FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Space Girls Can't Swim]

This cute visual novel starts off pretty strong with a neat intro, a goofy story and some gratuitous cheesecake, but once I got to the end it ultimately felt a bit unsatisfying and shallow, making me feel like I got clickbaited by booba: a tale as old as time!

That's not to say that the game doesn't show some good effort and design, as there definitely are some aspects that are pretty cool. For example, while it starts off slow, the game really picks up in the amount of unique images and graphics it showcases during the story, which is much more enthralling than just looking at people posing all the time in front of a static background. The story was quite amusing in general, the minigames were an interesting activity, and I also thought that the way the game will continue the story from a loss is a lot more interesting than just giving a game over or restart.

However, as said previously, it started to fall apart for me. The story just felt overly shallow and simplistic with problems being introduced and resolved faster than you can blink, and choices felt pointless, sometimes literally, such as choosing who to explore the hotel with. Considering it's a game about making choices and seeing all the different endings, it's completely absurd that it doesn't have a skip or save/load function to get past stuff you've already seen before. And while I don't like to harp on about typos, this is a visual novel which is all about text, and the script was absolutely flooded with errors: hell, it even got one of the main character's name incorrect constantly (Constella, if you're curious)!

CubePunks responds:

Haven't heard anything about typos - It's 32 full pages of text, if you spellcheck the game we'll give you credit.

[Lumera Numbera's PUZZLE POP]

Wow, this was a fantastic and cute little puzzler! Not even quite sure what to say: overall the experience feels very well-crafted in all aspects and I immediately got addicted and just kept on playing! It was quite challenging to rewire my brain to start combos using numbers instead of 1 and 6, as well as utilizing loop-arounds and reverse order. I do like some of the subtle things like how, if you're in the middle of building a combo while time runs out, it will immediately spend your current combo instead of just making you lose. The satisfying way building higher combos results in higher-pitched sounds is a classic, too. Well done!

If I had any complaints, it might be that the tutorial is a bit too quick, only explaining the bare essentials. Don't get me wrong, I like how lite it is and understand that a big wall of text of all sorts of rules will immediately fly out of the players head, so its better to just get to the fun stuff, but I had a lot of confusion understanding why sometimes I was suddenly able to chain similar numbers, and what the heck the gems do and how they are created, and so on. But then again, I feel like I did learn everything about the game, so maybe it was alright and I'm just being silly? But still, even if you don't make it part of the tutorial, I wish there was some sort of optional 'how to play' or 'codex' menu I could willingly access to learn the deeper aspects instead of just relying on potentially washing some of my games to experiment and learn.

[Lampyrinth]

While it does have a certain nostalgic old-school Flash appeal to its visuals and gameplay, I found this pretty underwhelming, as the gameplay has no spice, no sense of challenge, threat or engagement to it, but rather tedious busywork as you just walk around the maze, pull a lever to get a key, go back to that same lever to pull it to open the way to the key door, unlock it, and so on, over and over. It just felt so tiresome.

Considering 'lamp' is in the name, I was really hoping that the game was doing something unique with light and shadow: perhaps the lamp would serve as a time limit, perhaps you would reflect light off mirrors to solve puzzles, or use the light as a limited resource to fight enemies, and so on. Instead, the only thing that seems to happen is mazes get so dark that you can't see the effects of buttons and levers you use, adding even more tedium and backtracking to a game that already has it. Sure, it's impressive with the way shadows are generated by the light, but that only makes this game a neat tech demo, not fun.

Obviously my heart goes out to you that the game files were lost so I'm slightly forgiving of elements like the FPS counter getting in the way, but I still want to be honest with what we got, and if I'm being honest, the core gameplay would likely still be quite unappealing to me even if it got polished up a bit more. It's not necessarily bad, but not really good either, just merely serviceable.

I did like some of the small fancy touches it had, such as the way menus are actually levels that your character moves around in to select options.

Veinom responds:

I was going for Zelda-like dungeon puzzles, but with a lay-back feeling, simple controls, without time restrictions or enemies. The challenge is to reach the end and find all the fruits and diamonds. You also need to be fast, or you lose points.

The game loop might seem a bit boring to you, but it was mainly made for people who like searching for secret items, while using their memory and thinking, in any pace they see fit. Thank you for taking the time to tell me your constructive thoughts.

