FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Blu&Red]

I really want to like this, I really do: the concept is great and I love the idea of going through a level twice with two different routes that work against each other. And while I did have a bit of fun, there were just so many issues with the gameplay that made it just feel very frustrating to me. I have no idea why you didn't just color the player characters to be blue/red to indicate what blocks they can touch: having them stay white just makes it confusing when the former would be much more intuitive. Felt way too punishing to have to do both runs perfectly: dunno why it doesn't just let you retry a color without forcing you to do the previous as well. General lack of music and sound made the game feel very drab and empty. Controls felt quite clunky with the weird way you build up momentum but stop immediately, and the double jump was so short it was confusing and unsatisfying to use. Something about the hitboxes felt so unfair as well: had so many times where I got killed when it felt like I really did not get hit. Had a bug where sometimes when I was on a moving platform, the player character wouldn't move with it, they'd stay still. And so on. Definitely a great idea that has a lot of potential: the levels themselves are already quite good I think, it just needs polishing up in the controls and other departments to make this a slam dunk!

[The Office]

Has the right building blocks in place for a decent game, but unfortunately kind of has an amateur design to it that kinda killed my fun. Collision was choppy, walls and lighting were glitchy and weird, and there were a lot of confusing elements to the gameplay like why my flashlight kept turning off and the controls weren't explained. Unfortunately, I couldn't really figure out how to win: the monster always seemed to home in on me perfectly no matter what and while I could dip into the 'safe zone' by crouching under this gate to lose him, he'd always move towards the exit upon losing me so he was always barring my path. From what I could tell, the maze layout was so straight forward with not enough branches or loops I could use to get behind him, so it seemed impossible to win. The star of the show here is definitely the music: it's so intense the way it builds up when the monster gets closer and closer until you see the red lights and then bam, u ded! Heart is in the right place, just needs a bit of polish to it!

[wormb]

Nice, simple and funny! Love the animations for the characters, especially the flailing running animation. Not much to it as it's so short, but it's a fun little story that is built without words, just game mechanics: I have no idea why our character grows bigger, but I love the sudden realization you can have when you realize it and turn the tables. Always fun to see these experiments!

[oddpum]

Pretty neat game! Very cute presentation and I like the concept of setting everything up in advance and watching all your clones go while the ghost just sits and watches with his following gaze, haha. I do like the intuitive HUD and controls with the timer and the time control fast-forward/rewind buttons, very nice: didn't even realize you had the map buttons and ability to reset or go to other loops, very very fancy! Despite being fun, I did feel like it was a bit of a drag at times: so much of it just felt like busy work, getting people to hold down buttons, step forward, realize you need someone to hold down another button now, buttons buttons buttons repeat ad nauseum, without anything really fancy or inventive except for a few occasions where you have to hold a button down but then step off it so the color comes back to form a platform. Would be nice to see some other tricky mechanics and such play into it, but perhaps I'm at fault because I was going for a brute force high loop run instead of a low loop run, which probably does get quite fancy with the way you need to plan it out. Unfortunately the game did crash on me right before victory! I was on like loop 21 or something and was in the final room, but right when I hit fast forward, bam, black screen! Not sure if it was a performance thing? Game did seem to be stuttering when I fast forwarded as the loops went on and on. Bit of a bummer, but I'm interested to revisit if I can trim those loops down since it's a cool game!

Edit: finally did it without crashing, 16 loops!

[Shoot to Slide]

Another nice puzzler! A little confusing at first due to the player looking like a bullet themselves so you'd think you'd just launch yourself into the enemies, but the real mechanic became clear quickly, and soon enough, I was having fun trying to think through the levels in this new interesting way. Some of the other graphics apart from the character were also a little confusing, like the spiky looking blocks that you might think could hurt you, but are actually just fragile blocks that disappear after being shot. All in all, though, the levels were fun and had a good flow to them as they introduced more cool mechanics and neat designs!

[The Faces of the Forest]

Pretty awesome game! Really sweet and interesting story that both endears you to the characters in the world and gets you pumped to smash the system! Thought the game did a nice job at portraying the peaceful nature of the story in its gameplay mechanics, by, for example, only being able to stun bugs instead of killing them. Loved the whole mask system and the way you can slow down time to draw the sigils and the way it changes the music: felt so cool to get better and better at drawing them quickly and gave me a real Trauma Center/Castlevania Dawn of Sorrow vibe. Some parts of it were a little bit of a nuisance: if you jump on a bug and a bug is right next to them, you'll get hit by that bug despite the fact that you shouldn't have ever been in danger, the world is huge and locations can get a little samey without any significant landmarks to guide you, and I also felt like sometimes the game just went overboard a bit as I couldn't take two steps without being forced into drawing another sigil, haha, maybe a few more normal platforming parts could be needed.

DavidMarchand responds:

Thanks! Fair points all around. I saw you play this the other day! https://youtu.be/NNLQIwDowlg?t=17710 The whole team was really happy to see that. I'll eventually get around to fixing the typos you pointed out and maybe adding a blinking effect for when enemies are about to recover, since all of those are pretty easy changes.

[Not Quite Ghost]

Game does get pretty interesting once you get into it later on with the whole creation of stripes of null-space that you can shift through, but before that (and I'd say maybe even still after that) the game is kind of just a slog of slooooowly moving around a giant map that never changes in any significant way between levels to pick up tiny little jack-os. Game just gave me eye-strain with the constant flickering lights and the way too tiny jack-os and how everything is a shade of brown/orange so it all blends together. I hated finding ghosts as well because their little 'silent movie' pop-ups vibrated too fast for me. Sorry I'm sounding like such an oldie, haha. Was kind of silly that you could kill yourself with a null-space stripe and the game wouldn't acknowledge it: it'd just keep going until you manually restart yourself. Probably the most fun I had in the game, ironically, was when I used the stripe mechanic to quickly speed through the level: maybe the mechanic could be revived in a different genre from this scavenger hunt into a more speedy chase type game? Eh, maybe I'm just too much of an adrenaline junky and this wasn't my bag: very interesting ideas though!

[Ketris]

Pretty decent: it is just tetris after all, but it is competently done with some new funny graphics and such! Silence is kind of drab: would love for some neat music and sound effects, especially since like half the fun of getting a tetris is to hear the jingle. Despite there not being a sound effect, I did like the satisfying explosive reaction you get when you clear multiple lines, so kudos there. I also felt like the last second grace period you get is too short: usually tetris allows you a good bit of wiggle room when you're right about to place down a block, especially when you're stacked near to the top, but this game barely had anything despite acknowledging it with the way it flashes the block: made it annoying to get some of those more complex moves where you jab in an L with a quick last-second rotation and such.

[Tiny Toy Tanks]

Hmm, it's an alright game, but for me, I'd argue that it took a little too long to build up to the good part. The later levels get pretty cool since it forces you to play fast and strategic, making good choices with the mines and angled shots and so on. But the early missions were way too simple to just point n click at enemies, agonizingly slow due to the slow movement of the tank, and drab, especially since we're the blue tank which doesn't pop-out as much as the orange tank against the background. Also the early levels were a bit confusing at introducing some aspects like using mines to blow up walls and such. Once you get into it, it can get good, but I just worry that a lot of people would drop it because of the slow start, so maybe speed it up a bit in some way!