FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Descent (2021)]

Surprised at how challenging this got! I was worried in the beginning with how easy it was being, but hoo boy did I eat my words. Overall it is a bit of a mixed bag for me. On one hand, the gameplay, while simple, is pretty solid and the game does a good job at constantly escalating the challenge with a large amount of varied enemies and obstacles being introduced bit-by-bit. Graphics were pretty decent as well: a bit drab, but with some nice effects like dust clouds for movement and jumps. On the other hand, I did feel a lot of the challenge was not quite from good design, but unresponsive controls, annoyingly obfuscated obstacles, and frustrating physics. There were definitely some times where when I got hit, it was on me, and that's fair, but so many of my jumps were unintentional or delayed because of the controls: for example, I'd try to walk off a platform into a glide, but instead of gliding, it'd treat my input as a late jump right into some ceiling spikes, killing me (I suppose this is the bad aspect of coyote time). Plenty of other times where my jump would just go awry or I'd bump into something and lose my glide for no reason and such. A lot of the obstacles, like the crumbling bricks or especially the falling stalactites were barely visible and incredibly annoying to look out for. Speaking of looking out for, I wish there was a way to look down: I understand that we have a glide, but like a climber does (or a faller in this case, haha), I'd like to be able to look ahead and plan a bit (I understand if gliding is supposed to be a replacement for this, but still). Oh yeah, another big thing that tripped me up was the inability to ride falling platforms: I really wanted to ride on them and jump off, but they fall at a different rate so you end up detached. I still feel like I had fun, I just feel like this game kind of rides right on that tenuous line between fair challenge and frustration.

[The Behemoth Mural Collab]

Hmm, it's definitely a good cause and nice to see collabs like this, but at the moment, the general display and navigation doesn't leave a good impression to me and kind of hurts the experience. Don't get me wrong, it does seem to have some charming art and presentation here and there, such as the notebook paper tilted credits, but overall, it's a bit out of sorts. The mural itself is decent, but the graphics look really mish-mashed and distorted, like they've been scaled in all the wrong ways, and I don't like the way you can move beyond the edges and see into the darkness. Hovering over an artwork, I can't read the pop-up text for the artist because it's plain black text that doesn't stand out from the background art: would really benefit with a white highlight or maybe a text box surrounding it to make it pop. Navigation is really weird: for example, I'd hit play to go to the mural, hit the next arrow to go to the artists list, and then hit back to go to the mural, but it wouldn't send me back, instead it sends me to the credits for some reason (it seems like the back button on each page has a predetermined page it sends you back to, instead of sending you back to the actual previous page based on what the user has done). Buttons are a bit boring and difficult to tell if they are interactable because they don't get highlighted, and the mural HUD is confusing: why is there a pointless arrow key HUD, but the arrows to go back and next are within the art work instead of on the HUD? Also I wish the controls were a bit more intuitive, like being able to click and drag the mural with the mouse, or using the scroll wheel to zoom in and out. And so on. Again, good cause, but I'd like better presentation: the game needs to be as beautiful of a frame as the artwork it is housing!

Mabelma responds:

Thanks a lot for the feedback. A lot of useful points to take into consideration for the future. Appreciate your comment, and your score 👍🙏

[Alpha_Zero]

Pretty neat game with a cool ability it is centered around! It took a bit, but in the end, I felt like I was a Titanfall 2 pilot, phase shifting in and out of dimensions: popping out at the exact position to throw some enemies around, only to pop right back into dark subspace when they start shooting. Felt great to get used to the fast and frantic play, scrambling as I dimension hop, memorizing the enemy positions for maximum effectiveness when I pop back out.

Definitely had a rough start with this game though. The main menu is really drab, annoying to navigate and is confusing with its language. For the gameplay, movement was a bit sketchy and weird, especially with the jumps where, among other things, jumping up through a platform would have you impact with the platform as you pass through it, even though you hadn't finished your jump. Finally, I don't feel like it introduces the concepts, especially the ability, in an effective manner, as I had no idea what it did at first besides make everything dark. The level the ability is introduced in does nothing to explain it: maybe create a level where you're locked in and shot at with no way around normally, but the ability instruction is there, so you test it out and realize you can go past the bullets. Also found it weird that some objects you throw you can keep throwing forever, but other objects can only be thrown once?

