FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[The Year After]

Quite surprised at this one! It's definitely a little clunky with constant graphical glitches and stuttery unresponsive walks, but it wasn't quite enough to take me out of the experience which I think was really well done! I loved the subtle environment storytelling with the little breadcrumbs and hints of what's going down, piecing everything together bit-by-bit. Just the way I could walk through the house and see the different furniture to see how their lives have progressed was really cool. Was so intrigued by the whole underlying 'what am I doing? am I influencing this family? has this already happened? who the hell am I, other than this really weird ninja?' plot along with the other family plot. Very impressive stuff considering the minimalist presentation.

[Wrath of Nightmare]

Hmm, I haven't finished it yet, so I can't judge it for sure. The intro is pretty neat and does set up some good intrigue, and the graphics and scale of the world is quite impressive. However, that same scale ended up making me just get lost, and not in a good way. Without villagers repeating the objective or any sort of note/journal system, and with not much guidance in the beginning, I wasn't sure where the heck to go and just got sick of it. If the world was a bit smaller, maybe a journal/note system wouldn't even be necessary. It didn't help either that, as big as the world is, it seemed fairly lifeless: I was really hoping I could examine bookshelves and other things in people's houses to learn about them or myself, but I couldn't interact with anything. If I can keep track of what the heck to do, I think it would be cool: maybe I'll retry in the future.

TheEnkian responds:

I think you've made a few good points. Things I'd like to add:
- Objective screen.
- More clear directions/signposting of areas.
- Interactive bookshelves.

Thanks for playing!

[Erebos]

Pretty neat game! It's a little bleh: a lot of the graphics like the corpses are pretty bad and kinda take you out of the experience, and the ship can be really bland as well, with different floors not even having some different colors or wall patterns to shake it up at least a little bit. But, for what it's worth, I did have some good spooks and the story was cool in that it had multiple endings (though it really sucked that I got an ending unintentionally and then it didn't save the checkpoint so I could retry). I also thought you missed some possibilities: I tried to use the bridge computer before even learning about self destruct and suddenly my character is trying to arm self destruct like he knows about it, and I felt it would've been cooler if he just drives the ship to a planet and ends up dooming everyone in his ignorance as an ending. I also thought there were some times where having the examine button and the interact button do separate things didn't make sense: when I first came across Seuss I examined him first, which had the character calmly state that it was Seuss: then I interacted with Seuss and now suddenly my guy is screaming! Was pretty funny, but yeah, I think examine and interact shoulda done the same thing there, just like how you have it do the same thing with beds.

thesteamknight responds:

Thank for playing and for the feedback!

[arachnowopunk]

Neat game! I haven't beaten it yet, but I plan to because the game just seems to ooze charm and professionalism in its design and presentation, and looks to have a lot of depth to the gameplay mechanics as well! I like the little touches like the speech bubbles, the way it pauses after a pop-up, the way it previews your direction for a jump, and so on. It's not without its issues, however: the fact that the spider moves so smoothly but is technically on a grid can really screw you over as I had so many times where my spider moved one extra step too far even though I told it to stop, or stopped one step too early. Some of the instructions were a bit out-of-order as well: kinda wish the game told you about the ability to cancel your jump/stop much earlier than it did (though to be frank, its easy to guess that down is to stop since its the opposite). I'm assuming the maps are all smartly built for it, but it can be frustrating how far you have to go just to get your spider to turn around at times, especially when you misjudge and end up turning yourself the wrong direction since you didn't plan multiple steps ahead. Maybe it would be worth it to just have two buttons at times instead of forcing everything into one button to ease up the difficulty, haha. If the second button turned direction it would also prevent the issue where you try to make a jump you thought you could but didn't know you couldn't, and now you're probably stuck in a situation where you're gonna walk into spikes, haha. However, I understand that the whole complexity to turning direction is intended, so it's probably a no-go. Also, while I like the fact that the game waits for you to ready since you need to switch from mouse to keyboard when closing a pop-up, maybe closing a pop-up should be possible with a keyboard press in the first place to make it a non-issue? Anyway, while I do have some gripes, like I said, this game does seem to have such good construction to it that I'll definitely want to revisit it.

[Medieval Cop 9 - Song and Silence (Part 3)]

I'm definitely not the ideal audience for this as I haven't played the previous episodes or anything like that, so feel free to disregard. Nevertheless, from the little bit of time I played the game I had some minor feedback:

1) It would be really helpful if you could save in this game at any time so you could take a break, but it looks like it's impossible to do so when characters are talking (which is a huge portion of the game). Therefore, it'd be helpful if there were more gameplay segments interspersed throughout the game to give the chance for a break.

2) The game seems to have a really heavy tone to it with the dialogue and themes, but all of the tension is undercut by the incredibly simple cartoony/anime graphics, sprites and sounds which I assume are the default rpg maker assets. Could really stand to have some custom-made assets to more accurately capture the mood you're going for. I did like the picture of Arc and Dregg: something like that seemed to be custom-made and quite effective.

