FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Gravity Storm - First Mission Demo 1]

Nice little retro game!

It's a little bit basic overall and feels like a 'my first action platformer' game from a first-timer dev, but I don't want to be too down on it because it actually does a lot of things very well in terms of design:

For one, it starts out strong by immediately getting the player into the action and introducing some cool mechanics like gravity switching.

Next, the game kept my interest by having each level add something fresh and distinct to the mix, be it a new mechanic, tileset, obstacles and so on, alongside mixing it all together with tricky combinations.

Finally, it all ends with a good ol' boss fight which has a decent attack pattern and an enrage phase!

So yeah, it's not necessarily anything groundbreaking or truly interesting, but it was a fun short romp and I think it displayed some good design fundamentals that a lot of other games in this ilk get wrong, particularly from first-timers! And yeah, it's nice to see more appreciation for Metal Storm: I was a latecomer to that game myself!

[the ancient little wizard]

Hah, quite the amusing little game! I quite like the goofy vibes to it and especially enjoy all of the interactions you can have with objects and people. Creating a whole stealth system for these stores was very interesting and livened up the experience above my expectations. There were also a lot of secrets like NPCs that sell special items, recruitments, and the ability to find a pointier hat that upgrades your height stat by 1 which I assume makes no actual difference in anything important, haha! All in all it seemed like a fun little adventure!

While I did enjoy it at the start, I'll admit that around the second trinket I was starting to fall out of love with it. The stealth system seemed buggy and I got seen plenty of times even though I was clearly hiding behind objects that should've blocked their sight. The combat system had no depth to it and could easily be solved by just spamming meteors and meditating with the occasional heal thrown in, turning it into just a hassle (maybe my fault for picking combat mode, but how was I supposed to know without trying?) And every store just felt like more of the same without any sense of progression or escalation, which alongside NPCs repeating lines just made the world lose its allure.

Having said that, morbid curiosity did make me go back and play a bit more, and for some reason I encountered the void walker and was able to go home with only 3 trinkets? Not sure if that was a glitch or maybe I get a better ending if I get all 5?

Would certainly love to see more goofy adventures like this: just needs a little bit more meat on its bones to keep the adventure novel and interesting the whole way through instead of stalling out like it did here!

ArlucGames responds:

Thanks for such an in depth review! It's nice to hear of someone trying to engage with the whole game, which does of course expose its flaws...
The stealth (like most games) was never fully padded out, as the game is so short anyway, but I understand how that can be frustrating.
Combat was also thrown in for variety but not fleshed out, again just wanting to keep the game simple.
You can actually reach Void Walker with just 1 trinket. This was intentional and reading the item descriptions will make it clear which one it is 😉
Did you get the secret ending? If you help out the skeletons, they'll point you in the right direction. Though the secret ending is also simple and more of a gag so you may not want to go through the effort 😅
Thanks so much for playing and hope you'll try out my other games in the future! Which I hope to be a bit more involved than this quick little project 😁

[MEATBALL the MITE]

Pretty cool metroid game! In some respects, the game is rather basic and not necessarily anything we haven't seen before, but I still found it to be a very fun adventure: the goofy, highly-animated visuals and 'cells at work' inner-body concept was very charming, and the way the world is constructed has a good balance of generally being linear, small and guided enough to keep the momentum up while still having some sense of being lost and backtracking through a big world. I enjoyed collecting upgrades, finding secrets, and duking it out against bosses: all in all, solid work!

If I were to have any feedback:

*It'd be nice if the map showed you icons next to the teleporters indicating what world they take you to, similar to the signs next to them in the world. There's kind of something like this on the zoom-out map (which took me a while to find, could be more obvious, maybe use a word like 'world map' or something instead) where it creates bridges between them, but this only happens when you manually zoom-in and out for each one-by-one?

*It'd be nice if the pause menu allowed you to look through your upgrades that you've collected: sometimes it can be easy to forget what you've acquired, especially when coming back after a break, and it can be helpful as a hint for where to go next.

*It's probably a big ask, but it'd be great if the map had even more functionality like being able to place icons or notes manually to remember things that the map doesn't naturally keep track of itself.

*Can be frustrating to figure out what blocks are destructible and what blocks look like they are, but aren't for some reason, and what blocks are only destructible from quakes happening and which quakes will cause that and which won't and so on. This caused a lot of unnecessary backtracking and confusion: maybe the map could provide more information?

[Martian Mayhem!]

Hmm, not too shabby!

For the most part, it seems like a decent Minecraft/Terraria-clone with enough of the fundamentals down-pat to create that classic addictive loop of looking for resources to create the next thing, but at the same time it feels like a very early alpha or a tech demo, showing off that its got all of the necessary functionality to make a game, but not actually being a game yet as it is still lacking the bells and whistles to make it appealing, stand out from the crowd, and truly suck me in.

I gave it my best shot and had a bit of fun at the start, but it quickly lost me. The world just felt so big, dry and lifeless that I easily got lost and it quickly felt tiresome, it didn't feel like the building tools allowed for me to get creative or build something nice like a house, and there was just a lack of any sort of guide, motivation or goal to strive for. The biggest frustration was trying to find coal to build a furnace: I looked and I looked, but every time I thought I might've found some, it turned out to be flint instead! Wish those two elements looked a lot different from each other so I could spot them more easily, and wondering if I got screwed by the procedural generation.

