FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Dead Estate Dressup]

I'm not one for dress-up games, but this one is pretty cute! Definitely a lot of juice in this game: everything is so lively with the way objects pop as you pick them up and place them down. Pleased to see the sheer amount of variety and functionality as well, tons of costumes and backgrounds with the ability to isolate the character for a shot. Was hoping for the ability to manipulate object layers like some dress-ups do, but it's all good. Might also help, since some costumes are just so built to match certain contours, if they would just snap into position instead of it being free-form.

[Chucan Fall]

Hmm, game has some ups and downs. For example, the title screen logo is very impressive, but the rest of the HUD elements such as the credits, score display, and so on are very bland hard-to-read text: could use a bit more stylization or outlines to add a little bit of a professional touch. Graphics seemed a bit haphazard as well with the coins and mines looking good, but the actual platforms looking like a sprite that's been awkwardly stretched/resized. The gameplay is quite basic, nothing to write home about, but it's functional: was confused on why I would die when I didn't land on a platforms, and why I couldn't recover from death by landing on one during my death fall (feels a bit unfair to not be able to). Controls were a bit confusing at first with me not realizing I had to click the sides of my screen with the mouse (thought I could just click to the left or right of my character to move in that direction) so I switched to keyboard which worked better. Seems like an alright idea, but I think it's just missing a lot of spice and something special to make it really stand-out from others.

GoodL responds:

Thanks! I always appreciate your feedback, and honestly since you reviewed World War Wizards a year ago I've always kept what you said in mind while working on new games. I really do appreciate it! I totally agree with what you're saying on the text, it's absolutely true that I didn't put in a whole lot of effort there, other than the title screen text, and doing so definitely could have applied that extra polish. It does look a bit... unfinished I suppose.

As for the mouse movement, Construct defaults "touch" inputs with with mouse pointer inputs. I never intended anyone to play this game with a mouse. I suppose I could have disabled that from even being possible.

You are not wrong that the platform sprites are a bit awkwardly stretched. Despite doing this game in pixel art, I didn't actually use "true" 1x1 pixel art when it game to putting the assets I drew in game. I'll keep that in mind next time. It's something I usually like to do, but I guess I was slackin'.

Lastly, in my mind it made sense that if you didn't land on every platform then you'd be "falling too fast" so you would "take too much fall damage from landing on a platform after missing one." But I do realize that that isn't exactly cohesive with the fact that the fall speed increases over time. Honestly I was hoping to hand wave that away with "video game logic." lol

Thanks again, and happy new year!

[Slipways]

Boy was I lost when starting this game, haha! Glad I was able to eventually find the 'How to Play' menu button: maybe make that pop-up automatically when you start a new game, because boy, I can't see anyone figuring this out without it! Gotta say though, even with the help, I was still lost for a good long time: I wasn't aware, for example, that planets could export their product without fulfilling what they need imported first (for example, I thought a mining planet would need people going to it so as to work the mine in the first place, so no ore could come out). Also just seemed to be overly frustrating: so many probes uncovering empty planets or planets I don't need, everything I needed was too far apart from others, and so on. I know it all sounds bad, but I'll admit, though, once my first run ended and I realized more how everything worked and that runs were short to get a score, I was actually quite eager to get back in and try again! Definitely an ambitious game that has a lot of nice little touches to it and cool juicy graphics: maybe a little more help with the onboarding process in terms of explaining goals/score and basic gameplay, and from there, it should be great as-is!

[Face It!]

Surprisingly fun and well put together! I will say, I was totally lost on how the game worked at first: the tutorial was just a wall of text that didn't explain things well (maybe break it down into a few pages instead with more pictures/examples). Eventually I grasped that the objective was something like to pick the face that has the most commonalities shared amongst the others or something, and I ended up having a lot of fun upping the difficulties as I got better and better! I liked how polished and juicy the game felt with the cool transitions and pop-ups and goofy, funny art style: really solid presentation that made everything flow well and get me addicted for more!

[Don't Eat My Mind You Stupid Monsters!]

