FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Trivial Trivia: November Grab Bag]

Always down for some more fun trivia! I went for food and was surprised how well I was able to make it through, especially considering I still have the palette of a child who just wants his chicken nuggets, haha!

Anyway, the game feels like its in a pretty decent place now for the most part, having been improved over time with slight alterations, quality-of-life features, and a nice bit of pep to its presentation! I'm sure there are little things here and there that I could nitpick, but I just want to celebrate its evolution into a solid trivia game: well done!

[Meteor Tempest 2]

It's a decent arcade experience! It's rather simple, but the very lively and animated presentation does a lot to make the game feel exciting despite that, and the game does have a decent array of different meteor types to keep you on your toes. There's some potential here!

Unfortunately, I feel like once you've played 1 or 2 waves, you've already seen everything the game has to offer: every other wave just felt like more of the same except maybe a tiny bit harder, and I found myself running out of patience, especially since it kept increasing the time commitment. Perhaps if the game introduced new meteor types, or had some special events to shake things up such as a bonus level or a boss fight, it could've kept my attention better. Perhaps in Meteor Tempest 3?

[Kerners!]

Wow, this really surprised me with how much I got into it! It looks great with very chill and polished vibes, the concept is really neat and the gamefeel/interface is just so satisfying to operate with the way pieces automatically rotate and snap into position as you drag them around. And that little jingle when you win is so nice for some reason! The inclusion of a bunch of different modes, particularly the ones like Daily and Instant which allow for community/party play, is quite nice too. It's a solid game and definitely something I could see installing on my phone to play now-and-then for realsies!

If I were to have any complaints, it'd be that while it is very addicting, it's only in a kinda turn-off-your-brain chill-out way. Perhaps I just haven't played it long enough, but the difficulty/challenge factor of the game seems very stagnant and practically non-existent: the time limit is too generous, the play space stays mostly the same, there's no ranking/scoring system, and so on. Basically, there's not much of a long-term appeal for me because there's no room to grow and flex my skills to prove mastery of the system. Still, fun while the honeymoon period lasts!

As a side note, I found all of the unlockable palettes and fonts to be not as good as the default, so there's not much motivation to be found there (though I'm not one for cosmetics in the first place, haha)!

[Thicket]

Nice short and sweet puzzle game! It's a bit easy and doesn't last too long, but the concept was very unique and was expanded upon in very interesting and creative ways, and it was overall quite memorable and fun!

While it is short, it does have those bonus levels at the end as a nice, well, bonus! Unfortunately I took a break before playing them and was disappointed to find that when I came back my progress was lost: I had fun playing this but I dunno if I wanna go through everything again just to access them, especially level 10 where even if you know the trick it still takes a lot of steps to solve it!

retrowillgames responds:

Type “cheat” while in the game and it should unlock the bonus levels if you want to play them :)

[Monkey's Cards]

Hmm, not sure how to judge this as I'm not a fan of Solitaire and card games in the first place, but also because...it's just a recreation of Solitaire and already existing games, and that's it?

Like, it's just a clone, so I'm not sure what I'm supposed to judge here, especially since the only addition here seems to be the monkey-themed aesthetic. There are no significant quality-of-life features or changes I'm seeing from the original...and in fact I would say there are less here than there would be in the original, so that's not the best impression. For example, for a newcomer like me, I found it annoying that I couldn't access the rules as a reminder without exiting the game completely. I was also confused by the cards as sometimes it was difficult to tell the difference between symbols when they are shrunk down so much, and what's going on with the face cards: are there no jacks?

There certainly are games that recreate or present existing games with a better interface and quality-of-life features that make me come around to loving a game I had no interest in before, but this unfortunately didn't do that as I had hoped. Again, though, I'll admit that I'm not the best judge because these card games aren't my cup of tea, so take that as you will.

[Horizonauts: Run Like Hell]

Hmm, while I'm sure Horizonauts will be pretty cool, this game felt quite underwhelming to me and didn't do anything to sell me on it. If I were to sum it up, this game reminds me a lot of those mobile game ads, you know, those minigames that you want to hurry up and skip over so you can get to the game you actually want to play?

That's not to say the game isn't without potential. The art is nice and energetic, and I do like that the game seems to be going for some complex mechanics and enemy design to keep you on your toes. I'm not one to be against endless runners in general, and this could be good.

But right now it just feels incredibly generic without any unique mechanics to set it apart from the crowd, and even worse, it feels very janky and rough, especially with its controls. I couldn't get certain moves like doing a high bounce off of an enemy to happen consistently no matter how hard I tried to determine the right way to hit my inputs. The hitboxes seemed arbitrary at times with me going straight through those grinder enemies without getting hurt. And there were plenty of other weird cases of missed inputs or just weird behavior.

Apart from that, I had some other complaints like how the window to get into the tutorial is timed: why you gotta make learning about the games rules a missable QTE? It seems so backwards: shouldn't it be that it puts you into the tutorial automatically and gives you a button to skip it? That seems like it would be much more intuitive.

You say it's still in alpha/beta and I can believe that: maybe it was just too early to put this out to the public. Best of luck on its development, and best of luck to Horizonauts!

