FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[iii Demake]

A nice short and sweet metroid (sorry, catroid) game! Even though the map was a bit bland and I feared it would be easy to get lost, it felt like it was just right in terms of size and number of landmarks that I had a good time exploring it and figuring out where to go, and it was fun interacting with all of the people and the unique powers I got. Has a lot of nice little touches like being able to speed up the dialog by pressing the button (plenty of games don't have this unfortunately!). The best part for me was the map design: I never got lost since it just felt so intuitive with the map just naturally guiding you to the next area that corresponds with whatever upgrade you just got. For example, I was trying to remember where the heck I was supposed to use the wall jump at but before I knew it, bam, I had been led right there to win the game!

[The Last Quest]

A nice little quirky gag on the 'murderhobo' cliche in RPGs: maybe a little too direct and on-the-nose at times (and when its not being that, maybe a little too memey) but I had fun nonetheless. While its funny and cute, walking around the world seemed very glitchy and stuttery at times due to really weird collisions and bumps and left-over physics objects and such that made the game overall feel very clunky. Graphics were a bit of an eyesore at times too with everything being so white that distance is hard to judge at times since your sword blends in seamlessly. But other than that, it was fun exploring the world map which was very wide and diverse, there were some cool touches and gags like the hidden waterfall area, and even though I saw the ending coming, it was a nice finale.

[Drake Madduck Is Lost In Time]

Pretty neat Metroid-style game with an impressive amount of exploration and upgrades to collect! Had a fairly good time guiding my Scrooge Mcduck through the levels and battling it out. I did have some difficulties with the game, though. For one, it might just be me, but I felt like there were too many interruptions in the game with text-pop-ups that kinda killed the pacing, and the text was very small and difficult to read. The text-pop-ups were funny and such so it helped, but I felt like they could be a little less wordy, or be more visual when introducing mechanics. Next, there were a lot of times where I wasn't sure if something was a death pit or a transition to a lower level: might be handy if there was an arrow or something to indicate if its safe. The biggest complaint was the gun and the lack of feedback on it: for some things, like rewinding the birds, it worked well for you see they immediately start to show signs of being affected, but for other objects like platforms, rubble, seed projectiles, etc, you don't see any changes until you hold the beam for a long time on it, so much time that you might assume you're not even affecting it at all. Definitely has a lot of potential and is pretty good already, just feel like it needs some extra polish to it to make it flow better!

[Consumable Controls]

While the visuals are a little simplistic, the puzzle design in this game is solid and fun! Can be a bit tricky to suppress your instincts to not waste moves at first, which can lead to some frustration: lord knows I messed up a lot of runs by accidentally jumping too much (damn you Mario!) and it did suck sometimes to lose a run by mistiming a jump in general, but the cool concept was worth the sacrifice, I think. Felt great to be able to plan out the perfect route by calculating all of the moves on screen, and some of the levels even early on were some great brain-teasers with stuff like the box stacking and such where the ideal route might not be as readily apparent as it seems.

[You are now Possessed]

Super solid puzzler with great levels and variety, along with a presentation that both charms and has an intuitive UI design that lets players understand it immediately makes me realize why this won the GMTK jam: well deserved! I think the only weak spot for me was the death animation (I wish he fell down instead of just crumpling) and the combat-related moves: though I understand there were there for variety, I didn't realize the daggers were pointed in a direction to indicate where you would attack towards and I felt like there were a bit more annoying to plan around. Still, had a great time with this puzzler, and even though it didn't save my progress I'm looking forward to playing it again to beat it!

[Magic Cassette]

Pretty interesting puzzler! Has some cool rewinding mechanics that actually have some interesting twists to them that are introduced to you bit by bit with the way the levels go! Some real brain-teasers in here: I still need to work on making it all the way to the end. It does get a little repetitive with all of the puzzles being about boxes in the similarily claustrophobic hallways with doors and buttons, but it does enough to spice it up with different configurations that it's not all that bad. Overall the levels felt very well designed in ramping up the difficulty and introducing new concepts to the player intuitively bit-by-bit. Apart from that, the game does have a general good sense of presentation to it with nice little touches like the hanging lights and the cool effects that the slow-mo-rewind state has, among other things. Nice work!

[Lord of the Portal]

You know, for something that could've just rested on the laurels of being a meme game, this is actually a lot better than I thought it would be and shows some decent effort and thought (and if you didn't, you can pretend you did haha). It's actually a pretty fun and goofy quick draw game with good presentation, intuitive mechanics, and a nice variety of bosses, with all of that being fun and playable even if you don't recognize all of the meme references (and if you do recognize the memes, its even better, especially the B ending, my goodness)!

Also was that a Cadillacs & Dinosaurs sprite in there? It definitely looked like a beat-em-up sprite.

[Beneath the Branches - demo]

Not too shabby! Game certainly had some spooky atmosphere built-up with the unique hand-drawn art style, and it had some really interesting events to get through like the water girl boss fight, reminiscent of the Faith boss fight. One part that I think needs a lot of work is the sound-design, which I think is critical to getting people immersed into a horror atmosphere. I think it could use a lot more atmospheric sounds in general, and I feel like the sounds used for the wooden bridge creaking and the water girl splashing needs big help: they were clearly just the creaking of a bed frame and the splashing of a bath tub: really took me outta the experience, they need to be a lot of swampy and spooky. It also had some other parts that kinda took me outta the experience, like how the water girl boss fight was a bit too hard and clunky when transitioning between screens (leading to too many retries which dulls the threat of death) and some of the art being too repetitive. Still, not a bad start as it has some pretty memorable moments, so looking forward to more!

[Geometrica]

Really cool puzzler with a unique concept! It's a bit confusing to get used to at first, and the controls can be a bit tricky (for example, I was expecting to be able to click and hold, drag to another light and release to form a connection, but it looks like it requires you to click twice, and later on I'm not sure why I kept losing my hold click when trying to delay a connection) but the game does a lot to help you along with tutorials/intuitive design so it was alright and worth it to get into the unique puzzles. Even more so than the puzzles and gameplay, I gotta give props to the general design of the presentation and UI of the game: it just felt so professional and crisp. The graphics are simple but have tons of little touches like outlines and animations to give them life, levels and pop-ups fade-in and out smoothly, you can preview connections you're forming before you actually make them, death and level completion states have cool animations with neat effects, and so on and so forth: all of these little touches probably won't be actually noticed, but I think they are subtly felt and help really elevate this game to create a top-notch experience!

[Pain Reaction]

Very cool action-packed game! Game is packed full of that satisfying Prox276 game feel I've come to expect: some good ol' explosive pixely fun! I love how the screen-shake is used to effectively signal the most important events, being an enemy being hit (so you know you aimed correctly) and an enemy exploding (so you know you need to look for revenge projectiles), which felt like an improvement over other games more haphazard screenshake. I like how the levels ramp up in terms of difficulty with new and interesting enemy types and other difficulty tweaks, though I wish the boss would also improve in some aspects as well. I wish the rocket would only appear in your hand when you're ready to fire: its a bit confusing when it looks like you should be able to fire but you still can't, and only showing it when you're ready would help, I think. I got a bit confused when enemies were dying from their own buddies projectiles: in a way, its neat, but it felt a little unsatisfying to me that I didn't get to take them down myself, but that's just me (probably because it doesn't screenshake when this happens?). Solid game all-around!

By the way, I love the goofy drooly face the basic imps make when you hit them, haha.

Prox276 responds:

Thanks! Your thorough and constructive reviews are something I think of from the moment I start a new project and it's one of the things that motivate me to do my best and create something that improves on my past games! I really appreciate it! :)