FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Nina Aquila: Legal Eagle]

Pretty neat Phoenix Wright clone! Seems to have a lot of goofiness to it which I enjoyed, and it cut to the chase quickly to get you in gameplay which was nice for an impatient person for me (though I would've loved if there was more flavor text in things I could examine within the environment). The characters were nice and goofy, though I'd argue maybe it's a bit too similar at times to Phoenix Wright instead of doing its own thing. It was a little clunky for me at the start: I felt like the reveal about Halloween would've been great if I actually came to that conclusion somehow, either by selecting an option or using evidence, but instead the game did everything for me. I guess I can chalk that up to it being a tutorial, since it got a bit better in the next witness testimony where I had to use the appropriate evidence. I haven't gotten very far but I am having fun. I'm hoping to kind of embraces its own thing about exploring a world of anime genres as right now it just feels very much like a clone, which while good, can't last me too long.

[Fight and Flight]

Bit of a mixed bag. On one hand, the game has a lot of heart to it and puts it best foot forward with some incredible presentation through graphics, music and sound. The levels you travel through are very animated and I do like how the scenery keeps progressing as you speed up more and more. On the other hand, however, the gameplay was a little lackluster and also confusing. There were no button prompts or tutorial in the beginning so I was hopelessly lost: I didn't even know I could attack and dodge so I was getting stuck, walled-into unwinnable situations until I figured that out. The attack and dodge were very confusing as well: the attack move looks like a dodge and the dodge move looks like an attack, and as concepts it felt like they kind of go against the heart of the game which I think is funnest when just moving around, narrowly avoiding obstacles (maybe you should just have an attack, no dodge since moving dodges for you?) Hitboxes were a bit clunky as well, or that there's a delay to them: there would be times where I swear I hit the attack/dodge/or moved out of the way just in time only for it to count as a hit. I dunno, for a game all about speed, I never felt like I really got into the flow of it. Would also be nice if there were scores to go for or more content to reach. Would love to see it reworked to operate a bit more smoothly though, as I think there's a lot of heart in this!

[Slimoban 2]

Pretty interesting puzzler! I was a little underwhelmed at the start: seemed like a bog-standard puzzler with some asset pack graphics and some lazy designs (for example, pushing a slime or a box into water just creates a stone tile instead of a box tile or slime tile), but I have to admit I ended up getting quite addicted to it in the end as it picked up in the later levels! There ended up being a lot of interesting mechanics that, while a bit confusing (using potions to pick up items) nevertheless created some interesting brain-teasers, like the one where you push your own corpse from a previous life. Nice work!

[FRIDAY NIGHT FUNKIN']

Pretty funky game! Certainly fun to play and very impressive with the stylish graphics and the way everything bops to the beat. Love all the countless little touches to the game, like the cool menu and the way the characters get frightened by lightning and such.

As a long time rhythm game player, however, there are some frustrations. I really want to see how well I'm hitting the notes and what my current combo is, but they are only shown for a moment on the girl in the background instead of the center of my note chart, so they are difficult to read (also the 1 looks like a 7 so the combo counter is odd to read in general as well). There's no results screen at the end either with any sort of grading or scoring so it's not easy to tell how to improve or how you're ranking: for example, how many misses, goods and sicks you got.

In general, as well, the note charts felt...very loosey goosey at times. It's difficult to explain but, this felt like a game where I unfortunately had to rely on my eyes instead of my ears, because the notes weren't directly correlated with the music consistently: sometimes they were, but other times not. With tons of songs in other games, I can close my eyes and still hit the notes because the arrows are aligned with the music. With this, however, if I were to close my eyes, I'd end up not hitting Sicks or straight up missing notes since they are misaligned. I dunno, maybe there's something else at play, and I understand that maybe I'm being unfair comparing it to things like Stepmania and DDR, but take it as a compliment that the game is cool enough that I want to.