I think this game has a really cool concept to it that I'd love to see polished up and fleshed out into a big game: I feel like it's really got legs. Could add a whole story element to teaching the mechanics: maybe you're an escaped experiment or something like that. Would absolutely love to see a Katana Zero-esque replay when you beat a level, where it edits out all the time you spent in the dark dimension so you see what the enemy sees, where it looks like you're just instantly teleporting around causing chaos!

Frogrammer responds:

Hey thank you so much for your feedback.

- Yes as a big Titanfall fan, ability was inspired by time-shifting level, really glad you liked that)
- I agree the menu isn't near as polished as should, didn't have enough time to work on it
- I noticed one way platforms triggering the ground too early too
- Yes sadly mechanic weren't quite introduced, i thought about the level you mean, but didn't want to make the game unbeatable if someone for some reason, didn't know about the ability at all
- After throwing some objects and striking enemy nor touching ground, they can't be grabbed anymore
- Thanks, I may work on it more one day! And also I absolutely thought about teleporting in replay too, really wish had enough time to realize this as well

Thanks for your feedback again, its really important)

[Pico-Raiders]

Hmm, this is a tough one for me. On one hand, I do think it is very ambitious of a game, being a strategy game, to run on PICO-8, and is pretty cool with the way it captures that old-school DOS/Atari/C64 feel and style quite well. Has some neat little touches like the animation for the sinking boats and such, and I did have some fun skirmishing with the units when I could figure out how it worked. On the other hand, I feel it is too ambitious for the system its running on as, while I was able to figure out some aspects, the game just seemed way too complicated and PICO-8 just isn't able to tutorialize enough aspects to get all of the intricacies and rules across (had no idea how many of the units worked, like boats and such, and wasn't sure whether there was a strategy for army unit attacking an army unit, nor if catapults can kill a castle, etc). Controls were a bit annoying as well: so many times I'd select an army dude with the intention to move him: I'd hit move, but since I wasn't holding a direction before I did that, it'd treat it as me skipping and I'd lose the ability to move that unit (argh!). Also, that cool animation for the sinking boat starts to get real annoying once you've seen it for the hundredth time and it just makes the wait for your turn even longer. Anyway, it's a neat game, but it might be a bit too much for me, not being a big strategy fan. Felt like you, unfortunately, recreated everything about old-school strategy games too faithfully, as that included the outdated design bits, haha!

KJScott responds:

It was originally a 48k spectrum game which I tried to recreate and was right at the edge of how much I could put it before I reached the code limit so I was unable to provide any clear instructions (which I knew was going to be an issue). Yeah, I totally agree with all your comments about the controls, instructions, animations, etc, but as your figured I was trying to recreate all the old design choices. The controls was the biggest obstacle as I needed to port over full keyboard support to effectively a controller scheme which I know needs more work but hit the limit of the code to refine it further. I do have a game on the back burner which utilises a lot of the ideas but reworking it hopefully for the modern era but will see when I get time or motivation to finish that off. Thank you for the comments!

[Capuchin Centauri: Station Cohabitation]

Wow, really cool game! I absolutely loved the whole concept of the upgradable suit parts, as well as the cool dynamic between the monkey and their suit as you get parts blown off and need to either try to deal with some parts missing as best you can or jump out to stitch them back on. The upgrades made for some really cool customization and feeling of progression, and the monkey/suit transitions to repair made for some really cool scrambles and thinking on the fly. Overall I thought it was great: only had a few minor complaints. I thought it was a bit annoying that if you pick up a new gun, for example, to test it out, your old gun doesn't fall to the floor so you can't go back if you don't like the new one. Bullets in general felt a bit slow and unsatisfying at times until you get some speed upgrades (which I didn't find many). Levels were a bit drab and repetitive and the map felt too big. Sounds were a bit wonky and too sharp at times as well. Still, really clever game that felt very well executed in general: would really love to see this idea fleshed out into a more polished and finalized version!

