FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[TREES' ADVENTURE - Demo]

Pretty neat demo, but a little rough on the edges (though of course, being a demo, that is to be expected). I think it definitely has a pretty good core to it for now: speeding around and bouncing off of walls and springs felt great when you get your momentum going. Definitely seems to be going for Sonic-esque gameplay and I'd say it's getting close.

That said, I did feel like the demo was lacking some polish (I know, duh, but still). For one, the game seems to lack any amount of coyote time which made it feel bad whenever I jumped from the edge of a platform and it used my double jump instead of making it count as my first jump. In a similar fashion, walljumping felt very awkward in that if you try to press a direction and jump instead of just jumping (which is very typical), unless you do it perfectly in sync you'll usually just fall off the wall and double-jump instead of actually walljumping: I think there should be a bit more stickiness to walljumping, a bit of a half-second buffer where you can hit a direction without immediately becoming unstuck from the wall. Moving beyond controls, with the power-ups and springboards and such having no sound-effects or sparkles or what-have-you and instead just disappearing instantly made the worlds feel very hollow and unexciting, which also combined with a general lack of direction in terms of their being too many routes and no story to work off of. Finally, and this is just my opinion, but the climbing ability felt a little weird and misplaced with the way it kills your momentum and allows you to go up anywhere: almost felt like cheating when I remembered to use it. Again, it might be that I'm being silly in pointing those things out because they are obvious and going to be addressed in the actual release, but I want to play it safe.

Also, I tried to play this game with a playstation controller and it didn't work unfortunately: just something to note for you to look into if you can!

UnlimitedTrees responds:

thank u. ive been gettin a lot that the game is very unpolished atm and yea, it is what it is. the game's pretty early in development and this demo really is just a little slice of what i have planned, so while the base ideas r there everything is lacking polish which i didnt have the time for with this demo. im glad u and other peopl r able to enjoy this demo, i hope i can rlly make the final game something special so every bit of criticism helps.

for the playstation controller, i dont own one so im unable to test it but i may look into that later down the line. ive mainly tested with an xbox one controller and keyboard, hopefully some day i can make input stuff better and cooler.

[Hell Fight]

Pretty cool game! While the combat is rather basic in terms of only having a single three hit combo, there was some interesting strategy to be had with stamina management, choosing between jumping or dashing to avoid hits, and managing the attack patterns from the many different enemy types and bosses that led to some great fights. Didn't expect to see some interesting additions like stamina only recovering if you are far away enough from enemies, and the various cool abilities you can acquire like dash attacking.

That said, the game did feel a bit clunky. The feedback from hitting enemies didn't feel that satisfying and impactful, and their health bars were difficult to parse to see how much damage you're dealing. Enemies were a bit irritating on how inconsistent stunning/staggering them with hits was, and a lot of times the hitboxes and dash invincibility felt awkward and led to hits that I feel shouldn't have happened. Also I didn't like how if you try to dash backwards mid-combo, you end up dashing forward. And finally, it's a minor thing, but I don't know why the game uses both mouse and keyboard: you'd think everything would be keyboard-only and it is for the most part, but then for some reason a few menus are only operable with the mouse, and the unnecessary mouse pointer says around even when it's not in use.

Basically, while I think the game has a pretty good core, I do feel like it is lacking a bit of polish. But anyway, I still had a great time and I'm looking forward to try and get deeper into this game!

[Happy Birthday, Ninjamuffin99]

It's a gag game, so it's mostly about the joke appeal, but I was surprised to see that it's pretty fun and addicting! The mechanics are simple but quite intuitive and deep when combined with the various candle assortments. I kind of wish the game was a bit deeper and tightly designed: for example, I'd love if there was some sort of time pressure where you need to keep blowing otherwise the candles will fully regen their flame, not allowing you to be cowardly. But maybe I shouldn't wish for that because as it is now, bloody hell does it get hard: I'll never figure out how old ninjamuffin is because I can barely get past 11 or so! Given the kind of slapdash nature of this game, I can't have 100% confidence if it's me or if it's the game not being robust enough to avoid generating an unwinnable scenario, but I'll give it the benefit of the doubt: I guess ninjamuffin will just need to accept that he's 11 years old. By the way, love the secret bonus of hitting both A/D at the same time: I felt clever for thinking to try that to use that as a means to win, and then even cleverer for finding that easter egg, haha. Nice work on creating both a fun message and a fun lil' game!

