FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Tuggowar]

I'm not much for card/deck games most of the time, but this one actually got me hooked a bit! I think the reason behind that is how well-designed the UI is: while there is a tutorial to guide you through the process, it's more that the UI has so many little touches in it to help you learn everything. For example, I love how you can hover over almost everything, even things that are not cards, to get a info pop-up. Also, I like how certain elements are animated, such as when you use a medic to support a card, you see the wrench icon get dragged over, increase the attack, and then disappear, which visually shows you how the process works. My complaints are mostly minor: for one, I missed some of the tutorial information since the text and some of the guided selections didn't pop as much as they should (maybe increase their text size or give it a background, and increase the pulsing glow of selections) and two, the gameplay could use a little bit of extra excitement, you know, little special effects and animations for attacks, maybe some cool banner transitions for phase changes, etc. For the most part, though, very solid job!

[Roborazzi]

Interesting game! Certainly a bit on the nose with its concept, haha, but I nevertheless found it very clever and fun. Certain elements to the game, such as the character always moving in one direction, seemed odd at first, but I realized that it was part of the way the game adds challenge in trying to keep yourself out of the shot. Loved the presentation as well, with the pictures popping up on the side along with chatter, and negative chatter popping up if you blow it.

While I did have an alright time, the game did start to get a bit monotonous for me. All of the rooms I went to seemed to be the same thing without any means of escalation to them. Also, I couldn't work up the nerve to play again after dying trying to find the exit door on room 3: having to restart all over again from that just felt too punishing, especially considering I felt confused why your batteries still drain even when finding the exit: I was done, after all!

That being said, there was something else that stuck out for me. It's perhaps my fault for getting a false impression of it, but I thought the gameplay didn't live up to the concept as much as I thought it would. It's good as a fast-paced scavenger hunt and all that, but I felt like the concept that the intro was trying to build up to would be some sort of Hitman-esque game where you setup accidents to put people at their worst and then take pictures of them, or perhaps a stalking game where you try and trail people to snap a picture at just the right time when they're doing something bad. You know, I wanted it to get all Nightcrawler (the movie, not the X-men) on me. But again, perhaps I'm being too harsh on a jam game and unfair for judging it on what it wasn't: for what it was, I still thought it was quite neat.

['Brain-Toasting Dungeon']

What a charming little game! The whole "choose-your-own-adventure" style really takes me back to the past, so it's very apt for a flash jam, and this one certainly nails it with a lovely amount of funny scenarios all brought to life with goofy animations. The game doesn't necessarily have much depth to it and it's over so quickly, but it was fun while it lasted and I enjoyed every second of it, including going back to see all the alternative choices. My initial playthrough went through with practically no deaths: I think I caught on to the strategy too quickly of choosing the seemingly stupid choices, haha. Cheers for this!

Butzbo responds:

Wow, great to hear it was a throwback! and it's also fun that you figured the logic of following the weirder choices ;)
The good response makes me think of making a more elaborated story with something like this, we'll see. Thanks for the review!

[Vending Machine Action 2.0]

Whoa, what an incredible game! I love the intensity that this game brings: so many explosions, crazy gunfire, leagues of enemies to blast through, and the bosses, oh man, the bosses are absolute dynamite! When I saw the first boss running with those iconic gunstar-esque limbs, I knew I was in for a good time, and it just kept escalating from there with all sorts of cool variations in level design like battling through a level while being lasered at, or running down a collapsing bridge. Weapon-switching mechanic was pretty neat as well: I thought it felt really gimmicky at first, but I did feel it lead to some cool dynamic fights where you need to be ready to improvise at all times.

It does have some minor issues: for some reason the game's volume is incredibly muted, and even then, I think there is a distinct lack of sound effects in the gameplay, particularly for the enemy death explosions. Sometimes the readability of the game suffers from so much shaking and explosions that you can get hit from a bullet you didn't see. One of the stages just had me stuck at the beginning with no way to proceed until I selected to just skip: bit of an oddity. Finally, the controls can be a bit awkward to get used to, with weird things like having to stop shooting just to pick stuff up, even if you're standing right on top of the pickup when shooting.

