FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[STARSHIP PROTOTYPE]

It gets pretty exciting in the later stage what with the boss fight and everything: loved fighting that thing by rocketing one direction and letting myself drift off that momentum while shooting at it, felt pretty cool to dance around like that. But other than that, I felt like the game was overall a bit clunky and confusing. For being all about revenge, I didn't really feel like I got to fight anything except the last boss: before that, it was just dodging glitchy seaweed and not even being able to shoot turrets, only being able to shoot their bullets. I'm not even sure why I was landing on planets in the first place. Also, the HUD was a bit lackluster with just bland numbers with overly long decimal places (round those suckers up) instead of some cool graphics, like an actual life bar for health (not that it mattered because you pretty much die in one hit to practically everything so why bother with a health bar). I think there was some fun gameplay in there with the physics based movement and the shooting: would love to see more bosses to fight for revenge!

[Bright in the Screen 2nd Session]

Hmm, it's certainly quite stylish and interesting, presentation-wise, and has some interesting gimmicks like the projector screens for displaying information, but overall I feel like I had a bit too much of a confusing and frustrating time. Controls were very awkward and unintuitive at times: why I have to click on things instead of just hitting space bar or enter or down to interact with them is odd and very frustrating, especially when I needed to click on a tiny elevator button when I was outrunning something and the camera was shifting it, making it unnecessarily difficult. And then, once I get used to the mouse clicking, suddenly it goes back and uses space to interact with things instead! Just very odd. Movement in general was very annoying as well with sprints being required for big jumps but, my sprint was very fidgety and would sometimes not work properly, leading to me never feeling confident my jump would work. Still, tempted to go back in just because of the interesting design, so kudos on that.

[TEXT 'N' DRIVE]

I do have a fondness for educational games that seek to educate through fun gameplay, and I think this one did a great job! Great message and a very fun and well put-together game system that accurately portrays how difficult and silly it is to text and drive. Very, very clever stuff! Though I have to admit, for me, it actually might've been a bit too fun to the point of making me want to text and drive since it's such a fun challenge, haha! I'd actually want the game to go one step further and make it so you have to erase any typing mistakes you make, since that would more accurately portray the difficulties of texting and driving, because then you either need to correct your mistakes or chose to look down at the keyboard/use both hands to avoid mistakes, heightening the intended challenge that is crucial to the message. As it is right now, it can actually be a bit too easy to fat finger the general area of the keyboard like Homer for each letter to type in the sentences. Still, great job!

[State your name]

Pretty neat story with some interesting twists and turns! I like the slow reveals and the funny ways your responses change as you get into it deeper and deeper. My only complaint was that it was a little too static for me, and that made it feel a little less organic for me. I'm probably not going to explain this properly, but I would've liked if the interruptions and such from yellow and violet and so on happen in a linear fashion no matter what type of choices you make, as long as they follow a general nature. Instead, their responses are tied to certain choices you make, making them feel less like dynamic characters reaching out to you and more like scripted programs (which might fit given the whole simulation nature but still). For example, It's possible, when you loop back, to pick answers that you've chosen previously and the story will loop back to that point in time as it replays the same responses yellow and violet gave before, despite the story suggesting that they've moved on from that point and wouldn't repeat themselves. I guess it just kinda gave me a Truman Story vibe: suddenly it was too obviously a rigged game that was leading me down one route. Again, maybe that's kind of the intention, but I felt like the game would've been more powerful if it was programmed in a way to be more dynamic and organic.

[360]

Definitely a little confusing and didn't seem to land with an exact theme/story/message that ties it all together for me, but fun enough to figure out the weird minigames and their mechanics at times to see what's going on! There's an interesting allure to these type of games with minimal instructions and such: kinda like getting into a crashed alien space ship and hitting random buttons to see if you can get it to fly, haha.

['Curse of the Sock']

Pretty cute game, but it was a bit choppy and weird for me so I hope I can give it some good feedback since it's a demo. Climbing on ladders was very frustrating at times: if you just hold up on the very first ladder in the game, you'll just fall right back down, as you need to kinda force yourself onto the platform with other movement. The standing melee attack is a bit annoying in how it forces you to stand still, makes you want to constantly use the air attack instead which feels better. You can mash the jump button to keep playing the jump sound even though you are already mid-air. The scythe ghost enemies felt really annoying to fight since they can get right into you and you force you into taking damage if you try to attack them since you can't knock them back with an attack effectively. Animations seemed a bit wonky at times: would have attacks be cancelled or have enemies I've killed since look like they're getting their attacks out and such. Controls flash away too fast in the beginning: I didn't even realize I had a duck because I didn't have time to read it all. There are some nice things already in the thing like how it seems like the hit box for the player attack does take into the account the arc of the swing, not just the final position of the sword. Hopefully this gets polished up for a full release as I think it could be cool!

