FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Golf Escape]

Fantastic short and sweet adventure you got here! It's got all the hallmarks of a great game: a clever and intriguing gameplay hook, intuitive and responsive controls, an addictive escalation of difficulty, slick and smooth gamefeel, and all with a charming and juicy presentation! It's the complete package and I am gobsmacked that this wasn't winning prizes immediately right when it was submitted: truly buried treasure we got here!

Davbo37 responds:

Thank you so much for your kind words! Glad you enjoyed it and all those aspects came through 😄

[Booliards]

Wow, what a fantastic gem of an arcade game! Not only does it got the retro vibes down pat, it's got a fascinatingly unique set of game mechanics and is so dang juicy and polished! Sure, it was a bit of a struggle at first to get used to the controls, but with a bit of practice, I was addicted and saw the genius behind them (particularly the usage of the vacuum suck)! Can't believe the style system is so robust to recognize fancy shots like banks and sinks: really makes me feel appreciated and wanting to get more into it! I have no idea how this got past over: seriously an underappreciated gem! I can't stop speaking in exclamations!

[Dream Punk]

It's that dream again! No, but really, I knew I recognized this: it's the sequel to That Dream Again from years ago, except now it's been polished up and expanded into a grand ol' adventure! It can certainly be frustrating at times, requiring so much focus and control to navigate such treacherous and bouncy areas, but it's just such a charming adventure with an addictive sense of progression with each gadget you unlock that wins you over. Really neat stuff you got here: can't believe it got past over and didn't get the initial appreciation it deserved compared to the prequel!

I gotta admit though that I did have some confusion over this though. One was that I spent a long time using the arrow keys to move around, only to find out that the glider doesn't work with that, only WASD: very strange! I also had no idea I could press spacebar to talk to people: I assumed that I needed to unlock a talk action similar to how you need to unlock everything else. And I still can't figure out how to get past the glider challenge: I get stuck in there and try to make my way through the course to hit all the buttons so I can get out, but I can't figure out how to proceed past the wind tunnel section. I wanna see the rest of the game!

[DECK FURY (Alpha)]

Wow, I was pretty impressed with this! It's got some rough edges here and there, sure, but as a fan of games like Mega Man Battle Network and One Step From Eden, I like the direction that it's going, and I really loved how smooth and intuitive the game felt, what with its excellent usage of tooltips, target previews, tutorials, icons/symbols, and other great UI/UX elements! Heck, for an alpha, it's already practically got the core loop settled and is a complete experience! Cool stuff and I feel like its got a lot of potential from this great first impression!

If I were to have some feedback, I'd say:

*I got really annoyed at how short the energy cooldown was: kept giving me whiplash with how much it keeps stopping the fight to reload the same cards over and over, and it made fights too easy with how much I could just spam cards with little to no consequence. In my opinion, I feel like cards should be a much more precious resource and you should really think of how best you use them, as if you blow them, you'll be stuck with just your puny blaster for a long time and not be able to handle a desperate situation, like getting cornered by drones with no push card. I found it much more entertaining when I pretended that my energy cooldown was much, much longer because of this: made it much more intense and strategic, and I loved scrambling and improvizing!

*Sometimes the aiming can be a bit odd and throw things off. It's like, if you're above an enemy and aiming downwards, but you're a little bit off, it can end up going to the side instead. It might be preferring certain angles? It feels like if you're aiming SW, it'll keep you pointed S properly, but if you are even slightly aiming SE a bit, it'll switch you to aiming full-on E and miss a shot.

Deltakai responds:

Hey appreciate the feedback and glad you've been liking the game so far!

Your two points of feedback are really interesting and they're both issues I've been grappling with since the game's inception.

Regarding the first point, I actually modeled the base energy cooldown off of MMBN's energy cooldown, which is 8 seconds. Now personally when I played the MMBN series I actually found this to be too slow and for me it actually created a bit of an awkward break in the gameplay where I use my cards too quickly and then have to sit around doing not much until my energy came back. The most fun part for me was when I was actually in the card selection, thinking about my next plan of attack and then trying to execute it while I have the cards loaded.

The main way I made this faster was adding the Amber Pearl starting item which refunded 10% energy every time you killed an enemy, as well as refreshing your energy each time a new wave was spawned. That being said, this is definitely a balance point of the game that I will have to keep an eye on, and a possible solution would be to make the base recharge time longer, but increase the benefit of Amber Pearl to reward players for killing enemies efficiently with their cards.


The second point I knew about as soon as I first built the aiming system - the issue becomes most apparent when you're close to the edge of the screen and trying to aim towards the edges of the screen where you can't move your mouse too far out and thus resulting in the aiming reticle to be a lot more sensitive to changes due to the close proximity of your mouse and character. I do however think this would be less of an issue if the game was fullscreen and you have more space to move your mouse about.

