FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Phase Shift: Lab Escape]

Hmm, it's an interesting take on the classic infinite runner, but I don't know if it went in the best direction. Most infinite runners have the player run automatically: this turns the game into an exciting test of reactions and quick planning as you try to keep your eyes ahead and pick the best path and have your fingers ready to deal with any obstacles that come. This runner, however, doesn't run at all: the player can move back and forward at their own pace. I suppose it's a unique and different take on the system, but it just doesn't feel as satisfying because of it. I know the game does have the bot chasing you, so technically you do need to keep running, but it just didn't feel the same (especially since the robot cannot be outrun if you do not get upgrades, making it seem like you're not in control of your own success since you can't beat it with your own skills). Also in general the levels seemed very depopulated with not enough obstacles, and the color switching mechanics just felt very odd with there not being an intuitive way to memorize which button does which color.

Pastruvium responds:

The running system was based off of Dino Run and was implemented in response to my designs for future obstacles (particularly later ones). However, I do get your point about it feeling a bit slow, and I probably could have/should have designed the obstacles to function a bit better while moving quickly. I think the movement system works particularly well during the boss battle and later in the game when things get a bit more hectic, but I can see that the feel and especially the early stages feel off. On that note about the speed upgrade, it's a good point and something that Dino Run specifically did well. Maybe if I were to re-do the game, I would remove the speed upgrade and put something in the game to increase the player's acceleration/speed, or even add acceleration and add an upgrade that decreases the time it takes to get to max speed.

On the depopulation of obstacles and such, the early stages are meant to ease the player into the admittedly complicated control scheme, and the game becomes much more dense as the player progresses.

On the note about early game, a lot of decisions were made for late game (hard obstacles), the boss, and endless mode (unlocked after completing story mode). I think they work a bit better in those cases, however as a result, the early game feels neglected and off-putting. I should have gone back and touched up the early game after getting the flow of late game down (at least I think I did!).

On the control scheme itself, I implemented the keys in a way for ease of use and speed in switching. I often think about them as most used to least used from left to right, or forward, up, and down. This was originally set as, from left to right, yellow (air), orange (solid), blue (liquid) for up, forward, down. This was changed as I felt that orange (solid) state would be used most frequently. In addition, through your video, I could see that my tutorial was maybe a bit too sparse, though I like tutorials to let the player figure things out by themselves more and mostly explain controls. In the future, I might include more text or optional explanations to help things along. Also on this note, it seems I failed in explaining the plasma dashes (w, s, and shift) properly. They, especially when upgraded, help the player moved from platform to platform, and to outrun the chaser bot when it gets too close, especially on endless. This is tied to the meter on the left side of the screen and is refilled when defeating enemies that can damage you. Money (Genetic Material) is gained through defeating the running enemies (scientists).

Thanks for your detailed feedback, and I really appreciate the video you put out! It really helped me see how someone else directly interacts with the game and tutorial without me around to explain things when they become a problem. It also really helps to see when mechanics and gameplay becomes frustrating or boring the moment it happens. I particularly liked the moment you figured out how the colored floors (gas and water funnels respectively) worked, though I definitely could have done a better job of explaining everything in the tutorial.

[Sludge and Sorcery]

Pretty goofy game that has a great start, but kinda loses steam as it goes on (though I do still want to go back and beat this eventually!) I really love the quirkiness of the game's story: very charming to pull the rug out from under the player and do a whole character switch, which was great because I really love the slime team. I figured that, because of that, the game wasn't actually an rpg but just playing around with rpg themes and it would be just a nice adventure game. I wish that were the case, but no, unfortunately it does actually remain an rpg and that was my biggest problem with the game: the combat was just so weak for me since it just drags on and on. The dialogue was already becoming an issue because I couldn't advance text with a button press like how most games handle text (not saying I wanted to skip it, I love the dialogue, I just read fast) but the combat is so slow with its slow transitions and slow dice rolls and way too much health for all the enemies and due to the randomness the fights can just drag on. Honestly, I wish the combat was just taken out of the game altogether so the game can focus on the best part: the funny story and quests. Or, at the very least, I wish the combat was replaced with something quicker and more funny to fit the overall unserious themes.

migmoog responds:

Thanks for playing our game and providing feedback! Just a disclaimer I didn't weigh in on the design of the game much, that was Polyducks' field, I was just an artist and the only one of our team with an NG account. The whole point of the game's main characters becoming the slimes was for mainly writing purposes, and it says this game is an RPG in both the genre and description, so we didn't intend on changing that. The speed of the dialogue was a limitation of the engine we were using (GBstudio). However, I do believe that the heavy RNG in the battle system is a bit of a bore, especially in a game like this with so many fights. We're very glad that you took the time to play our game!

