FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[CHEFWARE]

Yowza, this game was fantastico! Not even quite sure how to praise it as it was just very professionally-crafted and juicy in practically every regard, including the spots that developers usually don't bother with, such as the main menu and options! Well done: it was loads of fun, and I thought some of the minigames like the one where you need to write down the order and execute it later were very memorable!

If I were to get a bit nitpicky, I'd say:

*I did find it really weird that it doesn't automatically transition to endless mode upon beating the boss for the first time, either by allowing you to continue past the boss into it or by selecting restart: instead you can only access it by fully quitting out and selecting it from the main menu when you start.

*The beer mug filling one was a bit deceptive and confusing on what constitutes a success. I think the problem is that I was trying to fill the glass so that the top of the liquid portion matches the line, whereas the game considers the top of the foam where it should match the line. Could be wrong about that, but something about it was weird.

*It's a minor quibble, but I wish the game would give you immediate feedback on your success or failure before the time limit (when possible). For example, when you finish cutting up enough fruit, you should hear a 'woohoo' or something like that to let you know you can rest easy as you've already won.

*Some minigames didn't seem to scale well at the speed gets higher, like the hamburger grilling one became practically impossible and acted in weird ways.

*It's a greedy wish, but I do wish there were even more fun minigames to play, or even more so, I wish there were more variations and tricks in the existing minigames. For example, some ones like the bike delivery have decent variety with changing up the jumps you need to make between pits and goblin, whereas others just do the same thing every time and have no such tricks to keep you on your toes.

Great stuff!

[Kill Laanie Race or Die]

I certainly think this has potential to be a nice racing game, but currently it feels rather underbaked and needs more time in the oven!

My main complaints are:

*While some of the visuals are pretty cool, you went way overboard with the filters like the monitor static/film grain/whatever and it just makes my eyes hurt and makes it difficult to read the screen. Get rid of that crap: your art looks good by itself and you don't need to hide it behind these dumb filters.

*Damage feedback is very lackluster: getting shot or shooting other cars isn't apparent as there is no sort of sound effect or hitspark to indicate contact. Also when you crash into a wall, the game starts draining your health and plays these loud, grating sounds.

*There's a lack of information given for the race. For example, what's my current position/place/rank in the race? How many cars remain? What's my speed? When I finish a lap, where's my current lap time and how does it compare to my previous laps?

*Unless you memorize the course, it's very difficult to determine where turns are, making it rather frustrating. Up to you how to handle this, but a few ways would be to zoom out the camera, add signals/signs onto the course, or to have a minimap/radar of the course in the corner.

*When all is said and done, the game isn't doing anything that innovative to create a fresh new experience, nor does it have core driving gameplay that is satisfying enough to make up for that as it feels rather basic in terms of functionality and slippery/awkward in terms of physics.

Hope this helps and that you continue to work on it!

GNOSTU responds:

Hi Mr FutureCopLGF

Thank you so much for your honest feedback. We are currently polishing Kill Laanie, we also want to state that this is a game jam entry for Gdevelops game jam 5 and we only had 9 days to make this hence the reason it seems underbaked.

Addressing your complaints

* The visuals effects we know does not appeal to everyone and we are aware of that. We are a retro revival indie game development studio that focuses on a sense of nostalgia to everything we do including art and music. We are sorry to hear that you have experienced pain in our visuals we are adding an options section to turn these effects off for players that do not like it.

* About the lack of visual information. Yes we understand that the industry standard is to know your position, speed and lap time. Again we simply did not have time for all the extra bells and whistles that go with racing games. However we are creating modes for players that want to have a normal racing experience.

* Regards to minimaps. Again not enough time to code we only had 9 days. We do not believe in hand holding when it comes to our games as many old games dropped you in the deep end with no help or info regarding things like minimaps and when corners need to be taken we were trying to go for a more realistic racing experience. Like I said we are working on modes where minimaps are an option to turn on or off. As for the zoom I do not think we are changing anything in that department as we are trying to keep the zoom like Konami's Road Fighter.

* Being fresh and new is not what we do at graphic nostalgia studios we focus on bringing life to old games from the arcade, sega and nintendo and adding things like physics and redrawn or modern styled additions like character select, color selections, PS1 and PS2 style 3d graphics and music. As for the awkward slippery physics the game jam theme was unstable so I think we delivered on that.

Conclusion.

