FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[[BTNverse] Saccharine playground]

This is a weird one for me. On one hand, once I got far enough to see the hook, it looks like the game gets really intriguing with its disturbing themes, visuals and sounds. But on the other hand, the game feels really confusing, frustrating and glitchy. It's difficult to tell whether the game is intentionally glitchy, or whether it's barely being held together to work in the first place with its unintuitive mechanics, weird AI, and so on. I'm worried that a lot of people might be turned off and frustrated, unable to experience the meat of the story. I really want to like it, but the world feels so strangely put-together and odd that I can't have full confidence in it.

adriendittrick responds:

thanks for the thoughtful review!

[Ghost House]

Decent game that could use some more polish to it. The game has a good core to it, and even has some nice touches like death animations for the ghosts, damage feedback for the player, secret hidden areas, and so on. However, it is missing some crucial touches like temporary invincibilty after being hit (spiders can KO you instantly with a barrage because this is missing), death animations for enemies besides ghosts, and just better, fancier graphics and sound in general.

[Tightly Bound]

I like the idea and I see what you're getting at, but the controls/movement can be a little frustrating at times. The tether would behave in a very glitchy manner at times and the physics were a bit odd. I did like how you had stuff like coyote jumping in there though! All in all, it just felt like it was a bit too slippery and glitchy, and you could do something the same way and end up with different results. Would love to see a more polished version of this, though: I like cool tethered mountain climbing bits like this and its worth exploring more! With more control and more deterministic gameplay, this could be a great adventure!

[up in the sky]

Cool game! Fun to learn how to move around. Sometimes it can be a bit jittery and janky to grow but it's all part of the fun. Wish there were more levels and mechanics, but it's a jam game and it doesn't have to overstay its welcome, and I liked how it had a story to it. I have no idea what happened at the ending: it was a bit confusing and abrupt. Also, I thought it was kinda funny that the creditssaid: Made for StuffedWombat when technically it's because I haven't clicked enough for it to say Made for Ludum Dare (maybe an intentional joke?)

StuffedWombat responds:

haha yeah the credit thing happened organically and i thought it was accurate and funny :P

the thing at the end is a super low budget bird ^^

[4 coins]

Not too shabby! A nice point n click game that reminded me of Curse of Monkey Island. Felt like the puzzles had a good logic to them: never had to use an item in some non-sensical manner as everything made sense. Liked the cute graphics, characters, dialogue and sound effects. Combining items was a bit odd: for example, you can't combine the string with the fishing rod, you are forced to combine the fishing rod with the string. I think it'd also be good if you don't have to click and hold an item to use it, but you could click an item to pick and then click where you want to use it. Would love to see a full game like this!

[Stray Shot]

Really wacky concept! A bit confusing to figure out everything though. At first when I noticed that stray shots spawn enemies, I though stray shots were to be avoided: like, I thought it was gonna be you go through levels of enemies and you have to watch your shots so you don't end up making things harder for yourself: count your shots and all that. But then I figured out that, while that is true, you don't want to spawn enemies to overwhelm yourself, you actually kinda do as well since that gives you more points! It's really wild: its like you are intentionally setting your own difficulty and building your own challenge based on how you shoot. It can be a bit confusing to learn the concept as it's not immediately apparent and could use some more tutorialization, but once I got my head wrapped around it, it is a lot of fun! Wish I could shoot diagonal, but it works as it-is just fine.

[A ♥ apart]

Cool game! I like playing these games solo and working with the whole split attention thing. Love how as the difficulty goes up and up you gotta wrestle with dodging the orbs and trying not to screw yourself over by dodging in such a way to save one and doom another. I like the presentation of the game as well: very simple and chill. I will say that I think the power-ups are a bit too tiny: could stand to be bigger not only to reduce eye-strain but to let you identify them better as well. I was having fun, and now I see that once you get to level 10 it ends, but I think the game needs some sort of sense of progression to it: I wasn't sure whether it was infinite or whatever. Maybe fill up a level-progression bar, or change colors to signify each level, or have two heart halves at the bottom of the screen get closer and closer each level, I dunno, something that lets you know you're getting closer to the end.

[Help Yourself]

Very cool concept! Took me a long time to release what was going on though. I feel like the difficulty spiked way too early: level 3 introduced a bunch of crazy concepts which, while fun to figure out, was also pretty frustrating to figure out without any prior knowledge of how the game worked. I mean, prior to that level, you could win by just jumping! Suddenly you have to know how all these buttons work and that you can operate them from your past selves and that you can jump on your past selves corpses and so on: it's too much at once! The rules didn't seem to be consistent either: some levels seem to reset all of the elements upon dying, while other levels kept the elements there? Unsure if it was a glitch or not. Neat game and very cool concept, just could use some better level design to gradually introduce the concepts more intuitively, and some nice graphics couldn't hurt either to both fancy it up while also highlighting the mechanics more.

[In A Keybind]

Very cool concept and execution! I enjoy it, but I will admit that there are some frustrations. The initial concept made me think that it was going to involve having to keybind a ton of actions, similar to games like QWOP or Receiver where every minute aspect of reloading a gun has its own button, leading to funny confusion as you try to remember the buttons. In this, you only ever need to code three buttons, so you don't end up with any hand-twisters like the game could've, I think. Not bad, but I feel it missed a trick there (maybe in a sequel?) Platforming was a bit frustrating since it did not have coyote time or jump buffering, leading to plenty of falls feeling unfair. I really like it when the green keyboard appears on the upper-right, letting you see what keys you have left: that should be there all the time! Both when you're selecting buttons to bind and buttons to recover! Dunno why it is hidden sometimes. Fun though, and I reached the end with a perfect run!

[The Fancy Pants Adventures: World 4 part 2]

As said before on Part 1, sweet game! I did have some difficulties in this though: felt like I couldn't control my momentum through the level as smoothly as before. Part of it was because the game didn't reintroduce the controls and it started out difficult because it's technically part 2, and part of it was because there were a lot of challenging jumps and oddly-placed ramps that were actually kinda in the way at times, but maybe I just didn't read the terrain correctly.