[Cinnamon in the Dungeon]

Nice little puzzle dungeon game! The presentation is cute, the mechanics are intuitive and explained well (perhaps too well, the mole is probably not even necessary), the challenge is decently paced with the gem serving as a subtle easy/hard difficulty selector, it's smooth without any obvious bugs, and so on and so forth. It's not necessarily something that I'm going to shout from the rooftops or remember after awhile, but it's a solid and decent game that provides some good fun! The only feedback I could think of is that it would be nice to have some sort of level selector so we can retry levels, particularly if we want to go back for a gem.

[Seconds to Scan]

Cute little game! Reminds me a lot of games like The Impossible Quiz, you know, a bunch of questions and minigames that are quite tricksy and require lateral thinking to solve, with the extra addition here being a time pressure mechanic. The presentation and story surrounding the game was very impressive and charming, and I had a decent time making my way through to the end.

If I had to be rough on this, I'd say I was a little disappointed at the end because of how short it was: it left me feeling rather unsatisfied and wanting more. In particular, I was bummed out how the questions were the same each time instead of having some sort of randomization to them, both to the questions asked and the contents within, like a Warioware game, so it would really challenge me to think fast instead of just memorize the exact sequence to win. In short, I kinda feel like the impressive visuals built my expectations up too high, and the gameplay just didn't live up to that: kind of a style over substance issue. Still, it was decent enough, so no harm no foul.

I did have something weird happen to me: a glitch where suddenly the timer was gone and I was able to solve the last 3 questions with no time pressure. I think what happened is that I solved a question right when time ran out, so the transition glitched out and took me to the next question instead of the game over screen, but the timer was already erased so there was nothing to stop me? I really don't know!

sysl responds:

You're 100% right, the timer should not have disappeared like that. I've tried to reproduce it but without luck. I think it may be a tween issue between the puzzle it vanished on (from your video) and the one you moved on to.

Part of your disappoint I think was the timer disappearing. You would have had to do another loop of gameplay. The idea was to make something that everyone could get to the end after a few tries.

A lot of how I design games is that I want to get across an idea, entertain the player for the whole time and if they are left wanting more that's fine. I know growing older I have less time, so if someone can show me something and leave me with an experience in a reasonable time, I like it. Not to say I would never make a longer game, but I want it to be worthwhile instead of just taking an idea directly. ("impossible quiz redux".)

[SpellWheel]

Oh wow, as someone who loves games like Magicka where you combine elements for all sorts of magical spells, this was right up my alley! I absolutely loved playing this and was fascinated with how well the mechanics were explained and how well they evolved as the game continued, with all sorts of crazy combos and enemy designs to keep you on your toes and forcing you to strategize in new ways. I played it on PC but I'm sure this is even better on mobile where you can get the physicality of spinning the wheel with your fingers.

It can definitely be overwhelming and I would get confused as how the numbers/math would resolve at times with all the multipliers and additions, but I feel like I was coming to terms with it, slowly but surely, and it does its best to make everything intuitive and provide feedback. I'd love it if the title screen would let you test all of your spells out: it seems to at least somewhat, but you can't hit anything with them but air, unfortunately. Still, great game!

EDIT: Never mind, you just need to click on the dummy to get something to test your spells on!

[Primal Planet DEMO]

Wow, this is looking to be something big! I really love what this game is going for in terms of having to use your resources cleverly to survive, and overall the game just feels so professionally constructed and left a great impression on me, what with its stunning visuals, vibrant world, intuitive design, attention to detail, and so on and so forth. There's a lot of interesting touches like having a dino pal and escorting your family that adds some uniqueness to the gameplay as well.

It's definitely solid already, but here's some feedback to help it along in its journey to full release:

*Some of the platforming and physics could be a bit janky at times. There were a couple of times that I was able to wall-jump straight up when I shouldn't be able to, done by jumping near the bottom of a wall I was sliding down, I think. Other times I was able to land on this weird spot on a platforms edge where I wasn't on the platform properly, but I wasn't clinging to the edge either, just kinda awkwardly standing there in the air. The dodge roll + jump combo felt really awkward too with the way it doesn't preserve your momentum but suddenly slows it down in mid-air when the roll animation wears off.

*When you encounter something that can be destroyed but not without special tools, like thorns walls, the player should have a different reaction when they try to hit it, like bouncing backwards or a sharp deflect sound, as right now it acts like if you were hitting a normal breakable wall which can confuse the player into thinking they just need to keep hitting it to break it when they can't.

*I feel like tall grass should cause your player to animate differently like they're struggling to walk, as well as having the grass shake around and play a ruffling sound effect, to really sell the aspect of it slowing the player down: it's easy to not notice at the moment.

*Having to escort your family is somewhat charming and can forge an emotional attachment, but I can image it ruffling a lot of player's feathers to have to micromanage them so much and they end up hating to deal with them.

*I'm not sure if I like the whole exp/leveling system. For one, I find it weird that it is locking away critical upgrades like double-jump and dash, because that means the game won't likely ever get challenging enough or have puzzles that require those since it needs to account for players who don't choose those. A lot of the upgrades also feel like fluff: why bother increasing my spear inventory when the puzzles that require spears will always feel obliged to give me an infinite amount right next to them so I can solve them? Apart from that, I also just don't like how it encourages you to rampantly grind/kill everything in order to get experience, including harmless stuff like bugs and fish: surely stealth should be rewarded in a survivalist experience, but by having experience points, you need to kill in order to level up.

Anyway, this has loads of potential and I look forward to the final release! Hope my rambling helps somewhat, though I understand that some of the complaints like about the leveling system are too deeply entrenched to change now: still wanted to explain my feelings though!