3) C'mon, even the Doctor said so at the start: keep the introductions short, haha!

[Magirune]

A bare-bones dungeon crawler that, while not impressing anyone with visual flair, does still have some rather interesting design to its dungeon! The game doesn't have the best first impression: aside from the lackluster graphics, drab sounds, boring font and no music, the warning about not using keys led to me being constantly afraid about when to use them, so I'd much prefer if the game itself did the work to prevent an unwinnable situation from ever occurring, if possible. Furthermore, the warning about reduced exp from repeat kills had me believe that I should only kill enemies when necessary, such as when they block my path, but this worked against me since the game requires you to kill enemies to get exp so you can kill bigger ones (but there's no strategy to this because you can just respawn when you die for no penalty, so what's the point? maybe a separate difficulty would fix this?) There is a silver lining to the fact that I was so cautious from the start, however: I do like how the dungeon is designed in such a way that, unlike a typical dungeon where you go floor by floor, this dungeon actually lets you visit practically all of its floors from the start, upon which you can then work backwards to design an ideal route to get out. That's such a unique concept I haven't encountered before and though I haven't beaten it yet, I think it will be fun planning this route to get out!

[Arcade Wizard]

Pretty neat game! Seems to have some real professional design to it, especially in regards to the level transitions and UI. Combat is pretty satisfying as well: feels good to hear the sound effects chain together as you blast a big group of enemies. I haven't played though it all yet, but I've mostly enjoyed my time with it. I do have some gripes though. Damage feedback can be a little confusing, particularly for the player: I'd have a lot of times where I thought I narrowly dodged an enemy but I actually didn't, so I think it would help to give a more dramatic signal when you get hit, such as freezing the game for a brief moment or blinking the entire screen red instead of just the player sprite or knocking back all the enemies from the player or whatever. Combat was getting a bit repetitive as well: even though the enemies were changing in terms of sprites, every fight could be beat with the same strategy of just camping the spawn points and then running circles to corral them all into a big group you could hose down. The groups got bigger and the enemies spongier but I'm hoping there is more variety than just that to add more strategy. Also, not so much a complaint but maybe something to consider: I think it would help to adjust the deadzone for the mouse cursor as if you move the mouse slow enough, your character will vibrate in an annoying way as they keep stutter stepping, haha.

[Madness: Zombie Horde]

Not too shabby! It ain't necessarily anything special, being a simple shooter, but it does do a good job for being what it is. A lot of games would be lazy and just make this go on forever and be a simple score attack, but this actually does have some decent pacing to it, what with the game actually introducing a 2nd phase at just the right time, as well as having an ending. Other than that, it's got some decent corpse explosions and achievements to unlock, as well as making the player hitbox just be the player's torso instead of their arms to give some good wiggle room. Kinda wish the shooting wasn't so clunky with the weird burst instead of a more comfortable full-auto or single-shot, but I understand it was probably done for balancing. Basically, the game knows it works best as a short game and it doesn't overstay its welcome, so nice work on that.

fullmetalchaz responds:

Wow, everything you said was spot on.
You knew every reason behind my design choices.
Its awesome but also a bit intimidating, thx man.

[Elementalist: 0]

Pretty cool game that could use some more meat on its bones, but it has a decent core to work from! I love me a good brawler, and this game does seem to have some decent combat to it. Enemies seem to have some decent attack patterns with some good thought put into them, though they also have some weird placement at times, such as bats being put so high up that they never fly low enough to attack you. I know you probably put a lot of work into it so you think that people will put a lot of play into it as well, but at the moment, there is no way there is enough content to keep a player's interest through a horde of monsters that large, especially when they spawn that slowly and with such a low variety of different enemies. It took me forever to see a fireball enemy for the first time, and even then, they barely showed up, with the vast majority of the enemies still being the basic ones you see at the start. I think that this game is a classic case of trying to stretch a short game into a longer game: it does nothing but hurt the experience. I think if this game was shorter with a faster pace to it, it would do a lot to help, but even more than that, I'd love to see this with a larger variety of enemies, along with maybe having different levels to showcase different waves of enemies or different arena layouts, and some more cool moves to style on enemies with. It could be something really great!

Franuka responds:

Hey, thanks for the feedback :)
I'm planning on making a bigger, more interesting version (more maps, enemies, skills, etc). This was more of a prototype to work on.

[Tiny Rally: Turbo Tour]

Seems to have its heart in the right place and looks like it could be cool rally game, but unfortunately the controls just killed it for me. The cars just feel so bad to drive: they just cannot turn well at all and are so slow to accelerate that driving just turns into a tedious back and forth of stopping to 3-point turn even the slightest turn. The E-brake didn't seem to work at all for drifting, with the best way to use it being to tap-tap-tap it instead of just holding it down for some reason. Also, I'm not sure if its just me, but I think the controls for reversing are reversed? Maybe I just confused myself, I'm not sure, but whenever I reversed it went in the direction I wasn't expecting.