The way I tried to solve this was by adding the "Relative Aiming" option in the Gameplay settings which would instead clamp the cursor to the player character rather than moving independently. The feature is still a bit buggy but give it a try next time and see if it helps with the awkward aiming.

[Lich King's Gauntlet]

Pretty interesting fighting game! It kind of reminds me of something like Footsies or Divekick, or maybe even Elden Ring PVP, in that it isn't particularly complicated, but it can still have a lot of interesting mindgames and intricacies to the combat. The combination of all the factors for combat led me to doing some interesting plays, like backing off enough to let the AI try and go for a health potion but preemptively be aiming at the potion so it intercepts them, using my dash aggressively to close the distance and get a quicker shot but then being mindful for my cooldown-induced vulnerability afterwards, using the explosion shockwave to knock someone into spikes or acid, and so on and so forth. Lot of depth to be seen here!

Unfortunately, as nice as it is in theory, I found myself getting bored rather quickly, mostly due to the really bad enemy AI which doesn't seem to move intelligently and fires off random blasts, commonly killing themselves with their own blasts or stumbling into spikes/acid. I was really hoping that all of the enemy wizards would have very unique AI patterns and their own sets of powers, turning the game into a cool boss rush, but alas! I feel like the game tries to hide this or make up for it by having the fights commonly involve multiple wizards, which causes a load of chaos to become a smoke screen. Perhaps if it had multiplayer against human opponents, it could be fun, but as a singleplayer experience, this doesn't feel great (but could be with better AI).

As a side note, another aspect that hurt my first impression is that I went to training mode first, thinking that it would help me learn the rules. Afterwards it went into real matches, but unlike what I thought, it didn't go straight to the tournament matches, but instead to an easy mode version of the tournament, which really served to bore me as it was all 1 on 1s which, as said before, the subpar AI doesn't shine well with.

[Upbound]

Wow, this one really surprised me! It's a rather simple arcade game, but you did a fantastic job at giving the game so much style and soul, what with the cool astronaut-themed voicelines, the very bouncy and lively animation as you jump around, the way sounds pitch up as you combo, the satisfying feel of speed when you're comboing balloons/jetpacks and watching your power bar flare up, and so on! Great stuff and a fantastic example of the power of juice to elevate an experience!

yahhcheee responds:

wow.. we really appreciate your sharing. we really tried to go the extra mile on all things you mentioned and i'm so happy that it touched you. Thank you FutureCopLGF!

[Keep It In! 3]

Not too shabby! Certainly seems to be going for a simple-yet-fun arcade vibe, and the amount of game variations were rather intriguing. Had a decent bit of fun checking it all out.

However, I didn't have the best impression when playing this. At its core, the game just didn't really hook me with its concept, and despite having a lot of different types of games to play, it felt like a real quantity-over-quality situation as many of the games either felt superfluous and barely any different from classic (timed), or felt very unbalanced (multiball) or confusing (rhythm).

In addition to that, the game just had a very unflattering presentation to it, the music was way too loud and there was no option menu to turn it down, and it was missing quality-of-life features like being able to quit out of a game. Furthermore, I had a few of the games glitch out on me in weird, frustrating ways.

Also, and this might be a nitpicky personal thing that doesn't matter so much, but I really don't jive with the whole bouncecoin system where you're playing and logging in daily to purchase cosmetics and all that jazz: just feels really unnecessary and scummy. I know you're not trying to scam me or take money from me or anything like that, but it just rubs me the wrong way and makes me feel like you're trying to add this as a motivation to make up for the fact that the game can't motivate strongly enough by itself.

St4rryQueen responds:

Although it might not be the clearest, the BounceCoin icon doubles as a clickable icon that pops up with a pause menu, in which you can quit, or even change your background or style mid-game.

[CHEFWARE]

Yowza, this game was fantastico! Not even quite sure how to praise it as it was just very professionally-crafted and juicy in practically every regard, including the spots that developers usually don't bother with, such as the main menu and options! Well done: it was loads of fun, and I thought some of the minigames like the one where you need to write down the order and execute it later were very memorable!

If I were to get a bit nitpicky, I'd say:

*I did find it really weird that it doesn't automatically transition to endless mode upon beating the boss for the first time, either by allowing you to continue past the boss into it or by selecting restart: instead you can only access it by fully quitting out and selecting it from the main menu when you start.

*The beer mug filling one was a bit deceptive and confusing on what constitutes a success. I think the problem is that I was trying to fill the glass so that the top of the liquid portion matches the line, whereas the game considers the top of the foam where it should match the line. Could be wrong about that, but something about it was weird.