Still, this game was such a trip! I'd recommend dressing up the title/intro a bit more as right now it is a bit drab: people need to see a hint at how epic the game can be!

EDIT: AHHH THAT ENDING SEQUENCE AHHH! I never thought a vending machine would make me feel so many emotions

toaster101 responds:

Thank you so much for the feedback :) i'm glad you liked it

[Noir: Deinitialize]

Someone really loves Nier Automata, haha! Definitely a pretty neat game that certainly has a great presentation to it through graphics and sound, though it's largely just ripped from Nier, so I'm only giving you half-credit for that aspect, haha.

But speaking of that, that's kind of the good and bad part of this game for me. On one hand, it's quite fun to run around, blasting and slicing enemies and bullets: feedback is nice, and there is some decent variation to levels in terms of enemies and setup.

But on the other hand, it does have a lot of the bad parts of the hacking minigame from Nier: because so many of the bullets can be destroyed by your attacks just like Nier, except now you have a sword as well as bullets, there's barely any challenge at all. Huge swathes of levels can be beat by just running straight at enemies and mashing to nullify their bullets: it's only until the end when blue bullets and such start showing up that you need to somewhat use your brain a bit.

Heck, even when blue bullets show up, your character has so much health you can still just tank and mash your way through levels. Due to this, the game has a lot of repetition to it that really dulls the experience for me.

Basically, it's decent, but I was really hoping for not just a recreation, but something that takes the idea from Nier and expands on it in a cool new direction. Still, for what it is, I had some good fun.

Yword responds:

Thank you very much for playing! And thank you so much for your great feedback too!

[Admin]

Very clever concept for a game, and executed very well! I had a fun time playing detective, piecing the puzzles together while enjoying the generously abundant flavor text and jokes around the many clickable objects in the office. I wish the game would keep going because I felt like it could've been even more challenging with some more cryptic clues or maybe clues that criss-cross amongst roommates or some other manner of escalation, but for what it was, it was a short and sweet fun time.

Bit disappointed that there was no save function for this game so I could continue where I left off; luckily its not that bad because you can just speedrun it by entering the passwords you know, but still, this is easily a potentially multiple-session game that could be helped by saves. Still, I did come back to play and finish it despite that inconvenience, so take that as a compliment for the game having a great hook!

By the way, I actually guessed the title screen password without even realizing you have to check the yellow sticky, haha! Many years in IT just make it a muscle reflex...

GabeMalk responds:

haha lol I'm so glad you guessed the title screen password like that, I was wondering during development if someone who worked with IT would actually do that... And seems like we got it haha. Thanks for the nice feedback, I hope on expanding this game one day, I have a few other levels written and designed, but everyone in the team (myself included) is working on other projects right now. Anyway, thanks again, cheers!

[Nebula Fighter]

Cool little game! While it is a little game, it still has a decent amount of pizazz to it with cool bomb power-ups, explosions, decent enemy variety, and some neat bosses with interesting patterns to fight through.

It does have some annoyances and confusion to it, though, that kinda hampered my experience. The most egregious was the hitbox of the player being incredibly large, or maybe the hitboxes of the enemy bullets being very large: whichever it is, it made so many shots hit me when I swear they didn't, and made it impossible to try and thread the needle between bullets, which is something I love to do in these games, so I was disappointed I couldn't. Couple that with the enemy bullets appearing without telegraphs and traveling so fast and it made for a frustrating time. Also, I kinda wish the power-ups were a bit more explanatory with symbols or something instead of just colored boxes: I eventually grasped some of the colors, like yellow being speed and green being fire rate, but I had no idea what the black color boxes were, as well as many others.

In the end, though, the game sessions were short and sweet enough that it encouraged me to keep coming back to finish the boss once and for all, so well done!