[Gravitate]

It's a rather simple game without much to it, but I gotta admit, I found myself getting somewhat addicted to it! There's just something satisfyingly zen or trance-like about the game: it felt really good to get better at going with the flow, feeling out where the center of gravity was, and then setting up gravity slingshots to get to the end with as minimal input adjustments as possible. I think you definitely chose the right words to serve as a prompt to direct the player: don't fight gravity, harness it. Having said that, the game is definitely a little wonky at times, what with sometimes having the next level be won immediately by having the portal spawn right on top of you and such, and the game felt a bit lacking in terms of special effects like audio, but it didn't bother me too much. Bit of a bummer that, for a score game, it didn't get integrates with Newgrounds high score tables: I wanted to get good and flaunt my score for this (though I'm sure people got higher than 45, haha)!

DMG-84 responds:

Thanks for playing, I really enjoyed watching you play it on your stream and I really appreciate the feedback, it was fun watching you ‘get’ it. Keep up the great work!

[Glitcheon]

Very interesting and fun puzzler! The goofy story, premise, and aesthetic were very cool, but the part I loved the most was how interesting the powers/abilities were and how the puzzles and platforming were built around them. They just felt very different from what you get usually in these types of games: instead of a double-jump, you get this wild temporary platform creation ability, and instead of a dash, you get this blast ability which can also serve as a psuedo-dash if you aim it backwards and ride the recoil from it. Combine those abilities together and then throw in some interesting obstacles like those ad windows that you can only stay on temporary, and this ended up being so much fun! Bit of a bummer that it's not complete and it has a bit of an anticlimactic ending, but hey, I'm happy to hear that it is in development since I think it has a lot of promise going for it, and I can't wait to see how it is improved upon! I didn't encounter many issues in the game as it felt pretty smooth for the most part: I think the only confusing part for me was the tutorial in teaching dash jumps as it makes it look like all you need to do is dash and jump to make it all the way across, instead of dash jump, create a platform midway, and then dash jump off of it (but maybe the tutorial is vague so you feel smart figuring that part out? up to you!)

[Dad 'n me 3D]

Pretty goofy and fun brawler! I definitely love a lot of the actions you can take: throwing around propane tanks for big explosions, picking up enemies and going to town on them, comboing the heck out of them while blood flies and big meaty thuds resound, it's great stuff! I also appreciated the enemy design on display, as there were more than just dummies to fight, but also big heavy dudes with slow attacks, jumping ninjas, helmet chargers and so on. Was surprised to see how big the map was as well: I thought the street with cars was actually a barrier, but lo and behold you can leave the park and go beyond. Definitely made for a fun time of just stomping about with reckless abandon.

There were some frustrating aspects to the gameplay however. In particular, I felt like the enemies were very spongy and it was very difficult to determine when they were dead and how much damage I was dealing: I could pick up an enemy and whale on them for so long and they just wouldn't pop (and speaking of that, it was very annoying that there was no way to drop/throw an enemy you've grabbed, leaving you stuck like that). And while I liked the variety of enemies, I only felt like some of them were fun to fight: for example, I appreciated the big-telegraph/windup that the big guys had, but I hated how a lot of the others had no such telegraph at all. Also, as much fun was it was to whale on enemies, it felt a bit directionless and I had no idea if there was a destination or objective to work towards: there was a timer, but I dunno what it was timing. Camera was also a bit wonky and could use some smoothing or more control to it.

I definitely think this has a solid core to it: with maybe a bit more direction/story, ironing out of some of the control issues, polishing up the enemies and balancing health/damage levels, this could become a big beat-em-up hit!