We do not shy away from any criticism here at Graphic Nostalgia Studios and we try and cater to all gamers. Please keep in mind that we are a retro studio first and modern gamers 10th. We are a studio that still plays old games like pokemon blue, Rise of the Triad, Contra, Piko's School and SimGirl. We do play modern games like GTA V and Cyberpunk 2077 with innovation and new things to see and honestly as a retro studio we do not see much change in anything in the new games we didn't 15 years ago. We love how old games were simple and none instructive, we believe that this generation of gamers are too spoiled when it comes to help and instructions. We read all our comments and appreciate each one as well as yours. We will take what you have to heart and work on a better experience for gamers. Thanks again for the feed back and Stay Retro

[Balance]

This definitely has some potential and feels like it could be a decent simple-but-fun arcade game. Unfortunately, I found the control scheme to be very odd and just make the experience too awkward to stick with. You'd think that the player would control the balance beam, making it tilt back and forth to make the box naturally slide, but instead you make it so that the player controls both the balance beam and the box, but the box isn't affected by the tilt of the balance beam? What's the purpose of the tilt, then? Even weirder is the way that the box only moves if you hold down the movement key: just tapping will have the box remain in the same spot while the balance beam tilts to no effect. Very strange!

[Pico Rubber 2024]

Hmm, not much of a fan of idle/clicker games in the first place, so feel free to take that into consideration, but I found this to be pretty subpar. Typically I feel the most important aspect of idle/clicker games is for it to, almost like a slot machine, dazzle the player with feedback that's so juicy and satisfying that it gets them addicted, and this has absolutely none of that (especially since it doesn't even default to having the sound on!)

Basically, it currently feels more like an alpha that's not ready for public consumption yet: it's functional, sure, but it doesn't have that special sauce to make it entertaining yet. As you mentioned in the description, ElRandomGMD's version of Pico Clicker has a bit more juice to it, but it's missing the innovative rubbing feature you have, as well as the other options: if only you could combine your powers to create a super version!

ElRandomGMD responds:

Sorry for your bad experience :(

[Blue Vortex]

Nice arcade game you got here! It's rather simple, sure, but it's got that fun and addictive quality to its gameplay mechanics and slick presentation that makes you wanna play more and more, similar to other arcade classics.

If I were to have any complaints, it's that I was a bit disappointed that the game didn't seem to evolve its difficulty in any way by introducing new obstacles or mechanics the longer you go: instead it just stays the same, meaning if you get good at it, you just stay playing until you get bored, I guess, haha. Also the hitboxes for the player felt really weird and I could never get a grasp on them: there were loads of times I thought I smashed into something only to keep on going. I guess it's nice that it's so forgiving, but still!

Augh, I've been playing too long that my eyes are doing that thing where everything's warping around!

[GOOB]

Great short and sweet puzzle platformer! The game's got some cute vibes, and the mechanics were quite interesting and much deeper than I expected, with the levels doing a good job at slowly introducing those hidden intricacies. In particular the bonus levels were a fantastic challenge with some real mind-benders. Nice work!

As a side note, I liked how the puffs that appear when you jump, while seemingly innocuous and just a throwaway bit of special effects that's in every game nowadays, did a great job at making me realize how jumping height is increased by the amount of legs making contact with the floor: clever stuff!

[sequenced]

Decent little boss-rush bullet-hell game! While it's a bit basic, I found it to be somewhat fun to battle through the various waves, and thought that the whole weapon preview system was pretty neato (though I found it odd that, while it will preview bullets speeding up, it won't for fire rate speed up).

I'll admit that it didn't keep my attention for long, though, as the mechanics and presentation were quite simplistic and bland, and the bosses lacked variety and started recycling the same existing three (crab, ghost and cube) over and over in different combinations. Still, was ok.

[Power Solenoid Demo]

Whoa, this was quite the experience! Game has some immaculately trippy and weird vibes that pervade the entire experience that I think hit the right balance where, despite being a tad confusing, the game overall remains surprisingly intuitive and intriguing in a way that makes you want to delve deeper into the mystery. I certainly enjoyed my journey both through understanding what was going down and the various gameplay genres you've got, be it pinball, shmup, boss fights, and so on! Consider me hooked and looking forward for more!

In terms of feedback:

*The game can be a bit rough and glitchy at times. I got crushed by a block horizontally and upon respawning from death, I was nowhere on screen, yet the game kept going (think I was outside the boundaries?) I also phased through a barrier with an orbit smash that I don't think I should've been able to, especially since it didn't work on another similar barrier: probably just wonky collision physics at play.

