FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Picowars]

Pretty cool recreation of Advance Wars! It's not my favorite type of game (I never get far in these type of games when they start to turn way too challenging, haha) but it seemed fairly well put-together and impressive. However, I feel like the game is missing a lot of quality of life which is necessary for people who aren't familiar with Advance Wars (especially since it's not 100% guaranteed that the game will work exactly the same way even if you are familiar). I know it's a fan-game, so you could argue that people should expect to be familiar with the game and not need a tutorial, but even taking that into consideration, the game could really use a way to see a unit's info to figure out what are their properties and strengths, and its missing crucial HUD read-outs like range-targetting for artillery and projected damage for when you do an attack, and so on. It's probably difficult to put all that into a pico-8 game, but it's absolutely necessary for this to work. Still, it's a very good core game you got here nonetheless.

lambdanaut responds:

Thanks for the review! I agree it's missing some pieces, and a tutorial would really be ideal.
Range is there for ranged units though. Hold 'X' on them to see their range :)

[[BTNverse] Prep-school horrors]

This is a really, really, strange game, and I of course mean that in the best way, haha. Love the really weird environment, kooky battles, and mysterious nature that permeates it which shocks and disturbs you constantly. Who says that all horror games need to be these first-person low-light no-weapon run-away games? This does a great job at building an unsettling and mysterious atmosphere, while simultaneously also being action-packed and fun with its great soundtrack and weird combat. The obtuse mechanics can be a bit of a double-edged sword at times: while its fun to get lost in the bizarreness and try to piece together what the heck you're even doing, some of the weirdness can be frustrating to figure out. For example, the pathfinding of your allies can be really, really bad, making you back-track to try to keep them all together or to make them pick up weapons (thankfully though, it seems that the game assembles all of them for a fight no matter what, so why even have them wandering around and getting lost instead of just putting them in your pocket like other RPGs if it just confuses you in the end?) The combat can also fluctuate between challenging and fun, way too erratic and unpredictable to realistically fight, to just braindead if you have a bunch of allies that just annihilate the enemy before it can even show you its moves. Basically, the game is a really crazy game, which makes it very interesting as an experience, but it sometimes works against itself with how crazy it can be, haha! Made it to ending 1/8 (lost the engineering headmaster) and will try and see if I can go for the others!

adriendittrick responds:

Thanks a lot for this thoughtful review, and I'm glad you had fun in my little existential dread of a universe :)

[Gravity Hook]

Fun little action game! Had a good time going for a right score in this as everything is so explosive and chaotic. The game does have a lot of juicy aspects to it like squash-stretch and screenshake which makes it feel nice, but it might be overdoing it a bit, particularly with the screenshake. When I first played the game, I died because I didn't even realize I was being damaged: this is because every action in the game shakes the screen intensely, which makes it so getting damaged, which shakes the screen, doesn't stand out from the rest of the shaking. Either the intensity of the shaking needs to be lessened in general to make the damage shake stand out more, or damage should elicit another reaction from the game, like a brief timepause or a red flash or something. I also felt the damage invulnerability was a little too short as you can get wombo comboed and lose all three hearts in an instant if you're not careful. Mechanics can also be a bit confusing at times: sometimes I'd hit the wall behind an enemy and dash into them (for example, when you hook behind an enemy while they're spawning), but that counts as me getting hurt even though it should be similar to hooking the enemy directly and dashing into them. Still, solid game that felt well-put together for some quick fun!

[STOP]

Awesome puzzler! This really hit it outta the park for me: great, professional presentation with nice polish like squash and stretch animations and transitions and so on, great platforming with subtle gamefeel inclusions like coyote time and rounded edges for clambering up, great pacing with the level design and steady introduction of mechanics and increasing difficulty, and very creative and fun puzzles! I'd love to see even more puzzles in this as I just wanted to keep playing more and more; you got me hooked! Only complaints I had were minor: one, the rounded edges for platforms is a double-edged sword since, while it makes it easier to get on a platform when you're jumping up to it, it also makes it so you can slip off a platform if you're standing on the edge of it, which shouldn't happen, and two, I felt like maybe the door puzzles should've been put before the bullet puzzles because the bullet puzzles were like the cherry on the sundae which maybe should be left for last as a matter of escalation (but then again, they say you should put your best stuff forward, so maybe having the bullets early is a good hook).