[RUBRIS]

Oh man, this game is as tricky to review as the puzzle gameplay is, haha!

It definitely looks really cool and professionally made from a graphical standpoint, and the gameplay concept is quite interesting and really mind-bending to wrap my head around and get good at. But man, as much as I tried to get used to it, I just ended up getting so damn frustrated at how backwards the design felt! Every second I was playing this, it counteracted every natural instinct I had: every brain cell was crying out to be able to be able to move/rotate the incoming blocks in different ways or be able to fine-adjust the camera to an inbetween angle so I could see more of the cube I'm working with instead of having my visuals blocked by the very pieces I've already placed.

I guess it's partly my fault for coming in expecting it to be like 3D Tetris from Virtual Boy or other puzzlers which are more focused on the controlling the pieces instead of the receptacle and not accepting the game's rules for what it is, but man, it just felt like it was impossible to get good at this, and not just because of my past influencing me (for example, the not being able to see more of the cube because of it being blocked off by placed pieces and the camera only offering straight-on angles with no x-ray vision was a big issue). To me, I can't really decide if this is some sort of avant-garde puzzler that is breaking conventions and really challenging in a brand-new way, or if it's just an experiment that sounded good on paper but just isn't fun or fleshed out enough on execution.

sarnyoger responds:

humanity just wasn't ready

[Skele Magic]

Quite the nice puzzler! I felt like the mechanic was rather simple but fun to utilize, just like how I liked the simple yet fun way the skeleton squished and stretched as I jumped around. Difficulty curve was a little awkward at times where I felt it dipped down to too easy in the later levels after making you go through some head-scratchers in the middle, but overall it felt quite pleasant to play. One thing to note is the fact that the puzzle does not reset upon death is both a blessing and a curse: I found it nice when I made a stupid mistake that I could fix and I didn't have to do everything over again, but when I did make a stupid mistake that I couldn't undo and there wasn't a way to reset from that, well, that was a bit of an annoyance. Definitely not enough of an annoyance to make me stop, however, since I found the game quite addictive to get through: well done.

[ITAZURA MADNESS]

Well, I finally got around to seeing what the fuss was all about, and it seems well-deserved as I really liked this game! In particular I found the game oozing with charm: every new screen (even the death screen) was a delight to witness as they all were so lively, animated, stylish and unique from one another: absolutely a feast for the eyes! Gameplay was fun as well, combat being reminiscent of punch-out with a nice mix of simple mashy fisticuffs alongside some subtle strategy of dodging, feints and comboing. I liked how there were a lot of interesting weapons to get, all with their own sound effects that they bring to the table. All that with a weird story, wacky characters and some groovy bosses make for quite the game!

However, it ain't all sunshine and rainbows. As much as I liked how simple and mashy the combat was, I found a large part of it very repetitive and too overly simple: I imagine it ups the ante as you get farther with more feinting enemies and such, but maybe it should do that faster to keep the pace up. And as much as I liked getting new weapons and seeing/hearing their new effects, they never really made me feel more powerful and I could never tell if they were making a difference: sure, the store SAID they were powerful with bigger numbers, but I never got any satisfying feedback from that in combat. I'd love if maybe the enemies would get more bloody or dented as you hit them as a sign for how low in health they're getting, or maybe damage numbers would appear or make bigger damage sparks/screen shakes/blood splats would happen with the more damage you're doing. Speaking of damage numbers popping up, the game puts a lot of emphasis on the combo meter, but does the combo meter do anything? It might've been in the tutorial but I might've killed the guy before I could read it maybe, and I don't know how to get back to the tutorial, but again, it didn't feel to make a difference. And while we're on damage feedback, I'd love if there was more ways to tell when you as a player are getting damaged, like a red screen flash, since whenever I died it felt like I didn't realize how it happened.

All that does make it a bit rough around the edges for me and miss the mark slightly, but I still had a pleasant time with this and look forward to making it farther up the tower: well done overall and I look forward to future works!