Butzbo responds:

Always appreciate the more technical reviews, and you make some pretty good points!
>It's weird how long I wasn't aware of the 1st ladder issue, its kind of critical being the very first thing you do so I just updated it now.
>The 'standing attack' endlag was something I made a bit more intentionally at first for a slower pace of gameplay, but it hasn't been so well recieved so I'd have to look more into that.
>Usually with animations I'm used to fixing the ones that interrupt eachother (mostly with death triggers), but I had so many of them that eventually one of them slips away lol.
>Glad you mentioned that detail on arc hitbox! I hadn't done these kind of melee attacks in games before so it's great to hear that some parts are on a good direction.

Thanks Futurecop!

[Laqueus - Chapter III.]

Haha, I'm pretty terrible at this so I probably can't give a good review, but I'll try. Game does seem to have a pretty professional design to it: I like the smooth transitions as you move around the room, I like the way you can examine items in full, and I like the interesting situation you're put into with weird puzzles. Some of the gameplay, however, was a little frustrating and confusing at times: there was something written on the back of the card but I couldn't rotate the camera enough to let me read it, nothing is highlighted so it was difficult to tell what I could interact with so I just needed to click click click till I get carpal tunnel, some of the transitions were a bit confusing that how you think to click on a pillar puzzle to be able to rotate it in the first place and how you need to click on the table legs to see the scale when clicking on the scale is not sufficient, and so on. In general, though, it seemed to be a pretty interesting brain-teaser!

[Vampi 3D]

Pretty neat game, but a little clunky! Made it all the way thru and saved my cute goth gf. Game was generally quite fun to get through, and I liked using the bat powers to scout out areas and collect hard-to-reach items and such. Had a few stumbles along the way though that kinda hurt my experience. First, the game was way too dark: you eventually get a torch, sure, but for a long portion I needed to turn the lights off in my room and even then it was difficult for me to tell how to get around. Speaking of the torch, I was lost for a long time because I had no idea that the torch was a pickupable item: might've helped to make it more obvious. I also don't think the 3d graphics use the cool clay graphics you guys used to the fullest effect: just felt very drab and generic for the most part, with the only charming parts being the characters you rarely get to see. 3d graphics were very glitchy as well: prison bars would clip through my hands weirdly and the lighting was very glitchy and made navigation confusing. Hopefully you guys can nail it outta the park next time with this just being a 3d experiment for now as I usually love your style!

Guy-Unger responds:

fair points. On my monitor it's not a problem at all but a lot of people have issues with it, it just needs a brightness slider.
The levels could definitely be a lot more interesting, right now it's more of a blockout with a couple of props. But like you say, it's kind of a first test for us to work in 3D. Thanks for the review!

[Blu&Red]

I really want to like this, I really do: the concept is great and I love the idea of going through a level twice with two different routes that work against each other. And while I did have a bit of fun, there were just so many issues with the gameplay that made it just feel very frustrating to me. I have no idea why you didn't just color the player characters to be blue/red to indicate what blocks they can touch: having them stay white just makes it confusing when the former would be much more intuitive. Felt way too punishing to have to do both runs perfectly: dunno why it doesn't just let you retry a color without forcing you to do the previous as well. General lack of music and sound made the game feel very drab and empty. Controls felt quite clunky with the weird way you build up momentum but stop immediately, and the double jump was so short it was confusing and unsatisfying to use. Something about the hitboxes felt so unfair as well: had so many times where I got killed when it felt like I really did not get hit. Had a bug where sometimes when I was on a moving platform, the player character wouldn't move with it, they'd stay still. And so on. Definitely a great idea that has a lot of potential: the levels themselves are already quite good I think, it just needs polishing up in the controls and other departments to make this a slam dunk!

[The Office]

Has the right building blocks in place for a decent game, but unfortunately kind of has an amateur design to it that kinda killed my fun. Collision was choppy, walls and lighting were glitchy and weird, and there were a lot of confusing elements to the gameplay like why my flashlight kept turning off and the controls weren't explained. Unfortunately, I couldn't really figure out how to win: the monster always seemed to home in on me perfectly no matter what and while I could dip into the 'safe zone' by crouching under this gate to lose him, he'd always move towards the exit upon losing me so he was always barring my path. From what I could tell, the maze layout was so straight forward with not enough branches or loops I could use to get behind him, so it seemed impossible to win. The star of the show here is definitely the music: it's so intense the way it builds up when the monster gets closer and closer until you see the red lights and then bam, u ded! Heart is in the right place, just needs a bit of polish to it!