FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Climb To The Top]

Pretty goofy game that I think could work great, but at the moment is too difficult to control to get into it. I had initially assumed that you need to click and hold-down your click to keep your hand gripped to a rock, but in this game a click over a rock just has your hand lunge to a rock and grab it...sometimes. I never really felt like I was in control, sometimes the guy would grab a rock and other times they wouldn't and would get stuck on things. It was kinda fun to wiggle the character around to try and get ideal grips, but at the end of the day it just felt random and uncontrollable. Getting Over It is my game of the year, but that's because it has super-solid control: this thing just doesn't work for me right now.

In terms of other feedback, the intro is a bit of a mixed bag: the plain default start button is a bad sign, but the way the camera swooshes over as a transition is a neat effect. The rules for climbing can be a bit confusing and unexplained: I was lucky since I boulder a lot, so I knew that, for example, you can double-grip a hold, and that you need to do this for the final hold for it to consider a climb finished, but I predict many people won't know this fact, so it should be explained in game (maybe make the final hold be a different color or a finish-line checkboard pattern with two hand prints on it, for example).

[Mini Crawler]

Seems like it could be a decent game, but the lack of sound/music as well as a unique hook really hurts it in its current state. It has some decent fights and enemy variety and I like the idea of battling in the dark, with the torch you pick at the beginning determining your player light radius and thus, in a way, your difficulty, and the way the room lights up when you win is cool. I think the game being based around light is really cool, and it wish it was explored further: I'd love it if the players projectiles helped illuminate the room as well so our fireball spell would double both as a means of illumination and immolation. It's really weird that the enemy projectiles illuminate the room better than the player's do: I think the lighting for all projectiles should be like multiplied by 4 or 5 times greater to create a cool, frenetic light show as you fight, trying to see where the enemies are inbetween their flashes. In fact, you could make it the player light is really small so that your fireballs are the only real way to see enemies: it'd create some really crazy fights! Other than that, there were a few other nitpicks like how it was annoying how some skeletons could take 2 fireballs instead of 1 (that should be kept consistent) and how overly-powerful the mines were in comparison to your fireball.

Balbazour responds:

Thank you so much for the detailed feedback!
I will certainly listen to your advice and work to make it better.

[Contract Rush]

The game looks like it should be really good with its impressive animation and art, but unfortunately the actual gameplay I found was quite boring except for the boss fight at the end, and even they were a little too bullet-spongy. The game made a very good first impression on me, but it didn't take long for the levels to start to look repetitive and the combat to get boring as you see the same tile art over and over with huge swathes of blank, empty space and haphazardly placed platforms: it looked like it had been randomly generated as there was a lack of any cool level design to create some fun platforming or enemy compositions to battle through. I think the assets were stretched too wide: if the game was compressed to be shorter I think it might've been paced better. I couldn't really get excited about any of the upgrades the game gives you either: apart from the gun upgrades, the jumping and movement upgrades didn't really do much and were difficult to keep track of. The game did have some nice qualities to it, such as the player hitbox being smaller than their body so you could dodge bullets easier, but it also had some lazy qualities like not programming in a separate death animation for falling (it just kinda freezes you mid-air and places the same death), no coyote jumping, no cool and unique abilities to play around with for our character, and so on. I think the art assets of this game are too good to be lost in a game in this state: would love to see these characters come back in a more fully-featured game!

[The Floor is Death]

I didn't have another person to play this with (boo-hoo) so unfortunately I wasn't able to experience this game in its ideal state. However, even if I did have another person to play this with, the game doesn't have enough exciting mechanics to it that I would get them in. The arenas you fight in are very dull and have no interesting obstacles or hazards or events to shake things up and create scrambles (there's a rocket in one of the levels but that barely does anything). The lava doesn't even rise up to eliminate platforms and create a sudden death scenario. Basically, the game is asking way too much from the player to make their own fun as it does nothing to create interesting scenarios to battle in.

[Arrow Girl Shoot Shoot]

A decent core game, but gets old fast. Definitely has some nice polish to it with certain elements like cool explosions for death of enemies and the player, a weight/momentum to the player's movement, the way the score ticker pulses with each point, and the way the text wobbles about. These elements are very nice and do elevate the game beyond what would just be a very simple game, but even then it can get pretty repetitive quickly: there's nothing to really shake it up and make it exciting like power-ups, enemy varieties, music, levels, difficulties, etc.

