FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Karoshi Portal]

Pretty cool game! A nice variety of mechanics and smart puzzles to go through in this kept things fresh and exciting, as well as some funny joke levels. It was a little confusing though: for a game called Karoshi "Portal", at the start and throughout it barely used the portal mechanics at all and instead was introducing other mechanics in a real haphazard way: one level you'd be using the portal gun for some cool, difficult and clever puzzles and then the next level would introduce bombs, only for bombs to be unused for the next several levels as it goes back to other mechanics and braindead platforming levels? Basically the pacing, difficulty and level order was all-around the place and it felt it could've been designed for a better flow and curve, but maybe some people like the haphazard level variety: guess it can kinda make it feel like a Warioware game, haha! There were also some minor bugs with the game but nothing too major: for example, if you shoot the portal gun at a wall, then shoot it at a box (deleting it), then shoot it at another wall, you'll create two blue portals (though they operate like an orange/blue pair instead of causing some sort of resonance cascade)!

[Sticky Sam 2]

Quite the solid game! Had fun going through this to the end at it kept the pace up with a good level of difficulty escalation with new mechanics bit-by-bit. Most of the mechanics were great, but I did feel like the arrows were a bit frustrating at times with how fast they would get: would've loved if the arrows froze when you start to move so you don't need to compensate for your travel time, but I understand if doing so is part of the intentional difficulty. Also would've loved to see more puzzles involving the whole 'blocks covered behind you' mechanic as that seemed to be abandoned early, but it's all good: since had a fun romp nonetheless!

[Sarlacc]

Pretty neat flappy-type game which I think has a cool theme to it, but has a rough introductory period where you need to get used to the absolute noisy chaos that is the graphics and audio of this game (I had a headache when I played this game and it didn't help, haha) both at the same time getting used to the controls which seemed overly sensitive and made me crash like crazy. I did eventually get used to the jetpack and made it pretty far, but the stigma left from the intro remained and the game didn't seem to change significantly no matter how far I got into it (not sure if it's possible to escape). It's certainly got some unique visuals, but for me, they were a bit of an eyesore and didn't evoke the sarlacc pit in a good way: if I didn't see the screenshots of the game in the description below, I would've assumed my game was glitching out. Speaking of glitches, there's a weird glitch where if you go beyond 2000 points, it trims it to be a 3 digit number for some reason: it does seem to only be a trimming instead of actually reducing the number, though.

[Bulldozer]

Solid game! Fun, fast-paced destruction that has a good variety of levels to go through, offering both some tricky puzzles and dynamic obstacle courses. I wasn't expecting the bulldozer to go so fast considering it felt so heavy with turns and such, but it did give an interesting feel to it like an old Marble Madness type game where you battle to stay on track, and the speed did allow for some fun ramps. I did have a few issues: sometimes the physics would go a bit wonky at times with how barrels acted, there were a few levels where you could get a barrel stuck in a corner and not be able to get it out, and the spike hitboxes were a bit larger than that looked. For the most part it was alright, but there was just a slight overall wonkiness to the movement/controls/physics that caused some frustration at times.

[Pullfrog]

Really neat idea and an interesting game to play! Definitely has a nice feel to it with a lot of love shown in the various aspects of its creation, and I had fun figuring out how to play the game and deal with the chaos. Has a weird mysterious element to it as well which serves as another nice hook. I did get a bit confused on the execution at times, however. My initial expectation when playing was that I would shoot my tongue at something, it would attach and freeze the block, and then I would press a direction to indicate where the tongue would move the attached block to. However, it looks like the only thing the tongue can do is pull it towards you (when it works, which seemed sketchy at times), which I felt limited it greatly (for example, you can't pull a block to the wall because of this since you'd get squished). Because of this, I found myself relying less and less on the tongue pulling and more and more on the tongue being able to destroy blocks, which I felt was way less appropriately frog-themed. Basically, I think the tongue pulling is the most iconic feature of this and it should've had a lot more usability given to it to make it the best, instead of having it compete with the destruction mechanics which I feel might've been built to compensate and reduce frustration from the tongue being bad. Still, had some good fun nonetheless!

afk-mario responds:

You are totally right! we try to compensate a little the fact that you can't push pieces on to the walls spawning more pieces there, but I understand how it can be frustrating.