*I found the orbit smash a bit frustrating, as I wasn't sure if I was understanding what its purpose was: is it simply a dash, or is there more to it? I mostly avoided using it because the charge-up time is unbearably long.

*Text can be very difficult to read due to its small size and whatever grainy filter or compression you've got. I don't mind a bit of visual flair, but readability should never be sacrificed.

By the way, the damage sound takes me right back to Marble Madness: was that an intentional homage?

jupitron responds:

Thank you so much for your time and video, was really helpful. I'm happy that you could see through all and still enjoy the game. Hope we meet again in the future.

[Kart Kollab]

Pretty neat art collab! I very much enjoyed that you found an appropriately creative and fun way to present the art rather than your bog-standard slideshow, and I thought the loads of options and features you had (including links to artist profiles) were good. Nice stuff!

In terms of feedback:

*I wish the default view was much larger in terms of screen size as right now, the carts are so tiny and compressed by being shrunk and crammed into a small screen that it makes it difficult to see finer details: rather than clicking on a kart because I think it looks cool, I'm clicking on them to figure out what I'm even looking at, haha.

*I wish camera control was a bit more freeform with you being able to scroll to zoom and click-drag or use arrow keys to move the view around, and that it would be possible to still click on carts even during the camera view.

*When you click someone and then go back to watch the races, it'd be nice if it preserved whatever the race looked like when you clicked, that way if you had someone else in mind that you were going to click on next, you wouldn't have to look for them all over again.

*While it would be awesome if this could always be a fully-functioning kart racing game, I understand that's a tall order. Something I would like to see which might be a bit easier, however, would be for the racing simulation you've got going to be a bit more interactive or elaborate: for example it'd be awesome if you could rig some sort of AI race and maybe you can gamble on the winner of a race or something.

[READY YOUR RUDDER]

Hey, this is a really fun and cool survival arcade experience! I really love the charming and lively vibes coming off of it, and I enjoy the core concept of every power-up you accrue coming with a new enemy being introduced, where sometimes that enemy is a direct counter to that power-up. It's a bit of a shame that whatever strategic value there would be to picking or not picking certain power-ups is inevitably lost once you get them all, but still, it's neat and I found myself getting addicted to weaving my way through the chaos and surviving as long as I could, especially since the game feels very fair and generous with its hitboxes.

Obviously I'd love if it had more meat on its bones because its got such a good core, whether it be new content or some sort of randomization to increase replayability, but for what it is, especially considering its a game jam game, it's solid.

I was a bit curious about the way the pirate keeps asking for gold, especially since we never seem to accrue any. Maybe some sort of cut content, like maybe it was planned that you needed to get gold that appears while dodging threats, but now they just assume that you come across a gold piece every wave despite it not being visible?

Was also curious about the crows nest and what its penalty is: I think it was doing something with the hitboxes, maybe increasing them in size a bit? Couldn't tell for sure.

FishDev responds:

Thank you for the compliments!! I'm thinking about expanding the game somehow, but in full honesty, I'm not totally sure where to take it. At a certain point, stuff would just get too chaotic, and more importantly, the upgrades that provide the controls -- which are the most important ones design-wise -- would get lost amongst any new upgrades I come up with that, most likely, wouldn't provide new controls. I'm honestly still chewing on it, well after release haha.

There's a few super minor QoL changes I have planned (e.g. making it so that the player can't accidentally skip the ending wanted poster if they happen to be pressing Z when they die) but I want to hold off on releasing any updates until the itch version gets its uploads unlocked, to keep the 2 pages in sync. One of the game jams this was submitted to is still having the judges look at the games, so I currently can't upload anything on the itch page.

The gold thing was sort of a mistake/oversight on my part. I wanted to give the character a lot of charm and thought "pirates love gold lol" without once thinking "I literally never give the player gold..." Maybe I could drop a gold coin on the player or something? Not sure yet lol

As for the crow's nest -- yup!! Sort of hard to telegraph though. Basically, every so often, a crow lands on it, and increases your hitbox by a pretty large margin (hence "bad luck"). The original plan was for there to be a few potential debuffs, like speed loss or increased spawn rates, and there'd be a bit of text going "Speed Down" or "Enemies Up" or something like that, but that ended up being too distracting amongst all the chaos on the screen so I cut it. For now, it's just the hitbox increase, I try getting the player's attention with a white flash on the hitbox when the crow lands, but admittedly I know that still isn't enough. If you have any suggestions, I'd love to hear them!!