FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Dine in Dungeon!]

As a big fan of Dungeon Meshi and diner games in general, this was right up my alley, and I enjoyed it a whole bunch! It says that it's a game jam game, but it feels like a very polished and complete package to me: cute story and characters, intuitive design, fun minigames, interesting concept of acquiring ingredients, bonus trinkets, good escalation of stakes and difficulty, juicy and stylish presentation, solid beginning and end, and so on! Great job!

Despite all that positivity, though, there were some parts I wanted to give feedback on:

*You have my sympathies, but the fact that the web version freezes up makes for a really bad first impression, and I don't blame people for being frustrated. Were you not able to catch this in testing? Luckily I was able to download the desktop version.

*I was really unsure whether I would complete this game at first because I was really disappointed at the lack of some features: where's the need to handle customer patience, where's needing to juggle different orders in a day, why is it impossible to screw up, and so on. Luckily I stuck with it due to how charming the game was, and I was surprised at how it still remains a challenging and engaging game in spite of that, but I wouldn't blame some people more impatient than I not willing to give it a chance when they see how little it evolves the first few days.

*The script for the game is riddled with inconsistent and strange capitalization which gives a bit of a bad impression.

*Perhaps the game is already challenging enough, but I found it to be a bit of a cheat that the timer stops during the cooking minigames. It doesn't stop during other actions, like when you're selecting ingredients, so why not during the minigame? Surely I should be rewarded for getting skilled at getting through them quickly.

In the end, I made 34 orders and got an A verdict. Ah, dungeon food!

[DEETS]

Hah, as much as I'm not a real fan of this kinda brand of stalker horror game where you're just running around a featureless maze, the sheer absurd strangeness of this entire game hooked me and I had to see it all through! It's just got such a charmingly weird sense of humor and polished craftsmanship to the experience that makes it so attractive: love all the little touches like the fact that you can just leave immediately and get a bonus ending that way, haha!

So yeah, enjoyed my time with it, but there were still some rough edges I wanted to point out:

*Looks like there's a bug where if you play it in a browser and not in full-screen mode, you can crash/close the game if you attempt to crouch and pick something up, such as the key at the very start of the game. I'm guessing it's because it is a browser shortcut that the game is overlapping with. Maybe if crouch was changed to a toggle instead of a hold, you could kind of avoid it, but not really I guess.

*The sound design was a bit strange in that it seemed like the horse neighs were coming from a different direction than the clip-clops: made me think I was dealing with multiple horses or something like that. Not sure if it was intentional to add to the confusion and tension.

*I think I bugged the game out in the final stretch where you're running: I wasn't sure where to go and so eventually the horse caught up to me, but it couldn't hurt me, even if I just stood in place or ran into it intentionally. It might've been because I fed him without realizing it, but even then, he seemed to stay friendly for the rest of the game. Maybe he was friendly the whole time and I just didn't realize?

*Doesn't look like any of the medals unlocked for me? Wonder if it's because of all the weirdness mentioned earlier with the game closing and such.

[Pistol Shrimp]

Huh, this one surprised me! At first glance, it's easy for me to kinda write this game off as just a dumb joke from how chaotic it all feels, but I actually think that there is a lot of charm to its goofiness, and a lot of intelligence put into certain aspects like how all of the enemies have different movement patterns to contend with. Yes, there are some rough spots here and there like how the music doesn't load properly, aiming can bug out and get stuck, and the mechanics can feel a bit simplistic, but overall I liked the energetic vibes this was putting out!

[Stinger Flash]

Cute little SHMUP! It's a rather simplistic game, feeling very close to a 'my first SHMUP' made in programming 101, but the presentation is charming and it's got some nice touches like the last bee turning into a boss fight and different endings being granted for the difficulty levels, so I had an alright time playing it!

If I were to have any suggestions:

*I like the idea of chipping away at a giant ball of bees, but something about the feel of shooting and taking down enemies wasn't as satisfying as I'd like. Might need some better special effects and feedback, as well as upping the sound levels since it's so muted I didn't even think it existed at first.

*There's an interesting, subtle mechanic where it looks like the more you shoot, the angrier the bees get and they start to fire back at you more violently, but if you stop, they'll calm down. This could be a cool mechanic if you lean into it, like perhaps your gun gets more powerful or you get more points with sustained fire but that reward is weighed against the risk of increased enemy fire. Or maybe you can turn the ball of bees into a puzzle where really angry bees at placed at certain points and you want to carefully dismantle the ball so you don't release too many angry ones at once. I dunno, I'm just spitballing ideas: there's a lot of potential here!

*Not really a complaint because it's probably the only reason I made it through Maniac mode, but man, the player hitbox is perhaps too overly generous in how easily you can dodge bullets from how tiny it is, haha!

[Parry the night]

Oh wow, this is quite the promising strategy game you're got here! It seriously feels like it's got almost everything necessary for some great combat. It took a bit to get used to it, but once I did, and if I kinda squint, I feel like I'm legit playing Fire Emblem!

Unfortunately, I feel like this might be a case where you got a bit overambitious for a game jam, as while it is quite impressive in what you've got done so far, I'd say that it is still very much in a rough state and not ready for prime time, so to speak!

There are a lot of little nitpicks I could poke and prod at, such as how the game lacks the ability to click on an enemy to see their movement/attack range preview, for example. But the biggest issue I had to point out was the controls and how unintuitive they felt: I was constantly tripping over myself trying to get things to work, having my inputs ignored or misinterpreted. If it helps, I think the biggest issue with the game might be the mouse, as it felt like it worked better when I stuck to just the keyboard only: perhaps you should just nix the mouse altogether so it doesn't get in the way.