[Box Factory]

Neat puzzler! Got pretty tricky at times, but I had fun solving the puzzles. The difficulty curve was a bit all over the place however, where you finish a really easy stage, then suddenly a really hard stage, and then it's back to easy, and so on. I guess it did keep it fresh somewhat, but I'd prefer a more gradual increase in difficulty (though I know that can be tricky to determine). For example, as early as level 4 there was a really tough level to solve considering it was still in the kinda tutorial period! Controls were a bit frustrating too: because of the diagonal view, sometimes it tricky to tell, for example, where pressing a direction will actually send you to. Obviously not an issue if you use the touch controls in the corner which are angled appropriately, but for keyboard arrows, it gets confusing. Anyway, at the end of the day, I had fun with the puzzles and it was put together very nicely in all aspects, despite some difficulty bumps.

[Cerbirds]

A cute goofy game from an art and presentation perspective, but kinda lacking in gameplay for me. The game just has a really janky feel to it, and I'm not talking about the cute way the birds bob up and down, which is adorable. Moving around was really odd and bumping into stuff was nauseating with the way it jerks the camera and player around: ramps cause all sorts of weird jank to happen where you'll be suddenly falling or sliding down. The hitboxes are all over the place as well: birds differ in size so sometimes switching in certain places gets you stuck and breaks the game. The powers didn't seem very creative either: most of the time you just switch to the bird that fixes the obstacle right in front of you and that's it. They do have some hidden powers, like gliding, but I was hoping the level to have more challenges that require you to use the birds in ways you might not think of immediately. I think there's a decent core here, and the idea of switching between birds for powers is novel, but the game needs a lot of smoothing to help reduce the glitchiness of it as well as some extra meat on its bones to become something great.

DantonSlip responds:

Thanks for that really complete feedback! It's always nice to have those ones!

This was my first gamejam game in solo and I was afraid to think too big and since I didn't knew my engine very well, I wanted to keep things simple at first, to have things working (which is, as you can see, more or less achieved but imagine if I had made a bigger game hahahaa) and have some basis to work on later. : ) I'm glad that I had such feedbacks, it helps me to point out things that weren't that well (even in a that small project) and seeing some people playing the game gave me lot of informations of how to make Cerbirds more comprehensible.

I'm currently working on a more complete version. First of all, I enhanced the colliders in order to not frustrate the player. I have some little enhancement to do in a core code side to clean up everything and solve some little hiccups that can be annoying. I also have multiple ideas to make those mechanics used in a better way (which will end up to some puzzles solving by using birds abilities) and a real level design.

Thanks again for your feedback, I really appreciate it!

[Lost In Dungeon]

Pretty cool game: deceptively simple with a little twist at the end! The story twist certainly elevates what would be a fairly basic game without much to it into something interesting, but just like how I think the game didn't have enough content to it, I don't think the twist had enough on it either. I actually think the torch throwing mechanic could be pretty cool at making some great dungeon crawling experiences, but you only ever really get to play with it for a very short time and nothing uses it very creatively: really most of the challenges can actually be solved by jumping with the torch and restarting when you die instead of throwing the torch. The best challenges are hidden behind the twist, like the spike fall, but even those aren't that hard or fun. It was kinda fun to figure out the trick behind the game, and there was some funny dialogue and such, but in the end I felt a bit empty: the game barely put up any resistance once you found the twist and it was over so short, surely the game didn't want you to escape so it should've been longer and harder to make it a fight. Just felt like there could be more, so take that as a compliment that you hooked me! I'm assuming it was a game jam game so apologies if I come off overly harsh: again, hopefully the fact that I said so much shows that you got something special that could be bigger and better. Also, I gotta give you credit for the courage to hide a significant part of your game behind a trick that many most likely won't find: takes guts to do that, and I do appreciate it!

