FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[MonkeyBusiness]

Game is a bit of a mixed bag for me. On one hand, it doesn't really look finished and is lacking a lot of polish and content to it. I mean, c'mon, you can only pick Jotaro? What about Dio! Jokes aside, there's only one level and it's quite plain, the camera is way too zoomed out generally, and the game moves way too fast at times with little depth to it. However, on the other side, the game actually does have some polish to it, with nice things like a sudden death mode to avoid people taking too long after someone dies, AI bots (so many multi games lack these), satisfying punches with hit-stop, and explosions with cinematic finishes and so on. Also, the simple controls and fast movement can, in a way, give it a nice fast-paced, simplified Dive Kick-esque feel to it all. Basically, I think the game could be a lot of fun if you keep at it: its very rough right now but there are signs of potential here.

[IMP]

Solid game once again! Reminds me a lot of DED GUY, and just like with that, I had a lot of fun with it. Some of the controls were a little confusing at first, particularly with the wall grab where you have to keep pressing a direction into a wall to hold on, instead of being able to let go when you're attached to slide down slowly (if you let go now you fall). Also, I kinda wish, in addition to the 3-stage timer, there was a circular bar or something around your character depleting letting you see more accurately how much time you have left till zero: it's not necessary, but it might help reduce frustration by letting the player more accurately see their remaining time so they can time their jumps (though I understand not being able to see this is part of the appeal and challenge). Anyway, those are just small nitpicks and possible improvements: as usual, my only real complaint is that I sucked this game dry, including all of the 'randomly difficult' levels, and I want more, more, more!

[Nightmare Breaker]

Hahaha, I was wondering why it was so hard, until I got to the end after two levels: I guess when you only have that much, you gotta make it even harder to stretch it out! Anyway, this was a pretty cool experience: a hard as heck challenge with nice graphics, sound, music and presentation overall. It did kinda feel like it threw you to the lions immediately without even a warmup, and some of the things like enemies that explode and shower you with damaging projectiles were overly harsh, but for me, I enjoyed the challenge. I gotta say, though, that the jumping controls were really frustrating: I know its Castlevania to make it so that you have no mid-air control, but when you combine this with the really tight challenges you've built and the fact that the character has this awkward squat-delay before they actually jump, it just really didn't feel fair and good to play at times. Anyway, it's a nice little game that I'd like to see expanded (as long as the movement is a bit more smoother)!

[Sleep Mode]

Mmm, as a fan of Gyromite and other escort type games, I really want to like this game, and I do somewhat, but in its current state its a bit too frustrating to play. The fact that so much of the gameplay hinges on you having to move enemies that you can't see to press buttons you can't see, while synchronizing movements with other enemies you can't see, is a recipe for confusion and ultimately frustration. I think it's a neat idea and I'd like to see more, but something needs to be done to help the player always see the elements and information they need to figure out a solution, whether it being stuff like zooming out the camera so you can see everything, compacting the levels so elements are closer, slowing down the player movement so you have more time to make decisions, etc.

[Slimoban]

Interesting puzzler! Gets pretty hard really fast, and lays into you with the whole 'tricking slimes into moving objects for you' aspect, which was cool to figure out. Presentation was nice as well with good graphics and animations. Controls are a bit frustrating though: there's no input buffering so if you press a movement key even a nanosecond before your previous movement is over, it ignores the input, and this can lead to frustrating slowdown and unintentional moves if you're inputting in sequence. Also, I don't know why the controls were spread between keyboard for moving and mouse for shooting: I guess it makes sense in retrospect, but it felt weird like everything could've been done from just the keyboard or just the mouse (why can we not click on a square to move to it, for example). Still, had a fun time, even though I got stumped early, haha!

[AutoLand]

Nice little one-button game! In general, the game had some great levels to go through with escalating challenges and mechanics, it felt smooth to control and I had a lot of fun. I did think that there were some minor nitpicks to the gameplay though: I kind of wish that when you reach a wall, the character wouldn't just stop, but turn around and keep going automatically; I understand it if you're in the air, since you want to wall jump, but not when you're walking. Also, I don't know why when you reach a key door with a key, you bounce off of the door when it unlocks instead of going through effortlessly (you do in the air, but not on the ground). And that one level where you just have to trial and error which corridor to go down with no way to back out was a misstep though: that was just really unfair and unfun. Overall, though, nice game.

[Climb To The Top]

Pretty goofy game that I think could work great, but at the moment is too difficult to control to get into it. I had initially assumed that you need to click and hold-down your click to keep your hand gripped to a rock, but in this game a click over a rock just has your hand lunge to a rock and grab it...sometimes. I never really felt like I was in control, sometimes the guy would grab a rock and other times they wouldn't and would get stuck on things. It was kinda fun to wiggle the character around to try and get ideal grips, but at the end of the day it just felt random and uncontrollable. Getting Over It is my game of the year, but that's because it has super-solid control: this thing just doesn't work for me right now.

In terms of other feedback, the intro is a bit of a mixed bag: the plain default start button is a bad sign, but the way the camera swooshes over as a transition is a neat effect. The rules for climbing can be a bit confusing and unexplained: I was lucky since I boulder a lot, so I knew that, for example, you can double-grip a hold, and that you need to do this for the final hold for it to consider a climb finished, but I predict many people won't know this fact, so it should be explained in game (maybe make the final hold be a different color or a finish-line checkboard pattern with two hand prints on it, for example).

[Mini Crawler]

Seems like it could be a decent game, but the lack of sound/music as well as a unique hook really hurts it in its current state. It has some decent fights and enemy variety and I like the idea of battling in the dark, with the torch you pick at the beginning determining your player light radius and thus, in a way, your difficulty, and the way the room lights up when you win is cool. I think the game being based around light is really cool, and it wish it was explored further: I'd love it if the players projectiles helped illuminate the room as well so our fireball spell would double both as a means of illumination and immolation. It's really weird that the enemy projectiles illuminate the room better than the player's do: I think the lighting for all projectiles should be like multiplied by 4 or 5 times greater to create a cool, frenetic light show as you fight, trying to see where the enemies are inbetween their flashes. In fact, you could make it the player light is really small so that your fireballs are the only real way to see enemies: it'd create some really crazy fights! Other than that, there were a few other nitpicks like how it was annoying how some skeletons could take 2 fireballs instead of 1 (that should be kept consistent) and how overly-powerful the mines were in comparison to your fireball.

Balbazour responds:

Thank you so much for the detailed feedback!
I will certainly listen to your advice and work to make it better.

[Contract Rush]

The game looks like it should be really good with its impressive animation and art, but unfortunately the actual gameplay I found was quite boring except for the boss fight at the end, and even they were a little too bullet-spongy. The game made a very good first impression on me, but it didn't take long for the levels to start to look repetitive and the combat to get boring as you see the same tile art over and over with huge swathes of blank, empty space and haphazardly placed platforms: it looked like it had been randomly generated as there was a lack of any cool level design to create some fun platforming or enemy compositions to battle through. I think the assets were stretched too wide: if the game was compressed to be shorter I think it might've been paced better. I couldn't really get excited about any of the upgrades the game gives you either: apart from the gun upgrades, the jumping and movement upgrades didn't really do much and were difficult to keep track of. The game did have some nice qualities to it, such as the player hitbox being smaller than their body so you could dodge bullets easier, but it also had some lazy qualities like not programming in a separate death animation for falling (it just kinda freezes you mid-air and places the same death), no coyote jumping, no cool and unique abilities to play around with for our character, and so on. I think the art assets of this game are too good to be lost in a game in this state: would love to see these characters come back in a more fully-featured game!