[Skeletons and Skulls]

At first, I didn't have the best impression of the game, seemed like a very bog-standard top-down melee game. Once I learned on my own, through no help of the game, that I could summon skeletons, then the game got elevated as it was quite fun to micromanage my little army, which seemed to have decent AI as well! Seriously, you gotta have a tutorial or onscreen instructions to teach about the summoning skeleton business: would hate to see people dismiss the game and not realize it's there! Anyway, the game was quite fun and did a good job at quickly elevating the difficulty level-by-level. Even had some neat stuff like deflecting projectiles with melee, which is always cool in my book. I will say, however, that the game still does have a bit of a boring feel to it with the lack of polish: not much feedback and impact to attacks (I couldn't even tell I was hurting the red imps because the red flash isn't apparent on a red enemy), lack of graphical variation especially for the levels, sloppy graphics with how the player character can overlap walls they should be behind, etc. Difficulty was a bit higher than I felt as well with hitboxes being a bit wonky and everything moving a bit fast and erratic at times. Still, not a bad concept, had a decent time with it and I'd like to see more of this game if you build upon it!

[Stupid House]

Quite the interesting adventure! Definitely was very weird and surreal and that served as an effective hook to keep me going. I felt like the puzzles were balanced quite well: difficult enough to make me feel clever for figuring them out, but with enough clues and not too difficult to cause annoyance. Well, that's not quite true: I was annoyed by the fact that there was no way to speed up the intro for watching the TV to memorize the pattern, making repeats annoying. Also, I felt like the piano puzzle was too difficult because it didn't use all distinct sounds, but rather it used, for some sounds, different pitches for the same horn sound: it can be really difficult for a normal person to discern those and memorize the exact pitch they need. Still, overall I had a good time figuring my way out of this stupid house! Also, as a side note, I'm glad the game was just eerie horror, and not jumpscare stuff: I woulda shut the game off immediately if that was the case, haha!

[Match-Off]

Really interesting concept! Imagine my surprise when I was just trying to get any match I could find, when I suddenly realized that a match actually does an action according to what's on the card. Makes it so that there is an interesting strategy to making matches, and I thought that the fact there are some logistics to think about, like collecting bullets before being able to fire, was quite unique. Having said that, though, I didn't have the greatest time: felt like the match just dragged on and on due to the high health bars and sheer amount of cards, many of which are boring actions (bullets and shields). My time was split between me and the CPU just loading bullets or using/wasting shields which didn't make any progress in killing each other, and the rest of the time was the CPU constantly unloading on me since it was always finding the shooting cards. I dunno if I just got unlucky, wasn't playing smart or the CPU cheats, but yeah, this might be one of those games where it's a cool idea in theory, but not in practice (but maybe I'm just impatient). Still, kudos!

[ROBO-GO!]

Nice, short and sweet puzzle platformer! Had a good time with my only major complaint being that I felt it was over too quick! I really liked how it kept escalating the challenge and adding new mechanics: was expecting it to go on a bit longer to combine 'em all in more interesting ways. Overall it was nice, but I do have a few minor complaints. I felt like the jumping was a bit wonky at times, with it being weirdly delayed or not coming out. Furthermore, some of the jumps were way too tight in terms of timing: I felt like you wanted us to always be going for those jumps on the absolute edges of platforms and it got a little exhausting/frustrating at times due to the speed of the game and the previously mentioned wonkiness. Oh, and also the brick collapsing noise was really jarring and hurtful to my ears. Still, solidly designed with a good difficulty curve and evolution to the mechanics!

[Super Raft Boat Classic]

Had a ton of fun with this one! It started off a little slow, with the game being a little wonky with how it puts the cooldown meters all the way in the corner so you can't read em in the action and how you can't see highlight targetting for your building, but that's just minor stuff: once the game got going it delivered some great arcade fun! Loved how fast the game escalated in terms of difficulty and I loved the variety of creative enemies you have to blast through and obstacles you need to look out for, all while managing your boat the best you can: made for some really dynamic and hectic multitasking scenarios which were so fun to get through by the skin of my teeth! I may have made it all the way to relaxation, but I'm definitely looking forward to trying the game with some more characters and looping: a nice short and sweet game!

I will say, though, my GOD was that default screenshake waaaaaay too much, haha! I usually love screenshake with the more the better, but this was a rare occasion where it was absolutely nauseating for me. Not only should you consider lowering the default, but maybe only utilize screenshake for hitting enemies, or maybe enemies dying, instead of for every shot you make (since that means you are constantly shaking, augh!)