FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Tower of Towers]

Pretty cool game, but a little bit of a mixed experience for me! I quite like what this game is going for in terms of challenging platforming, and I loved some of the variety in obstacles and little touches like left over blood from deaths, but the controls, while decent, weren't quite tight and intuitive enough to make me feel confident and, well, 'in control' going through the challenges, and that's when the game started to cross the line from 'challenging' to 'frustrating' for me.

I can't quite explain it, but it's just a lot of little things missing like input buffering, and the character movement being a bit odd, with one of the primary culprits being the dash: for me it was just way too fast, zippy and annoying to gauge and account for the exact distance it takes you. I loved playing Celeste to 100% because as hard as it was, the controls were so solid that I always felt mistakes were on me and I could win: I can't say the same for this.

Don't get me wrong, I still had an alright time with this, and I'm gonna try to get farther if I can get used to the controls, but right now, that's a big 'if'.

[Deepest Sword]

Very nice game! A fun series of challenges that escalate as your sword grows bigger and bigger, all wrapped in a wonderfully funny story.

The controls were a bit frustrating to get used to at first, as they weren't quite intuitive to me. One, I didn't expect the sword controls to be around rotating the sword and it took some getting used to: I expected to be able to control the exact positioning of the sword a bit more with the tip of the sword being synced to the mouse pointer, similar to 'Getting Over It' controls. Two, it threw me off constantly with the way the player 'adjusts' by automatically walking forwards/backwards when you rotate the sword around them: yes it does add some weight to the feel of the sword, but it's a bit annoying to have to account for and I would prefer they just stand still. Also the level design/physics was a bit wonky: I'm still not exactly sure how I wiggled past the 2nd level obstacle and whether it was intentional, haha!

Still, all in all, I had a blast getting used to controls despite their initial confusion/frustration: it was all just part of the challenge with this charming game!

[EFHH]

Felt like a pretty charming game! I really liked the whole goofy premise of it all, and I am always down for some adventure gameplay.

Gameplay was a bit awkward though. I couldn't tell if punching people was doing anything to them and if it was even possible to kill anyone: I think it's just to stun them as a last resort so you focus on stealth, but then why make it so you can punch forever and rack up these huge combos with all sorts of fun messages if it's not the focus? Just felt like a missed opportunity where I would've liked if the game was either just a beat-em-up or just a stealth game instead of this awkward mix where you just walk past and bop people with no consequence.

Also, some of the puzzles were a bit...pointless? It's like, very early on you've got three people right next to each other: you find an item for one, they give you the item for the next person, and they give you the item for the next person. Boom, done. There wasn't anything clever or hard about it: at that point, it just felt like unnecessary padding and would probably better be reduced to just trading with one person. I know that's how a lot of these games work where you trade items but...at least try to distance them a bit so you need to remember their locations or think about routes, or add a bit of a puzzle element to it so it's not so obvious and tedious, haha!

[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 :)