OneThatEatYou responds:

It's late but thanks for the detailed review!

I did notice the fact that all platforms needs to be reached using the highest jump a little too late, so I did not change it. I will attempt to remove this linear-ness in my future games.

I can see that it also lacks variation because it was made during a 72 hour game jam.

The medal encouraged many players to try and find the hidden route and gives them an additional sense of accomplishment that I couldn't provide.

Thanks again for playing it and making a video of it, I really appreciate it.

[Welcome Rookie]

Nice little choose-your-own-adventure game with a neat comic book presentation to it! After the initial confusion of figuring out how the heck to make decisions (which could be explained a lot better in the game) I had fun going through and seeing the different outcomes. There were a few graphical issues at times, like typos (bowl instead of bowel) and fonts being way too tiny in some bubbles, etc, but nothing major: it was all pretty professional stuff. Some of the decisions were a bit annoying at times: I'm not a doctor so I have no idea what compazine, zofran, dre, and so on are, and no hints are provided, so when I'm yelled at for doing it it feels a bit cheap. Some decisions also were a bit vague when they're boiled down to one word: for example, choosing to "Lie" at the end could be interpreted many ways, and the way the game determined it was way different than I meant. However, at the end of the day, the game is fairly short and sweet, and that meant restarts were quick, so the problems I faced weren't much of an issue and it was fun to see the various bad ends which, after all, are the best part of choose-your-own-adventures, haha!

Also I totally knew she was pregnant the whole time: I've watched enough House M.D. to know these things!

amidos2006 responds:

Thanks for the feedback :) sorry about being a medical game, that won't be the case in our next big game "Law Blow" (https://cheesyholes.itch.io/law-blow)

[Mission Ammunition]

Cool game! Game definitely starts very well out of the gate (apart from the unorthodox controls), with a professional design and great visuals and sound. There are so many bits of polish and special effects in this game that are very impressive: the shell casings popping out, the explosions with shrapnel and fire going everywhere, the death animations, and so on and so forth. So kudos on that part! Unfortunately, the rest of the game can be a bit hit-or-miss. In general, while it was fun going forward and blasting things, I wasn't sure what exactly I was actually working towards. It didn't help that the pacing kept being killed by the weird mechanic of guns limiting your mobility, requiring that you ditch all the time to make jumps. It's certainly interesting to require the player to think of guns in this new way, where you can't carry them through platforming challenges, but it feels so weird when so much of the game is built around creating explosive chaos. Something like this makes me think of the game being more of a survival game where ammo is limited, or a controversial design like Breath of the Wild with it's weapon durability which, was an interesting idea, just doesn't go well with a lot of players despite the good intentions. Needing to start the levels over and death was a bit frustrating as well, since the camera is so zoomed out and things that kill you are so tiny and can sneak up on you, especially fire, my god, getting killed by fire was so frustrating since it can be so volatile and haphazard. Basically, I think the game can be a really cool run-and-gunner, and the game has so much going for it in that respect, but it has all these annoyances (heavy guns, fire, cheap deaths, etc) killing the pace at times. Still pretty solid though.

[Wall Roller]

Pretty neat puzzler! I like the more action-orientated puzzles as a change from the usual puzzles, and I felt like the levels were solidly put-together with nice variations and pacing in introducing mechanics. The only oddity for me, and maybe it's just a problem with my brain, is that I felt I could never quite tell what direction the ball was going to rotate when it switched surfaces after a jump. I got better at it as I went on, but I think it was more that, as a game dev, I was able to figure out how you were designing the puzzle and went along with what seemed like the ideal route, instead of actually figuring it out as a player. So I would make jumps that I wouldn't know how I'd end up, but I would because I'd put it in the context of 'well, this level must be beatable and this must be the way because I trust it to be designed like this'. Does that make any sense? Maybe it doesn't, haha. Anyway, solid game.