Pretty fun and fast-paced action game! Was really tough at first, and a little confusing to grasp (for example, I thought the glowy enemies were powerups at first) but it did feel like the game was something you could get skilled at more and more but jumping around and slashing more effectively, so it felt nice. Cool art style and concept as well. Downsides were that the game felt a bit repetitive at times (only two enemy types from what I could tell with no real goal or ending), my hand was hurting from having to click so much to kill the spongy enemies, and I felt like I had a lot of cheap deaths from breakdowns happening so quickly right under my feet where you can't see them or my jumps being just a pixel off a tile.

[Color Cube]

Augh, I'm so bad at these games, but I'll try and not let that influence my review, haha! Had a good time playing it, was put together pretty well and offered some neat puzzles that slowly built up the complexity to let the player grasp the essentials. While the game is fine, I will say that the HUD graphics are pretty drab and dull and kind of pull the game down, at least for me: plain text with no outlines or style, and a victory message that has no fanfare or even capitalization! Could stand to be polished up a bit so it enhances the solid gameplay. Keyboard controls were a little confusing because of the titled perspective, so I ended up using the touch controls on screen since they helped, so that was nice.

[Hazel the Plant Witch]

Goddamn, what a charming game! I really love the dialogue system in the game with how it works off of your limited recordings: felt awesome to talk with everyone and gather the appropriate lines like a puzzle/investigation, and it was very impressive in how many ways the plants reacted to every type of line you'd deliver (even the ones I'd just do as jokes, haha). So innovative and clever: blows modern dialogue systems outta the water since it actually involves more than just checking off everything in a tree or picking the best response! Reminded me of old-school games like Shadowrun or Wizardry where you could collect discussion topics to help your investigation. It did get a little frustrating at times with the limited recording space, but the game was short and sweet enough to not be an issue with that. Top off that innovative design with some really cute graphics and story; this is a winner! Now if you'll excuse me, I gotta go back in and collect the rest of the dialogue!

minibunnies responds:

Thank you so much for this wonderful feedback! I'm really glad to hear you enjoyed the puzzle of the game. We tried our best to cover all of the dialogue options we felt made sense, even some of the more obscure random lines. I'm happy that you found a lot of those lines! We wanted to restrict how many lines you could have at once to make the choice of what you record matter. I can certainly understand how that limitation might be frustrating though! It really means a lot to hear how much you enjoyed it, thank you for your kind words.

[NullCat]

Very cool puzzle platformer! Very nice overall presentation and the mechanics were very interesting. There were some really clever tricks in there that played around with the rules of the game in very fun ways! Had a blast making my way through it: the levels kept upping the ante in subtle ways and I was totally addicted. I'm not sure if it was just me tripping or the wavy environment playing tricks on my eyes, but I did feel like something was off about the jumping? I dunno, it felt a bit inconsistent at times with how high you would go. Caused me a bit of confusion and frustration at the stubbiness of the jump, but nothing major as I was able to make it all the way to the end nonetheless.

[Elemental Tiles]

Another really solid game! I'm not usually one for tile-pushy games, but something about it being 'spells' made my brain think I was having a blast, haha. The power of theming, I suppose. Felt like the game did a great job with the level design, in that it constantly kept the variety up by introducing new mechanics and upping the complexity, while still also providing ways to make the new systems feel very intuitive. I found myself getting easily addicted to it. Didn't suffer any major issues that I could tell, apart from I did think some of the symbols were a bit confusing: the symbol for 'wind' (at least I think it's wind) might be better represented with a swooshy spiraly line instead of the snowflake looking thing. Solid work all around!

[Shake Art]

Pretty neat and silly artistic tool! Dunno if it's much of a game unfortunately, but I did have some fun goofing around making some drawings and shaking them about. I was hoping for a bit more functionality, like other tools to mess around with, or the ability to save/print/share our drawings and such, or maybe a game to go with it, perhaps based on our drawings (I mean, Vib-Ribbon, which I looked up based on this, did have a neat game to go with it). Anyway, I don't mean to harp on that so much: it's still quite nice, reminds me of generative art assignments back in college. One thing I did find a little confusing was the decision to make 'end line' actually cancel the line you're currently making, instead of finalize the line: I initially thought to make a line you'd left click and then right click, but instead you made it left, left, right: got used to it but I would occassionally mess up and lose progress.

nokoi responds:

its funny cause im making a sequel and almost every feature you mentioned is already in the to-do list lol