FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[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.

[Wolf's Bane 3]

Game seems to have some interesting stuff hidden in there going for it, but it just felt overly clunky, confused and inconsistent for me. A lot of the potentially gory stuff, such as the clown carving into the two 'parents', was undercut by the RPG-esque fantasy omnislash graphics and sound: would help to replace those with customized graphics and sound that is more bloody and splattery. Dialogue was a bit awkward at times with characters changing how they behave a whole bunch based on how they were written: Ada going from super shy kid to a quippy laid-back adult came up a lot for example. There were just a lot of weird quips in general which kinda killed the flow, like the thug suddenly asking to clarify their gender; those kind of things could be cut I believe to preserve the tone. I was still intrigued by this game and its creepy undertones, so I wanted to get farther to see what would happen, but I'm most likely going to give up because I wasn't able to save my game: it seems like the game only lets you access the menu to save when you're in free-roam, but 99% of the game is constant talking so I never got a chance!

[C-19 Conspiracy Story]

It's an alright mad-lib generator that could create some fancy stories, but it seems to be a bit confusing in its construction: for example, when it asks for a 'last adjective', its actually expecting you to enter a noun in the story. Also it might help to sanitize all of the entered words to lowercase to remove weird capitalization that can disrupt sentences, or perhaps give more advice to the user on whether the words you enter should be capitalized or not.

[In the Time of Pandemia]

Pretty neat management game! A bit frustrating at times since you don't really feel in control (people refusing to isolate on your command, etc) but I guess that was the whole point since it's realistic (but if it was, perhaps the game could've been shortened to get to that point quicker so as not to frustrate the user when you want them to go for a high score which they have no control over besides luck at times). It really dumps you with a lot of info at the start and it was difficult to digest all at once: the game does try to help by having a info read-out and a reference menu you can go to, but I really wanted there to be more reference material on the game screen, either by making the info read-out bigger and more easily readable, or by providing a legend/key for peoples status since I was having difficulty remembering them on the fly. I also feel like if you need to constantly explain that a lower score is better, it might just be easier to change the score formula calculation so that a high score is better, so people can just use their natural instincts, haha. Anyway, while it was a bit confusing and frustrating, its still pretty fun and delivers a nice message effectively through its gameplay (and frustration) so kudos!

[Super Cosmic Land]

Very impressive and stylish platformer! Game has a really professional and smooth feel to it with tons of small details and touches to practically everything, along with some great overall art, sound and music! So far I've played all the way to the first boss and had a nice time with it, with the boss being actually a bit challenging to fight at first due to the long fuse time on bombs. I do like how the game doesn't bother with lives: helps keep the pace up. Sometimes the game can be a bit overly detailed at times though, haha: I found that a lot of the signage and pick-ups, which should be important, were very difficult to notice since they are so small and don't pop out from the rest of the art, especially since you can't use colors to make them pop. Using the bombs are interesting but a bit too slow for my tastes (and annoying to die from friendly fire): they were so slow I ended up just running past everything as much as possible instead: might be better if your could throw them or they had a shorter fuse or something. Key doors/totems were a bit confusing as well, overcomplicating it: its like you pick up an object or don't and it activates a totem which signals that the door is open? It's a bit crazy that it doesn't seem to save your game: I was really looking forward to coming back and finish this after I saw that there were 6 places for boss trophies, but I can't do all of that in one sitting, haha!