KJScott responds:

Hit boxes fixed now, minor menu page explanation of drops (think i have a bug there though).

[Randy Learns Science]

Pretty neat game! Really captures the style of those old-school edutainment games with frightening accuracy, down to the glitching hourglass loading! I really enjoyed going through the various games and slowly having the hidden, surreal nature of the game start to creep out, bit-by-bit. My only complaint is that, and maybe I'm just impatient, is whether the juice was worth the squeeze, so to speak. Like I said, I enjoyed playing through and getting subtle hints at the lurking horror, but some aspects of it seemed repetitive to the point of making me want to quit before getting to the conclusion. I felt like the quiz dragged on a bit too long without giving enough variety in creepy responses, and I was stuck in a nigh infinite loop that I just wanted to quit out of, but I couldn't, with the whole sorting game. Would've loved if the game got really meta and recognized how bad I was doing at the sorting game and chastised me or altered the game with a glitch or something, but no, it just kept looping without doing anything, so I felt it was a missed opportunity for some spooks. The periodic game too was really difficult to read and tedious to do, well, until I realized I could just cheese it by clicking haphazardly and I wasn't penalized for that. Speaking of the periodic game, it was weird that it kept playing the 'answer the question' theme when...that only makes sense for the quiz segment. I also wish the periodic game made the pictures you were filling out turn out to be spooky images. Overall, I still consider the game quite memorable and interesting: just would've loved to see more reactivity and variety in the horror aspect of it.

Also a bit confused on the ending: I thought I lost the final challenge by losing all my health, but it still let me continue?

Dungeonation responds:

Got a lot to think about for a sequel now that it’s not for a jam, yeah! Thanks for the feedback! :D

[Seven]

Pretty cool game, but a little bit of a mixed bag for me! On one hand, I thought the movement of the character was very smooth which made platforming fun, and I enjoyed the hidden tech of using the third jump as a booster. Graphics and animations were pleasant as well, especially the character's slow-mo victory o-face (wish he made a sound as well, haha!)

On the other hand, there were a lot of confusing elements to the game. I wasn't sure of the purpose of the rings: at first I thought they were critical otherwise you suffer a time penalty or something, but that didn't seem to be the case? The rings seemed to add so much more to the stages than just the fruits, making you take all sorts of interesting paths, so I felt not making them important was a missed opportunity. If the rings aren't counted, doesn't that just end up confusing the speedrunners? Like, someone's time might look long, but maybe that's because it was an all ring run. But from a glance, the boards don't factor that in, so how could people tell? If the purpose is that you only want rings in zen mode, why then put them in the speedrunning mode as well?

Some other minor feedback was that my final time wasn't what I expected it to be, wasn't sure if it factored in level deaths, so it'd be good to display not only a timer for the level you're on, but what your running total is as well. Also, for a speedrunning game, I was hoping for a bit more tech to it: while the triple jump kick was cool, running was barely noticeable, and I would like to see other parkour moves like wall jumping and such that players could use to their advantage with skill. Still, as said before, game had a good core to it: just a little bit confusing with its execution.

[Midnight Cartridge]

Rather than "headphones recommended," I'd almost suggest "headphones required," because this game does some great things with directional audio to create a really spooky experience! Loved using my ears to listen for both the hum of the item I needed to collect, and the horrifying distortion of the thing hunting me. Also liked the level design and how it peppered around this roundabouts here and there to let you give the hunter the slip. Definitely did a good job at nailing that horror atmosphere through the visuals and especially, the sound. My only complaint was that it did overstay its welcome a bit for me: maybe I'm just impatient or bad, but having to collect 9 whole items in the same drab maze over and over, with some trips being very long as I need to dodge around and such, only to fail with a dead-end and have to restart, kind of ruined it for me, just a bit. Still, overall had a great time, and that's coming from someone who tries to avoid spooky games whenever possible!