy]

Bit rough around the edges at the moment, but I suppose that's to be expected for a demo.

Certainly, you've got all the key pieces for building a good shooter: you've got the basic game logic of a wave structure with shop inbetween, you've got a basic variety of enemies, you've got basic collisions and destructable objects, basic amount of bullets/guns, and so on. It's all there, and that's certainly impressive in its own right, but it's just very basic and unexciting at the moment, as well as being a little clunky.

It's difficult for me to tell what you already know is lacking, but there was a general lack of feedback and sounds in the game, making it overly boring and muted when shooting enemies or exploding barrels and such. Hitboxes and collisions were occasionally very weird: a lot of the time my bullets would just collide against something in the environment that I felt they shouldn't or something I feel like they shouldn't collide against at all, like the fragments of debris left from a crate. Enemies bullets would appear awkwardly as well, farther from the enemies that I would expect them to. It also felt really unprofessional in how the game doesn't pause when a level is complete and you're in shop: every click has you shoot the characters gun. And so on.

Additionally, I could forgive the game all of its bugs and jank if it had a fun or unique concept to showcase, like some sort of cool movement, neat abilities, or all-new game mode or something, but there isn't anything like that from what I could tell.

At its current state, I'd say it's more like an alpha instead of a demo since it's pretty much just a proof-of-basic-game-engine instead of proof-of-fun-game-concept, but hey, you've got all the building blocks you need to potentially build a great game out of this!

[Unstable Towers]

I understand the concept and I want to like this game, but it just felt really half-baked and frustrating to me. First off, the game just looks and feels overly bland with barely any interesting graphics or sound to enhance the gameplay. The stacking also felt really janky and totally up to luck on whether I'd get good blocks: even if I lined up a block perfectly to fit I found it would always cause a bit collision/quake that messes everything up, and with no way to rotate or shift blocks in a Tetris style it just felt unnatural and impossible to work with. Might be funner if you could continue even if a block falls over instead of being forced to restart from scratch, I dunno. Didn't take long for me to just quit, which is a shame since I think this could be a fun game with some more thought and polish into it.

[1000 Nerds]

Not the greatest game, obviously, as it is just rather basic with no difficulty or challenge to it and starts off painfully slow, but I appreciate the sentiment and I had to admit it was rather addictive to see all the different people pop-up and give 'em the ol' COD hit marker of death. I found it a little confusing that your character has HP, but doesn't take damage (but I gotta admit that I too would want to avoid dying and having to start all over, haha, and I do see the note about it now as well). Anyway, keep on truckin', Plufmot! Oh, and cheers for letting me know about Newgrounds Radio!

[Estresamente]

Very cute game! I rather like the Inside Out-esque concept of managing the body's stress as a worker/janitor, and it was cool seeing all the funny ways the body is represented, like opening up the eyes one at a time to light everything up, shutting off the projector to stop the dreams, or helping a bunch of bugs on the bellows jump in unison to breathe properly. I was definitely quite intrigued to see where everything was going to go, especially by glimpsing all of the various shortcuts and objects that'd require future abilities, but I do think it lost me in the end unfortunately.

I think the biggest issue for me is that the game feels a bit too overly large, with vast swathes of it dedicated to fairly basic and repetitive platforming. Felt it could definitely do with reducing the size of the world and distance between interesting objectives to keep the pace up, or maybe introducing more fun, smooth ways of traversal. I mean jeez, it was only act 2 and the game sends you down a giant pit that you have to climb all the way up! Something so drastic like that felt like something that should be saved for near the end of the game as a finale: with it being so early in the game and me not being immersed yet, I just lost all motivation when I saw how much I needed to climb back up and how much of that would just be rather repetitive.