['Llama vs. Llamas']

Pretty cute and charming game! Love the concept and I love the charming graphics and animations for all the characters. Game is nice and sweet and simple for the most part and doesn't overstay its welcome. I definitely had a lot of fun with this but its not without its problems as it does have a overall feeling of jankiness, particularly with the hitboxes. Most likely due to the 2.5D perspective, there were tons of times where I swear I shot water at fire but it just whizzes right over it without hitting it, or it ends up hitting another fire I wasn't aiming at. Maybe the hitboxes need to be more generous or something about the graphics needs to change to serve to pointing you towards where the ideal point to aim is at. The aiming/firing is odd too: most games have the crosshair serve as a general direction for the projectile to go, but the projectile continues past the point of aiming, whereas this game has the projectile stop and explode at the point you clicked at. This isn't necessarily bad, but I think if you want the aiming to work like this, the crosshair should be not a flat circle, but tilted as if it was painted on the ground, indicating that it will hit the ground at that point, making it more intuitive. I think I still had an overall good time, but definitely a little clunky in its implementation: luckily it kinda adds to the whole goofy charm, haha!

Butzbo responds:

Glad you liked it!

Yeah the hitboxes ended up being more troublesome than anticipated, in terms of perspective, and also at the time it was hard to find the proper size for them, big enough so that fire would get hit by the water, but not so big so that the llama would get hit if it passed behind it (probably having hitboxes for different purposes would have been a better choice). Also, I didn't put much thought about that crosshair detail, considering the 2.5d perspective I liked making it so that the bullet went right where you aimed, but I get how it can be confusing as its pretty unconventional, having it tilted to match the floor is a pretty good idea!

Thanks for the review! These detailed comments are great to get me thinking more in depth about design and mechanics.

[A Viking's Tale]

Hmm, seems like an interesting game, and I like the story and presentation of it, but I had too many problems with the interface to get a good flow going with it and just ended up stuck before long. Some of the problems with the interface are personal preference: for example, I would much prefer if interactable/pickupable items would highlight when you hover over them so you can see what you can interact with and I don't hurt my wrist clicking everything on the screen to see if it reacts, but I can understand if you want to make it challenging and keep items hidden so you have to search for them. Beyond that, however, I didn't know why the buttons to proceed with text kept flipping around the place: the inconsistency kept making me get stuck and having to search the screen for what to click. More than that, I don't know why the heck the button to talk with people is a skull (why not a speech bubble? why a skull of all things?) in the corner of the screen where you'd usually find the options menu when I'd prefer if you could just see the person on screen and click on them to talk to them like a usual point n click does. I dunno, the weirdness just made me get lost easily, but maybe I'll come back and try challenging this again.

[TOM FULP DRESSUP]

Haha, these games aren't really my jam (I'm a boring guy who just picks default at a character creator) but I do really like the art and the options are very goofy and fun to mess around with! I put Tom through the wringer with all sorts of outfit combos to promote the heck outta Newgrounds. Interesting to see that Tom is in the tighty-whitey faction (thank you for preserving his dignity by not letting it get beyond that lol)

[Le Chat Fonce: Dreams]

On one hand, I thought the game was a little lazy: I'm now familiar with the Le Chat Fonce series and because of that, it looked the same and played the same as all of the other games except with the colors changed to be GB colors. And lemme tell you, the colors didn't really help, especially when it came to elements like coins underwater since you made the water the same color as the coin outline/shine so they get lost in it. But on the other hand, this was actually my favorite Le Chat Fonce game! I liked the refreshingly simple goal of collecting money and the peppy music really propels you forward to go out and collect in a classic fashion! The world is reasonably sized so you never really get lost or have to backtrack much, and the fact that you're collecting coins to a certain amount makes you always feel like you're making progress and you can keep track of how close you're getting to the goal. I beat it and had a lot of fun, even with the kinda janky jumps at times: it was just really short and sweet, in my opinion!

[(Old) Newgrounds Arcade]

I really want to like this as I think the intention is cool and there's some real elbow grease in there, but overall I had a bad time with this. The presentation is all over the place: I knew I was gonna have a bad time from the very start when the title screen, the thing that's supposed to sell you on the game, didn't have any effort put into it: basic system fonts, terrible formatting, haphazard layout, inconsistent design (why on earth are the config buttons highlightable and not the main play button?) and badly scaled images (why is the title graphic so small?) which have all this pixelization on them. Just an overall lack of presentation which I'd like to overlook, but it just reminded me of old Geocities sites that people make fun of, it hurt my eyes, and more than that, it was difficult to tell what did what and how to get around. I was hoping that, even if the graphics were bad that the gameplay would win me over, but same issues were had in all the games as well with bad, lazy HUDs, graphics and gameplay: it was cool to see the variety, but I would prefer one great game instead of a bunch of shallow games which get old in seconds, if they even work. Again, its a great concept and a good effort given the amount of content (even though it is overall not so great content), and I think it's a really neat collab opportunity, but I think it needed way more time in the oven: I'd like to think some patches can help but it would have to be a pretty significant overhaul for me.