EDIT: Weeks later and just wanted to note that in general, I'm loving a lot of the changes that have been made! Still feels a little tiny bit clunky in some respects, but overall I feel much more confident with the note charting and general play, and I love all of the new options and touches like the lore cutscenes for Senpai and Tankman and such (though they are so cool it does just make me wish we had them retroactively for everything else, haha, tough crowd I am huh). I definitely do think this game has a lot of heart, style and infectious fun to be had that easily overcomes my minor gripes from comparing it too more polished existing rhythm games. Well done once again and best of luck with future development!

also if it hasn't already been said, the music kicks major ass

ninjamuffin99 responds:

lov u futurecop

[Deck Adventurers - Chapter 1]

Enjoyed my time with this! I liked the feeling of progression as you both slowly work your way up the map and how you walk through a level over the corpses of those you defeat, challenges escalated bit-by-bit along the way. Was impressed at the intuitiveness of the combat: I only suffered some minor confusion with one of the defense sharing goblins, while for the most part had a great time since everything was so easy to read and click on for further info. Combat was a bit slow for my tastes at times: sometimes I would find myself trying to grab a card but having to wait for the deck to shuffle everything in, and sometimes I wish I could somehow speed up the animations, but it was all good. But it felt like a good adventure nonetheless.

[The Flower Arrangement]

Had a lot of problems getting this game to run unfortunately. For some reason, if you let the text run to complete a page, and then go to the next page, the text won't appear for the page. What I had to do is hit a button to skip/make the text fill out the page, and then if I went to the next page, it would appear. It added a lot of stress to the run, especially since some pages are actually blank and I thought they just weren't loading, haha. Also, it was a bit clunky at times in other ways: for example, I tried to go back on a choice page and I got stuck on previous pages which the choice still being up for me to click, but not being able to go forward. Once I got used to the clunkiness, though, the story itself was quite charming and funny, especially since it had a lot of interesting interpretations of this kind type of theme and how spooky it can be, despite hunkiness. Art style was a bit odd at times with how it fluctuated between styles constantly (one second it's very beautiful, then suddenly it's a comic, then suddenly it's anime, then it goes back to beautiful art, haha), but eh, overall it was nice and got across what it needed.

waffrus responds:

Man. After I adding in looping music, it DID get a lot clunkier. I'm sorry it was such a pain to read. I added in the link to the game on my itch.io account bc it seems to work better there. I did notice that after running through the scenes once, they loaded better the 2nd time but... that's a real pain to have to do. I'll try tinkering around again, but I'm trying to mostly move on to the next project lol.

Thank you for your thoughtful review! I'm glad the story itself was enjoyable even if the shifting art style was a bit of a hit or miss. Tbh, I did consider keeping it all in the sort of painterly style... but then this would have taken even longer to release and I wasn't sure if some of more comedic scenes would have even worked with that style. Oh well, live and learn haha. Thanks again!

[The Hit On Hallows' Eve]

Hmm, this one is a bit of a mixed bag. On one hand, it's a little clunky: graphics are a bit uninspired with having to go through the same rooms over and over, your character is...weirdly animated, and the constant clicking and hit sounds can get grating after awhile. However, on the flipside, the game does have a lot of nice touches to it like allowing enemy bullets to graze you without actually hitting, dash invincibility, and some genuinely fun level design with cool monster arenas and ambushes to battle through as you start to get up to floor 4 and beyond. It's pretty nice, could be nicer but it's a good start!

[Hexplore]

Pretty neat game! Graphics are very charming as well as the goofy characters and music, and it was fun wandering around and seeing everything the world had to offer (including all the violent deaths haha). Was a little bit confusing at times: sometimes it was difficult to tell if you were highlighting something since it was so subtle at times and it was a bit annoying to pixel hunt for clickables. Some of the puzzle logic was very odd as well: having to wait after giving the hamster a carrot and giving moose a flashlight for him to stomp (and then to use the batteries on a tree?) were some real WTF moments. But, I suppose figuring out that weird puzzle logic is part of the fun of these games, so...yeah!

[ROOM ROOM]

Love this game! Very creative and clever concept and I love the way the game slowly introduced all the mechanics in a very cool mind-bending way. Once I realized that I could actually go back to a room by intentionally hitting it and I'd have to do that to get all the orbs, man that felt cool, like my brain had just imploded. Loved the puzzles too, felt like little Warioware games how they have these little clues to try and figure everything out while you're dancing around trying not to die. This might've been a short game but it was very sweetly put together: great work!

[Closed Circuit]

I dunno if I'm missing something, but this seemed like a real disappointment for me: a classic case of good graphics, animation, music, and sound...but no gameplay. It's just running down a corridor and shooting people while they shoot you. No strategy, no ducking or hiding or anything: it's just mash fire fast enough to kill them before they can kill you. You can aim in all these directions, but you never have to point anywhere but forward. Don't get me wrong, I know game jams are tough and such, lord knows I can't do 'em, but I think this missed the intention of game jams by focusing too much on the presentation and not enough on interesting gameplay.