[Jawbreaker]

Heh, the art and concept behind the game is very goofy, amusing and quite memorable, but that's pretty much it: once you get past that initial chuckle and then realize what an ordeal the actual gameplay is going to be, you immediately turn 180 degrees and hit da bricks. It just ain't worth turning your wrist bones into powder from shaking the mouse the mind-bogglingly amount of times this game wants you to do. At the very least, this game takes a bold, controversial stand in recognizing the two true genders: man and Miku.

[Oblivion Eve]

Yowza, what a game this is! Of all the things I was expecting from Pico-8, it wasn't a stylish character-action game that reminds me of Scourgebringer, but here we are!

As if it wasn't impressive enough that the game has an incredibly stylish combat system with tons of weapons movesets, satisfying hit feedback, and rewards aggression and variety with resource gain, but the game was no slouch on the menus and presentation, which are almost as if not more stylish! While the story and vibes were certainly edgy as all heck, it did escalate the game's coolness effectively, and I enjoyed getting the chapters as I played. Fascinating stuff and I absolutely loved comboing enemies enough to get my meter and then blast them all to hell: never gets old!

Having said that, it wasn't all sunshine and rainbows:

*For one, I had a bit of a rough first impression as I really didn't gel with the two starting weapons, being the sword and the spear. They just had such an awkward moveset with so many diagonal stabs: when I'm trying to attack an enemy above me with an upwards heavy attack, the last thing I want is for my weapon to stab everywhere BUT above me and completely goddamn miss! Thank god I had the patience to stick with the game and eventually come upon the axe and hammer, which felt great due to their much more intuitive movesets!

*While the feedback for attacks was very satisfying in terms of hit-freeze and visuals, I was really disappointed with the sound, more accurately the complete lack there-of. Really felt like it extinguished some of the satisfaction.

*I had a much more fun time fighting the boss gems instead of regular enemies, as with regular enemies, it was so annoying with how they fly all over the place, particularly with the way they completely ignore some platform collisions but don't in other cases! It was just impossible to tell how the heck they were going to pinball around and by the time you try to intercept them, they reset and you have to sit on your thumb and wait for their damn invincibility to wear off, argh!

*Power-ups were a mixed bag: obvious ones that increase your dodge distance or invuln, give health or meter regen on kills, increase size and so on all felt immediately great, but the other ones like hitstun, duration and recharge were tough to even notice at times and felt really vague, unclear and unsatisfying.

Again, despite the issues listed above, really great stuff you got here, and I'm having a ball!

[Walking Up]

Hmm, quite the neat puzzle platformer you got here! It's a little bit bland due to simple graphics and a lack of music, but nevertheless it feels decent and it provides a short and sweet adventure: it tutorializes intuitively through level design, has a decent set of mechanics to utilize, and it escalates the challenge in satisfying manner. It even has some cute touches like the way the arrow blocks first get introduced, what with the way they crash in from off-screen!

That said, while I did have fun and made it all the way through, it was a bit rough in some areas, apart from the issues mentioned previously:

*The symbols that the game uses to build a language and teach mechanics were a bit off in some cases. For example, the exit door looks more like it is closed when it is open, due to the stripes giving it a glass window feel: feels like those sprites should be reversed! There was no way to distinguish between buttons that need to be weighed down or ones that only need to be pressed once: feel like you should use a switch or lever graphic for the buttons that don't need to be weighed down to indicate this. You also setup the fact that boxes with X's on them don't get influenced by gravity switches, but boxes with arrows do, then suddenly you introduced boxes with X's on them but also with yellow to indicate that they do get influenced? Why not just use the arrow symbols like you were already using before? Using yellow makes me think they need to interface with yellow doors or buttons!

*The physics of the game can be a bit wonky: I had a level take more time than necessary because a box I pushed down from a ledge would end up getting too close to another nearby box and I couldn't separate them. Even when they were stacked on top of each other they wouldn't separate: why couldn't I just push the top one off?

*Level 13 was an very awkward difficulty spike: for a game that has been very simple so far, suddenly the level required you to do some very tight and precisely timed gravity-switching and physics to pull off the solution. It just felt like it came out of left field: I had no idea the puzzles would require this kind of dexterity based on the previous ones! Even though I liked this puzzle and the others after it, it definitely feels like there needs to be a better build-up as it really caught me off-guard.

*Bit disappointed that there was no save feature so I could come back to finish after a little break, or at least a level select...oh wait, there is a level select, but it only appears after you beat the game when it is no longer necessary! I would much prefer the level select be there at the start so you can pick up where you left off, or maybe even skip a puzzle you can't solve.

[To Kill A Fidel Castro]

Hah, this was quite the hoot and a holler! Really funny game that takes me back to those classic Newgrounds games where you torture celebs with a variety of implements, though this felt a lot less edgy.

