FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[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!

[Sporelunk]

Creepy as all heck, but in a good way! Definitely an interesting aesthetic twist on dig-based gameplay: despite the simple nature of the game, I did like how crazy it got in terms of obstacles and weirdness the deeper I got. I would really like to beat this, considering I got so far (200+) and I'd like to see if there is an ending, but I'm a bit conflicted: part of me did feel that it was largely up to luck with the way the layout was generated that I got that far in the first place, making me wary of making another large time commitment if I'd die from some RNG. I might be wrong, though: perhaps the game is more fair than I believe, but I just wanted to share my general impression to give you an idea of player retention. All in all, though, it was quite the notable experience!

[Laser Push]

Once again, another nice puzzler with a great concept that fleshes it out in a fun way through its very well crafted levels that teach and escalate the challenge bit-by-bit! In terms of feedback: maybe it's just my inner child speaking, but considering they are lasers, I wish there were a bit more cool, a bit more animated: would be nice if the lasers were a bit more glowy and pulsating, and maybe have some more satisfying sounds when they connect. All in all, though, solid game!

[Grapple Tongue]

Pretty fun game! Love the challenging climb with its escalation of obstacles and plenty of bonuses to go for, as well as its charming presentation and music. It is a little clunky in some respects: I kinda hate how aiming and moving are on the same keys instead of separated, it has some big and awkward difficulty spikes in my opinion such as the first introduction of the moving blocks, and there was some glitchiness to the game where sometimes I phased/teleported through walls when I was moving too fast. But luckily for me, I just found it to be a cool challenge and had a nice time trying to get good at it, so well done!

[Scott's Quest]

Hmm, seems like it could be an interesting adventure, but at the moment I was just too overly confused in trying to get through it. I'm coming at this as someone who is not familiar with Scott the Woz, so I'm trying to just be straight and evaluate it as a game first and foremost. I had several times where I glitched through the boundaries and ended up walking on top of the ocean, and I was stuck at the beginning for a long time as well because I didn't even think I could jump the gap (top-down games usually don't have jumping in my experience, shame that the only jump tutorial wasn't until way later with the drones). Even when it wasn't glitchy, a lot of the game felt a bit, I dunno, vague or sketchy, like how I wasn't sure how to dodge the drone bombs with confidence or how to fish or where to go, with a lot of the time spent getting stuck at dead ends only having to backtrack. Didn't help that the graphics were quite drab as well, in terms of repeating tiles, simple Paint graphics and not much variation. Definitely quite impressive in terms of scale and I would like to see if I could finish the game, but it might help if the game was polished a bit more and maybe had more guidance with NPCs and maps, and tutorials to teach controls, among other things.

Nomron responds:

Hi, thank you so much for your feedback! I agree that there should've been more thorough explanations on many mechanics-- it was difficult to implement everything with a proper tutorial in our timeframe. As for difficulty exploring, the fast travel system was added to make that (or at the very least, backtracking) a nonissue. Thank you again for your very articulate review :)

[Pico's Arcade]

Pretty mixed bag here, both in terms of games and feedback! I can certainly appreciate the hustle in creating so many mini games, but I'm more of a guy who prefers quality over quantity, and while some of these games were pretty nice, most of them were missing some crucial bits. For example, while I enjoyed the Madness Fruit Ninja game, I felt it was lacking that crucial slash feedback: the way the heads were chopped was not based on how you precisely slashed them, unfortunately. Having said that, I like the creativity in how many of the games have been minified, like how Friday Night Funkin became a simon says game instead of a rhythm game: I felt it worked very well. As another note, I wish the menu/HUD/interface was cleaned up a bit: the buttons and layout could be improved to look cleaner and more reactive with highlights, and there is a lot of color text and icons, like the title screen text, that gets swallowed up and becomes difficult to read because it's placed over a background of a similar color: it'd help if the text or icons were given outlines or some sort of bubble to have them stand out, mayhaps. It may not have blown my socks off, but again, I can appreciate the effort and heart for making so much for a nice cause and improving over time, so keep it up.

[Occupied]

It's embarrassing for a man of my age, but I gotta say, this game gave me the giggles...for glory! I really enjoyed myself with this game as I've always had a fondness for point n click adventures with a lot of interactables and flavor text, and this game delivered that in droves. Heck, there's a tracker and achievements just to let you know if you interacted in all the many ways you can! Absolutely loved the amount of things you could do that would affect the ending in so many ways, and loved the little touches like how pulling your pants down slows your movement speed. Pretty much a point n click take on the text parser "Dont Shit Your Pants" game and while it shares a lot of the same DNA, I still had fun and wouldn't necessarily consider it a rip-off or anything like that. Cheers for the laughs!

[RetroMMO]

Certainly quite the impressive undertaking to make an entire MMO, and while I can certainly appreciate that, it was a bit of a mixed bag for me. I only played it for a little bit, so perhaps I haven't done enough to get a good impression of it, but that was pretty much my main problem with it, that it doesn't really make a great first impression. While I enjoyed the old-school feeling of getting some gold, buying some basic equipment, and fighting some mobs outside town to level up, it didn't take too long for it to become stale. Everything is just a bit too old-school for me: gold and levels just come by so slowly and the combat is very basic, slow and with minimal abilities or exciting VFX to it. Not to mention that there doesn't seem to be a story or any sort of quest to guide or motivate me: I know one might say that the game is just about leveling up and wandering around to fight bigger monsters, but the combat just isn't fun enough nor the world interesting enough for that to be an incentive for me.

I haven't tried any group play yet, so I don't have anything to say about that, and perhaps that is my problem with not having much fun with the game. In that regard, however, maybe there could be something that could make it easier to group up? Instead of making people that get into fights vanish on the world map, maybe you could make a battle icon appear where they are, and if you click on it, you can jump in as a guest to help them, and maybe party afterwards? Again, would love to see some fresh new ideas to set this game apart from just being a straight old-school recreation in MMO form.

Again, this is definitely very ambitious and impressive despite my gripes, and I wish you the best of luck in adding to this game further and further. Perhaps I'll revisit later on!

EvanMMO responds:

Thanks for playing and providing such detailed feedback! Most of your requests are planned features.