[Basically Warzone (CoD Warzone Parody)]

Haha, pretty funny stuff! I'm not familiar with Warzone so some of the gags were lost on me, but I knew battle royales enough to laugh at the sudden parachute gag and death by snipers (and the sheer repetitiveness and futility of it all). Would love to see even more gags and secrets in this game as I appreciated the various things the game tracked (and the variation in audio tracks for fun replays!)

[TIMBER]

A decent, simple core game, but could really use a lot of polishing to it to make it shine. The game in itself is fun: stacking things is challenging and intuitive, the game escalates the difficulty well by introducing more and more varied shapes, and the rules are solid with the few seconds grace period to make sure structures hold. But while the concept is good, and while graphics aren't everything, the game is very dull and confusing at the moment due to the lack of graphics. Presentation is poor with bog-standard font/buttons and no frills, leading to a poor first impression. The lack of HUD makes it very confusing to determine what block is going to be used next: I initially thought my next shape would come from the right side of the queue on top, but instead it comes from the left, so it would be very helpful if there was an arrow or something pointing to let you know what the next shape is. Similarly, it would really help if the game would show an outline at your mouse cursor of how the next shape will be placed: it would make judging how the block is placed more intuitive, instead of just having to guess (for example, when you want to put it as close to the top of a previous shape). The game could also just have some more excitement to it: some tense music when you've built the tower and are waiting to see if it stands, some fanfare and explosions when you win, etc: it does have some decent sound effects for these but it could just be more.

[A Game of Cups]

Surprising game for me! I initially though the whole cup gameplay was just a ruse for some sort of creepy scare/subversion that was going to happen, but lo and behold it actually just kept up the cup gameplay and escalated by throwing in some crazy shuffling tricks into the mix (though there was that spooky ending bit, so my intuition wasn't completely unfounded). Part of me does still think it was a rather simple game altogether, but still, it did have a smooth, polished feel to it all and did some cool narrative tricks, so it did stick in my mind.

[City Escape 2]

Solid game! Had a lot of fun playing this game, feels like it has a nice smooth core to it with neat mechanics for gaining speed and transitioning between street level and the rooftops with vaulting and springboarding. I especially love the touch of having to jump on a train at the end of the level: feels so much cooler and stylish than just running a certain distance and getting a victory screen. I did feel like the game could have a bit more content and style to it to make it great though, and stand up against some of the more famous runners like Canabalt and the like. For one, I kinda wish the levels got a little bit more complex and varied as they went on since I felt my interest waning from repetitiveness around level 3 or so. Would've loved to see new cop units in the later levels, maybe ones that shoot bullets at you which you have to dodge, or have shields that you can't vault over, you know, riot cops, to show that they're done playing around with you. Instead, the game seemed to go for quantity over quality: increasing the distance you need to cover and the amount of cops blocking you, which made it annoying since a lot of the time you want to vault them but can't because you'll just bump into a cop immediately behind them. Other than that, I'd love if the game was a bit more graphically impressive with more animations and such. I'm not saying graphics are everything, but the animations were very bare minimum in this, and I think cool animations could really increase the stylishness of the gameplay: c'mon, I want to see me do sick flips as I vault over a pig and watch them slam face-first into the pavement in slow-mo with cool sounds and fanfare!

[Duloga]

Really love this game (well, love it as much as a game that makes me feel like crap and question how the world operates can, haha)! Even though I was able to guess how the game was going to end up, what with blue being labeled "cops," but yellow being labeled "yellow," not "crook," and that gets even more tenuous as the quotas increase and the labels get more and more confusing, I nonetheless loved the progression, especially since it was baked into the gameplay itself, not just told to you explicitly. The gameplay putting you into this role of being some kinda judge, jury and executioner, and not even being allowed to fight back by reducing the time limit, can really get under your skin and make you question what are you supposed to do. My journey through the game was quite a ride: first I went along with it, next I fought back by timing out but it punished, I tried to keep cheating it however I could by eventually I went along with it with morbid curiosity, knowing that my player would be next on the wall (I was very close to being compelled to just shut the game off half-way as some sort of moral victory). Again, very impressive narrative that is built not through words, but gameplay mechanics that really get you into the role and helplessness and shared responsibility and morality and intimately think about this stuff.