Initially when playing it, I thought it was all a big joke and it was impossible to win any of the games, and to be honest, I was fine with that as it was very amusing to watch them clumsily fail and see Castro win against all odds, like seducing the seductress. Imagine my surprise when I finally did win a minigame for the first time (the baggage claim, if you're curious)!

Another reason I did think it was impossible to win, however, was because some of the games were incredibly confusing: it was difficult to learn the controls for the pen minigame since you can die so fast before you get a chance to see, and I still haven't had any luck with the milkshake minigame despite me trying my best to carefully chisel. So yeah, while I like this, I do think some of the games could've been better designed.

Anyway, I had a lot of fun with this and enjoyed going back to check out all of the different outcomes! Very charming stuff, and educational to boot (well, kind of)!

[MUTABLOB]

Huh, this game is pretty interesting, being some sort of fusion of Conway's Game of Life with Vampire Survivors! More so that that, though, I was really surprised me with how much my impression of it flip-flopped!

My first impression wasn't that great. I'm not really much of a fan of idle games in the first place so there's that, but I just felt like the game was pretty mindless. There just didn't seem to be any sense of strategy or feedback to anything I was doing: I couldn't tell what the enemy was going to do next, so all I could do was hope for good luck and use whatever cards were given to me and watch the little guys go at it, which with the limited game jam graphics, wasn't that appealing. More so than that, the game felt really slow at the default speed, but I wasn't sure whether to speed it up since I felt like since that was the default, there must be some sort of micromanagement I was supposed to be doing, despite there seeming nothing to do.

Eventually, however, the game started to grow on me! Not only did the game start to introduce unique and challenging waves to watch crash against your blobs, like big rows or columns of enemies, but I also cranked up the speed to max which felt a lot more appropriate. While the visual effects weren't dazzling, the game did have all the critical feedback necessary to showcase the various perks and powers your slimes were picking up, so it was satisfying to watch them grow. Before I knew it, I ended up playing several times to take different routes of growth to see how it played out!

So yeah, in the end, I think it's a pretty cool concept and certainly has some merit, and considering that's the main goal of a game jam, this is a winner in my book! If it were just a bit more juicy and made some subtle changes to things like the default speed and the frequency of unique challenge waves, I think it'd be a hit! It reminded me a lot of playing Plague Inc, where you need to decide how best to grow your virus to maximize aggression while remaining covert and other factors in a great balancing act.

[B.A.S.]

Cool little arcade game! It's very simple and doesn't have much to it in terms of content and long-term appeal, essentially being an endless version of Feathered Escape's last level, but it nevertheless looks and feels very smooth and polished, and I found myself having a lot of fun going for a high score. In particular, I enjoyed the little touches the game has, like how the chicken panics when you mess up and go into a saw blade. Neat! Would love some sort of highscore table integration!

[Botanica Demo]

Hmm, this one gave me mixed feelings. I think it is promising, but a bit rough around the edges for me in its current state!

First impression, as said, was a bit mixed:

1) While the art was gorgeous and the game overall has a very cute, soft and whimsical feel to it, that very same art was a source of confusion as it hurt the visual clarity: with our character being so small, the foreground having so much foliage, everything being so bright and colorful, and so on, it was hard to keep track of elements like our character and enemies and even determine what is a platform and what is part of the background!

2) The gameplay didn't spark joy either as not only was it a pretty bog-standard platformer at its core, but the movement and physics felt very slow, floaty and awkward: for example, I didn't like how our character got knocked back so much when swinging their sword to the point of making me fall off cliffs, and I didn't like how slow the thorn grenade goes when you toss it which made me not even want to use it! There were also weird glitches like how if you jump on a platform you'll strangely hit the ground twice for some reason.

Normally, I would've already quit by now based on this impression, but I tried to persevere, and I felt rewarded for my efforts because the next few levels did feel better, at least somewhat. The second level's graphics were a lot better for clarity as elements felt more distinct and popped out more easily, and the gameplay started mixing things up with interesting and impressive setpieces like the crumbling bridge chase, the falling leaf climb, and the boss fight. The game was still pretty slow, floaty and awkward as said before, but at least it was slightly more interesting to play.

So yeah, its a bit of a mixed bag, and kind of a case of style over substance: the game looks very pretty and shows some effort in creating an interesting experience, but the core gameplay feels a bit awkward and plain. It shows enough promise with the later levels that, at the very least, I wish it the best of luck on future development!