larrynachos responds:

You're absolutely right on every account! I just can't seem to force myself to tidy up lol. I'm working with artists to slowly rebuild the visual aspects of the game, including the main menu! I'll definitely be revamping the minigame HUDS as well, I just don't have a lot of assets at my disposal :\

I hate to disappoint you, but I just plain suck at art direction lol. Like most of my games, the graphics are a combination of pngs from the internet and assets downloaded from opengameart (this time with the exception of the art contributed by icy64 and others!) just cobbled together. I could spend a whole day just fiddling with the graphical aspects and end up with an equally sloppy product, cause I can't really close my eyes and envision what I want, and when I try it usually evolves out of my capabilities and limited art assets.

I appreciate that you again took the time to do a more in depth review via youtube video! Can I ask what your computer specs are? It appeared to be running quite sluggishly (which is why the recoil in Madness Arena was so severe, and the physics games were running at a snail's pace). It's usually a matter of cpu. I'm using an i7-9700k (throttled at 50% cause I've been having overheating issues), and it runs fine for me (late game madness arena can always get a little laggy though, if there's too many enemies shooting you at once).

In terms of gameplay, I plan on adding more engaging minigames and refining the old ones with better features (for example, I want to replace madness zombie survival with a sort of animated on rails experience like time crisis, but that's something that requires an animator). The upcoming 1.4 release will include a new Line Rider minigame/level editor so you can make, play, and share levels :D

[Ranata the Frog and the Broken Forest]

Oh man, I really wanted to like this game, and some part of me still thinks its quite charming, but I had such a bad time with this, haha. Like I said, I think the overall concept and graphics are very charming and cute, and the game does have some nice touches like the tutorial which allows you to experiment with the controls before actually playing. But the game itself is just so frustrating for me. I really want to jump on flies but it's practically impossible to do so because you can only jump down on them, not up, and branches are constantly in the way to stop you. I really want to move around efficiently and save time, but the frog drifts more than a fast and furious muscle car on NOS. I really want to get this fruits down, but these two fruits are right next to each other and I keep cancelling the first shake by shaking something else, like what sense does that make? I want to deliver this fruit, but whenever I pick up the fruit, my previously carried fruit falls up and right back on top of me and makes me pick it up, and also the witch takes an hour to say I delivered the wrong fruit when I already corrected myself and am trying to deliver the right one! It was quite the adventure, and I did laugh at my mistakes, and maybe I just suck, but I still gotta say that I think the game wasn't designed in the best way possible: good attempt however.

Omael responds:

Thanks for playing. Next one will be better :)

[Dots: Revamped! Expansion]

Simple game, but pretty cute and cool overall! Was really impressed at the overall presentation of the game with the colorful and responsive menus, UI, and HUD: those elements are forgotten by a lot of indie game developers and its nice to see so much work put into them as it really helps give it a sense of professionalism. Game is a little overly simplistic for me: only having rainbow mode as anything special, which doesn't do that much in the first place, last too little and take so long to charge can really make some of the levels monotonous at times, but I will say that once you get deeper into the difficulties and the balls really start to stack up, it gets quite fun! I do wish the screen and game elements were a bit bigger: can't really see the cute faces on the dots, and I also wish the UI was a bit better in some regards to intuitiveness with, for example, the rainbow bar being, well, actually rainbow colored to denote it instead of blue. Still, quite nice!

Starblinky responds:

Hey thanks for the thoughtful review and the compliments + feedback. Appreciated!

I agree with pretty much everything you said. Especially with the bar being rainbow colored. I did consider new special types but I found it too hard to balance when enemies were 1 hit kills. And I didn't want to change it too much from the original 2008 game.

And by the way, since this was the browser version I had to make a lot of cuts for performance. The original game is 60 fps, a bigger game screen and has slightly increased visual effects. The original version is on Steam for free if you're interested!

https://www.dotsrevamped.com/play/

[The Year After]

Quite surprised at this one! It's definitely a little clunky with constant graphical glitches and stuttery unresponsive walks, but it wasn't quite enough to take me out of the experience which I think was really well done! I loved the subtle environment storytelling with the little breadcrumbs and hints of what's going down, piecing everything together bit-by-bit. Just the way I could walk through the house and see the different furniture to see how their lives have progressed was really cool. Was so intrigued by the whole underlying 'what am I doing? am I influencing this family? has this already happened? who the hell am I, other than this really weird ninja?' plot along with the other family plot. Very impressive stuff considering the minimalist presentation.