*It's a minor quibble, but I wish the game would give you immediate feedback on your success or failure before the time limit (when possible). For example, when you finish cutting up enough fruit, you should hear a 'woohoo' or something like that to let you know you can rest easy as you've already won.

*Some minigames didn't seem to scale well at the speed gets higher, like the hamburger grilling one became practically impossible and acted in weird ways.

*It's a greedy wish, but I do wish there were even more fun minigames to play, or even more so, I wish there were more variations and tricks in the existing minigames. For example, some ones like the bike delivery have decent variety with changing up the jumps you need to make between pits and goblin, whereas others just do the same thing every time and have no such tricks to keep you on your toes.

Great stuff!

[Kill Laanie Race or Die]

I certainly think this has potential to be a nice racing game, but currently it feels rather underbaked and needs more time in the oven!

My main complaints are:

*While some of the visuals are pretty cool, you went way overboard with the filters like the monitor static/film grain/whatever and it just makes my eyes hurt and makes it difficult to read the screen. Get rid of that crap: your art looks good by itself and you don't need to hide it behind these dumb filters.

*Damage feedback is very lackluster: getting shot or shooting other cars isn't apparent as there is no sort of sound effect or hitspark to indicate contact. Also when you crash into a wall, the game starts draining your health and plays these loud, grating sounds.

*There's a lack of information given for the race. For example, what's my current position/place/rank in the race? How many cars remain? What's my speed? When I finish a lap, where's my current lap time and how does it compare to my previous laps?

*Unless you memorize the course, it's very difficult to determine where turns are, making it rather frustrating. Up to you how to handle this, but a few ways would be to zoom out the camera, add signals/signs onto the course, or to have a minimap/radar of the course in the corner.

*When all is said and done, the game isn't doing anything that innovative to create a fresh new experience, nor does it have core driving gameplay that is satisfying enough to make up for that as it feels rather basic in terms of functionality and slippery/awkward in terms of physics.

Hope this helps and that you continue to work on it!

GNOSTU responds:

Hi Mr FutureCopLGF

Thank you so much for your honest feedback. We are currently polishing Kill Laanie, we also want to state that this is a game jam entry for Gdevelops game jam 5 and we only had 9 days to make this hence the reason it seems underbaked.

Addressing your complaints

* The visuals effects we know does not appeal to everyone and we are aware of that. We are a retro revival indie game development studio that focuses on a sense of nostalgia to everything we do including art and music. We are sorry to hear that you have experienced pain in our visuals we are adding an options section to turn these effects off for players that do not like it.

* About the lack of visual information. Yes we understand that the industry standard is to know your position, speed and lap time. Again we simply did not have time for all the extra bells and whistles that go with racing games. However we are creating modes for players that want to have a normal racing experience.

* Regards to minimaps. Again not enough time to code we only had 9 days. We do not believe in hand holding when it comes to our games as many old games dropped you in the deep end with no help or info regarding things like minimaps and when corners need to be taken we were trying to go for a more realistic racing experience. Like I said we are working on modes where minimaps are an option to turn on or off. As for the zoom I do not think we are changing anything in that department as we are trying to keep the zoom like Konami's Road Fighter.

* Being fresh and new is not what we do at graphic nostalgia studios we focus on bringing life to old games from the arcade, sega and nintendo and adding things like physics and redrawn or modern styled additions like character select, color selections, PS1 and PS2 style 3d graphics and music. As for the awkward slippery physics the game jam theme was unstable so I think we delivered on that.

Conclusion.

We do not shy away from any criticism here at Graphic Nostalgia Studios and we try and cater to all gamers. Please keep in mind that we are a retro studio first and modern gamers 10th. We are a studio that still plays old games like pokemon blue, Rise of the Triad, Contra, Piko's School and SimGirl. We do play modern games like GTA V and Cyberpunk 2077 with innovation and new things to see and honestly as a retro studio we do not see much change in anything in the new games we didn't 15 years ago. We love how old games were simple and none instructive, we believe that this generation of gamers are too spoiled when it comes to help and instructions. We read all our comments and appreciate each one as well as yours. We will take what you have to heart and work on a better experience for gamers. Thanks again for the feed back and Stay Retro

[Balance]

This definitely has some potential and feels like it could be a decent simple-but-fun arcade game. Unfortunately, I found the control scheme to be very odd and just make the experience too awkward to stick with. You'd think that the player would control the balance beam, making it tilt back and forth to make the box naturally slide, but instead you make it so that the player controls both the balance beam and the box, but the box isn't affected by the tilt of the balance beam? What's the purpose of the tilt, then? Even weirder is the way that the box only moves if you hold down the movement key: just tapping will have the box remain in the same spot while the balance beam tilts to no effect. Very strange!