FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Wika Wicked's Egg]

Certainly wins a lot of points for me in terms of presentation: definitely made a great first impression with the visuals (although I'll admit that might be due to nostalgia and such, haha). And while the game does start off a bit hard by frontloading with a lot of obstacles and not much direction on how to play, I found myself getting into it and enjoying myself.

Having said that, though, I felt like gameplay was a bit of a mixed bag. On one hand, I thought the game was fun and challenging, despite the simplicity of the mechanics. Flying around, dodging obstacles, conserving stamina, finding a good route, and so on made for a fun mix that kept me engaged. However, I felt it was a bit clunky in some respects. For example, I wasn't quite sure where or what I was supposed to be doing as I didn't know what items to collect and whether they mattered, and there were a lot of paths to take as well pointing in all sorts of directions and I didn't know if there were for story progression or just bonus challenges or whatever. Also, the hitboxes for enemies seemed way too large and the egg seemed too easy to crack from falling the slightest bit, leading to a lot of frustration.

I definitely feel like I still had a positive experience despite the rough bits and I plan on coming back to this to complete it, so well done!

As a side note: I had some real issues with using a controller for this, as for some reason, despite the up key being the key to fly up on keyboard, my controller expected me to press down to fly up. Wonder if it's because I'm using a ps4 controller instead of the more standard xbox controller? Weird.

[Cookin' Daddy]

This was a real odd duck for me. Initial impressions of the game were very strong: the presentation, UI, music and so on gave off a very professional, charming and polished feel, especially the very fancy title screen that zoomed around the 3d environment for every option you selected. It looked like so much effort was put into everything that made me really excited to see what the gameplay was like!

And then I played the game and I was like...was that it? I mean, it isn't bad or anything, the game is still alright, good even, and I liked the charming voice lines that came up and such, but it definitely was a bit underwhelming and short-lived. I was expecting some sort of level-based game like Cook Serve Delicious or Cooking Mama or something with a bunch of content and mechanics, but what I got was just a single score attack level for a very basic rhythm(?) game.

And to be fair, I would've been fine with that single level, except it doesn't have anything really exciting or compelling about it: where are the streak counters, the point multipliers, the satisfying sounds and explosions that increase in intensity as you rack up a big combo? What is the significance of the different foods that pop-up, as well as the different tiles? Where's the story or the multiple victory screens displaying the food we've cooked for our family, where it looks better based on how high our score was? What happens when I mess up: is there a combo point multiplier that I lose or is it just a time delay until I can continue? I got so confused at times where I felt like I did so much better than before, only to get a way worse score: perhaps this game does have some complex score mechanics, but it didn't do anything to communicate those.

Pardon the pun, but at the moment this felt a bit underbaked, or like a good-looking apple that's hollow inside: it felt like all the effort went into making everything surrounding the game look good, but nothing was done except the bare minimum to the game itself. I would love to see an updated version of this though since it seems liked you've got a good team going and this has a lot of potential that I'd hate to see go to waste!

ShycoticBunni responds:

Thank you for your very in depth comment! You brought up some very solid points here, and I vibe the most with your comments about the differing food tiles and the addition of extra juiciness via tile streaks and point multipliers! I'm gonna snap this comment up and present it with the team and see how they feel about this as well. :)
I'm glad you enjoyed Cooking Daddy nonetheless and thank you for your feedback, dude!

[You are red. You are blue.]

Call me a philistine or a monkey or whatever, but for the most part, this game didn't hit with me. Just felt like some pretentious wankery. It was a bummer, because I felt like the minimalist mechanics were pretty cool, especially with two (maybe three, I forget) later levels where you really gotta puzzle some stuff out by moving the camera and hitting all sorts of hidden panels. But those levels were few and far between the vast number of blah levels where you just crumble some structures and let the chips fall where they may to fill out some survey inbetween a bunch of inspirational quotes taken from instagram. I'm sorry I'm being so rude, it really isn't that bad or anything: I feel like the only reason I'm negative was because it felt like there were some really cool potential here that I really wanted to see expanded upon, but it never got off the ground and was just disguised with all the other fluff to puff it up and make a shallow game seem more impressive than it was. I am definitely a monkey who prefers his shoot-shoot bang-bang games though, so perhaps I'm just not the target audience.