The pulling feels like it doesn't work at times because we try to have at least one block of distance between you and the piece so you don't get squashed more frequently it's not the most elegant solution and we have talked about different ways of dealing with it, but maybe now that the conditions for it to work are more clear it makes it less frustrating :)

Thanks for playing and the review!

[Shelled Shinobi]

Pretty neat game! I'm used to most PICO-8 games being slow and puzzle-like, so it was great to see something so fluid and fast-paced as this crazy parkour game! It was a little bit tricky to get used to the speed and controls, but I think it never got overly frustrating and just felt like a good challenge I'd like to go back and see if I can effortlessly speedrun (would be great if the ending had a high score board or a dev's best time to battle against!) I think the only issue I had with the game was I felt some of the elements didn't gel with the speedrun flow nature of it: some of the collectables weren't on the ideal path and would take you out of your natural run it seemed, and I'd much prefer if boxes didn't bounce you back but would just let you crash through them, as it's annoying to have to bounce back and reset a path.

[Musync]

Pretty cool game! I like the unique concept, and it's pretty cool that the levels get more and more complex and have you stay on your toes by having to think fast to handle sudden changes like 'repeat' and 'reverse' to keep yourself from dying. My only problem at the moment is that I feel like the levels are quite overly long, which makes dying on them very punishing. I think the levels might be able to work with the long length of time, but to compensate for that, I think the music would have to be fixed to be more complex and more of a journey, like an actual music track, as right now the simple loops get quite repetitive quickly, even with the 'repeat' and 'reverse' mixing them up slightly.

[Nursery Curse]

Definitely delivers on its intention of introducing people to the absolute chaos that a nursery can be! While the game didn't seem to have much progression to it apart from the one level, and it felt like you could never 'win', I felt like that was the whole point of the experience and it was fun to get in character and try to manage in the face of overwhelming odds. I like the little touches the game has to help you learn the mechanics, such as how the audio has direction to it so you can figure out where problems are happening by the sound of cries, and how your character verbalizes things like 'there, there' to let you know that the grab has a calming effect for sad kids. Now excuse me, I have to get back to breaking up another fight in the bathroom!

[Bunny's Cavern]

I liked this game a lot: really fun and challenging like a bunny version of Super Meat Boy! The levels and obstacles put forward in this game were, in my opinion, very well put-together and challenging in a good way: I like how the game gets hard quickly, and it keeps adding more and more unique obstacles and set-pieces to get through, all while changing the environments you go through slightly to give you a feeling of progression. Controls felt good and smooth for the most part, so there wasn't much issues in navigating the challenging levels.

My only complaint was that there is a slight issue with the way the game handles changing directions: if you're facing right and jump straight up, tapping the left button during the jump will turn the bunny around. However, if you're facing right while jumping forward, tapping the left button during the left not just turn you around, but send you flying left a good distance, which can cause you to die unintentionally, which I did many times. I think it is an issue of the direction change instantly mirroring the momentum/velocity directly, so it shifts from 1 to -1, instead of slowly changing the momentum/velocity, from 1 to .5 to 0 to -.5 to -1 until it is in the opposite direction, if that makes sense. Other than that, the controls felt very smooth.

[[BTNverse] Universal Thief]

Holy mackerel, this mighta been one of my favorite games yet from ya: the concept really surprised me since I was just expecting a more common type of thief game (like Thief, if you can imagine that) but I should've known better than to expect the ordinary from you, haha! It didn't take long for me to absolutely love the whole strategic element of stealing moves for an ideal loadout to deal with challenges in your way, all in a crazy Earthbound-esque environment. Really very impressive design in building all of these sorts of moves that can serve all sorts of purposes! I haven't beaten the whole game yet, but I'm looking forward to: I honestly thought it was gonna end with you stealing the boss ID, and that would've been satisfying, but it just kept going!

EDIT: I am the alpha and omega, the beginning and the end of this game rocks

adriendittrick responds:

thanks for the great review as usual :)
Have fun beating the rest of the game when you have time!