Other than that, there are some minor issues like how I wish moving items around in the inventory was a bit simpler by just holding down left-click to drag items instead of having to double-click to engage this movement mode it has.

Basically, it's currently a good skeleton of a game: just needs some meat on its bones!

masonmcleen responds:

thanks for leaving a review! yeah, future updates of martian mayhem are sure to bring more content to the game and make the world feel more diverse. what i want to eventually do is add more creative options (i.e a set of 7 blocks for each color of the rainbow, more decorations) and also more functional items like chests and signs and the like. With coal, I've made it blue in the upcoming update because you're not alone - alot of my friends had the same issue haha! the two resources look very similar. i'll see what i can do with moving items, dragging them might be hard to figure out how to do in the game engine i use but i will for sure look in to it. i'll also make a walkthrough and add some in-game hints so players looking to "complete" the game have some guidance. but anyway, thank you for playing and reviewing! your criticism helps me make the game a better experience :)

[Shaman Steps]

Cool puzzle game! Overall very solid work: an interesting and mind-bending concept, charming and juicy presentation, an addictive sense of progression as levels get more complex with more mechanics/tribesmen to juggle, and a nice difficulty curve with levels that both subtly introduce the rules and challenge you with interesting twists and combinations. I admit I'm probably not going to finish it because my brain is the size of a walnut, but that's not stopping me from finding it to be a good game!

[Worm Paint]

Hah, quite the charming little game! It reminds me of being a kid and playing around with apps like Mario Paint or point n click adventures like the Magic School Bus or Lego Island, primarily because there's just so many goofy nonsensical things to click on and mess around with. It's a bit of a bummer that ultimately the game is rather shallow and pointless: I say it reminds me of Mario Paint but it has nowhere near the level of creation tools and there is no way to save/share your creations with other people and such, but still, it was a fun little nostalgic experience!

[Santa's Impossible Mission]

Hah, quite the cute little game you got here! It's quite short and pretty rough and janky in a lot of respects, but there was a nice variety of games to keep things interesting, the scribbly papercraft presentation was very whimsical, and in general the game exudes these innocent and wholesome childhood vibes. I was really pleased by some of the charming little touches that you took the effort to put in, like the way failure in the etch-a-sketch minigame has the tablet get shaken to reset it, or the multiple forms you transform into during the sneaking mission, haha!

In particular, this reminds me a lot of games I've seen from ThePeterson, especially in regards to the art style!

[Wallpaper 2.0 Collab]

Hmm, I don't want to be mean as I think the intention is good in making these collabs and there's a lot of great art here. But, for that very reason that there's a lot of great art and artists that deserve appreciation here, I want the presentation that this collab offers to make the art all the more appealing. When looking at this, all I could think of was Gordon Ramsey's famous words: "it's fucking RAW!"

Forget displaying the art in a very creative or interesting fashion that could garner attention, this presentation is the absolute bare minimum that could be done to present the art and nothing more. It is completely lacking any sort of quality-of-life features as well as any bells and whistles to make the experience appealing. Seriously, the official playlist you made for the art is miles above this: at least there you can easily access the artist profiles to see their other works or follow them, as well as being able to see the art itself in a larger view and download it, which makes sense for a wallpaper.

Again, the art is lovely and I love the sense of community and cooperation that comes from events like this: I just think that more effort needs to be put into the presentation to match the large effort that the artists put in when making their wonderful pieces. It's all out of balance right now! But hey, better luck in the future and I hope to see more cool projects like this.

ColorfulCeleste responds:

Honestly I absolutely agree. I really feel like it would've worked better if scratch was only used as a last resort to package it (it really isn't too difficult to build a gallery now and days). It was really an issue of not asking if anybody had an alternative to scratch tbh.

[Add Town]

Cute little arcade game! Overall it feels very fun and addictive, with both a neat concept and a simplistic but lively presentation. The sprouts randomly appearing can be frustrating when it screws over a move you planned out, but for the most part its great fun to try and improvise to the best of your ability to keep everything balanced!

If I were to offer any feedback, I'd say that I feel like the transition between moves is a bit too fast and makes it easy to lose track of elements (especially when combined with the bounce) and that I wish the game was a bit more juicy with more satisfying sound/visual effects when making combinations you've been building up as a reward.

[Planet Orbit]

Hmm, it's a pretty decent arcade-y mobile game: not exactly something that's blowing me away or making me want to recommend it to anyone, but the gameplay concept of planet-hopping and eyeballing angles/trajectories makes for a fairly simplistic but addictive loop, making it perfect for a small timewaster!

I am a bit confused with its design though. For one, the randomization of the planets means that scores somewhat come down to luck: sometimes I get a high score because the game is generous enough to give me a bunch of big planets, and other times the game starts off with tiny planets and I lose early on due to the difficulty of that. Perhaps instead the planets should start off large and gradually shrink? I'm also confused about the bonus point pips that orbit planets as again, it feels like you can only luck into them because if you're not naturally going to intercept them, there's nothing you can do to alter your orbit to make it otherwise.