[Piconjo Sp33ch]

Not really so much a game, but it is a funny little translator application that's good for a few laughs. One thing I noticed is that it was a bit inconsistent with its translations at times. While it was very impressive with converting phrases like 'portal' into 'pr0tal' and 'to' into '2' as you type it, I wasn't quite sure how it should handle 'too' and 'tomorrow' and such: in the case of 'too' it greedily converts it to '2' as well, and 'tomorrow' is translated as 't0m0rr0w' but I'm not sure if that should be different ('2m0rr0w'?) Wonder if it would be safer to have it only translate once you type in the entire phrase instead of trying to translate as you go since there could be further issues, but I understand why you made it the way you did because it does look quite cool to see it go as you type.

[Delivery Madness]

A goofy, challenging platformer which is fun, but can feel quite unfair and janky at times. I liked the concept of the game and the challenging levels you constructed, but even though I got through it eventually, I felt like it got way too hard way too fast, and most of the difficulty came from jank instead of the actual obstacles. A difficult platformer needs to work hard to have tight controls, consistent physics and logical hitboxes so as to make the experience fair and down to the player's own skill, but this game felt very wonky and unfair at times, especially due to some of the wonkiness with going down through platforms (why do I need to hold it for an awkward amount of time instead of just tapping to go down), weird hitboxes (why do I get hurt by acid or spikes when I'm standing on the edge of a platform above it) and inconsistent physics for springs and such. If all of that got ironed out, I'd say this is a wonderful short and sweet challenge, but as it is, I'd say player beware, since you are fighting not only the game itself, but its controls as well.

[AstralBirds]

A little bit bland in terms of presentation and concept, but I found it to still be a nice and chill experience overall. Took a bit for it to get going, but once it does, I thought it did a good job at introducing new mechanics (like the wind fields and green bubble fields) and escalating the complexity as levels went onwards. Some of the levels were a bit trial-and-error dead-endy at times which was a bit frustrating, but never anything too bad, with overall every level being great. The game was a bit glitchy at times however: had some weird collisions and funky physics at times, and a particular recurring annoyance was trying to phase through a field with blue powers, but some of my followers not going through fully and getting trapped despite me timing everything to the best of my abilities.

[aqua]

Very neat game! Cool puzzle concept, well-designed levels that both introduce the mechanics intuitively and escalate smoothly in difficulty, and cute presentation: it's got it all! The only thing missing for me would be more levels, haha, but I still enjoyed my short but sweet trip with this game.

[Lotus Armageddon]

Wow, this really blew me away! This game had so many layers to it that made it such an exciting journey to get through it all: to be honest, I think the shooting gameplay by itself would've already been enough for me to call this great (super fun abilities to use, tons of cool enemies and bosses with varied moves, great levels and enemy formations to contend with, etc), but to have everything else on top of that was a real treat. I loved all of the little touches within the game that made it ooze so much charm and attention to detail, like the fact that the DOS prompt accepts other commands like DIR, and the way the game changes to reflect Gargul's taunts, and so on.

If I were to have any complaints, it would be that the rhythm gameplay felt a little sketchy/patchwork and out-of-sync with the music (though it was just a throwaway gag so it's forgivable) and that for me, personally, it kinda suffered from the SUPERHOT issue where I just wanted everyone to shut the hell up about their weird story that doesn't make sense and stop interrupting me from playing the damn game! Haha, I do like the story though, and hopefully you can just take that as a compliment to how addictive and fun your shooting gameplay was!

[Piconjo: AFK]

Pretty neat game! I'm not much for idlers myself, but I found this quite enjoyable and addictive due to how animated and lively the game was! Felt like a lot of polish was put into this with all sorts of subtle touches, like how the HUD is animated and lights up when you reach the price point for a new item, and the way the sound when you hook something gets progressively pitch-shifted the more you hook in one go, adding some satisfying excitement to an otherwise idle gameplay. I also felt like the game was good at keeping engagement up by not only having clickable boosts (hope people realize that those can be clicked) and pacing all of the upgrades appropriately so you're always unlocking new aspects and new venues at a good clip (and it was always a delight to see what each new venue brings). Very well done!