And maybe I'm just bad, but I felt a bit overwhelmed with this demo in how it just throws you into what feels like the middle of a game, having to manage loads of units and battle an absolutely huge army. Don't get me wrong: I like that you start in medias res and don't waste time with exposition or babying us with loads of tutorials! And I understand you wanna show off all the unit types and the amount of scale your engine can deal with. It's just that I still think the scale of this battle should be cut in half to make it more manageable, especially since even a veteran like me is not familiar with all the differences that this is bringing to the table.

Again, as much as it is very rough, it's also very much going in the right direction and I think it could be something great if you continue to work and polish it!

Alex303 responds:

Thank you for reviewing and sorry for the late response! wish It could have been a more complete game but I do get carried away. After seeing your youtube video it made it really clear where the issues are. I'll make sure the whole process is more keyboard focused. And Im so ashamed to not realize people would use the move to see enemy movement/attack because i only set it to Z. Im gonna watch the video multiple times to make sure I nip all those bugs.

I plan on releasing a more complete game in the near future with smaller and more levels.

[Captain Laser Rabbit Saves The Earth!]

Hey, this is a pretty cool SHMUP! Overall it felt like a great short-n-sweet adventure that looked good, felt good, and kept me hooked the whole way through, especially because of how it kept things exciting by always escalating the stakes with new enemies and mechanics to contend with. Level 3 in particular stands out to me because of its very creative mini-bosses! I also liked the way you setup the difficulty levels, and liked the design of having to earn power-ups since it adds some depth to the gameplay.

It was cool, but there were a few points I wanted to give feedback on:

*The bosses were cool, but kinda let me down because only the first boss does it right where it gets harder to beat the closer it gets to death: all the other bosses get easier not just in general, but also easier as they get closer to death, which made it feel kinda lame to me. When the owl loses an eye, for example, it should start spraying bullets from the leftover socket or something like that, similar to how the first boss starts spraying bullets from the leftover socket where their shield generators were.

*I like the idea of having to pull off certain stylish tricks like blasting an entire wave to get a powerup, but that made it all the more annoying when I would do just that, but wouldn't get a power-up. I just don't understand why it is so inconsistent: maybe I'm misunderstanding, but if that's the case, I think it should be explained better.

*Speaking of the laser powerups, I found them really annoying to deal with due to how awkward it was to pick them up and how fast they can disappear. There were loads of times I was trying to click on them to pick up and I'd end up firing off my laser, practically negating the gain I'd get from picking it up!

TeamTamago responds:

Thanks for the feedback, I'm glad you liked it!

*Yes, I totally agree about the bosses! They all have extra phases designed but time meant getting the basics working was more important. Alas...

*So the Desperation Blast doesn't trigger power ups, It's a thing I was debating on for a while but then I found a humongous coding error in the how bombs worked on bosses last minute and fixing that took priority! But, yeah, it should be clearer either way. Laser and bullets shouldn't have any issues!

*This! This is a thing I was worried about the most while having no one play testing, "I can do it, but maybe I've just played it too much, maybe it's too hard for everyone else??? I don't know????"

Anyway, lots to consider. Thanks!

[The Whicher 2]

Hey, nice to see a sequel to the Whicher! And for a sequel, I feel like it's improved on the concept in a multitude of ways, turning into a big and fun choose-your-own-adventure with loads of amusing choices and reactions. Not only was I hooked to this game because the humor was on point and it was constantly providing some new absurdity to see like the running animations, I was also hooked to replaying it to check out all the different endings as well. Nice work, and boy did you get a lot of mileage out of the choices being misinterpreted as a gag, haha!

If I were to have any feedback, it'd be:

*Sometimes it was a bummer where one choice resulted in an amusing joke, like the 'give food' prompt for the urchins, whereas the other choice resulted in absolutely squat happening except you immediately moving on: I feel like some sort of reaction should always happen.

*It looks like the medals are bugged out? The game was awarding them, but I'm not seeing them being displayed: unsure what's going on there. Maybe an issue on my end?

Joeyag responds:

Thank you so much for your review! I hope you liked my mountains better this time, haha
Regarding the medals, they're not working due to changes on the site, requiring a flash API update for as3. PsychoGoldfish told me the update would be made in a couple of weeks

[Luna]

Cute little adventure game! It's rather short, simplistic and not very challenging, but the charming presentation with its goofy mouth-based sound design, nice animations and amusing interactions (like the crow etching the grave) did enough to make it overall a short-n-sweet, well, adventure!

As a side note, I think I found 14 candies, but the 14th disappeared when I grabbed the 13th. Was that by design to give a bit of wiggle room if you miss one?

[Riddle University]

Hmm, an interesting point n click adventure! It's certainly got a rather uniquely goofy sense of humor and world to explore, and while it was a bit rough to navigate, I enjoyed going around and indulging in your typical adventure game vibes of collecting items, examining stuff, and trying to solve the absurd puzzles. Not bad at all!

However, there were some major issues that got in my way of enjoying this:

*I love examining various objects to see all the flavor text and descriptions, but this game was like a monkey's paw wish: yeah, there's loads to examine, but all of the text is just purple monkey dishwasher nonsense. Maybe I'm just too old to get it. I suppose you were trying to capture a certain vibe, so maybe I can't blame you for that.

*For some weird reason, not all interactable objects have an id tag pop up for them. For example, if you hover over the water fountain or the fat guy, an id tag doesn't pop up, making me think that they are just background dressing and not critical to making it through the game (when they totally are).

*In a similar manner to above, there are a lot of times that the game doesn't give a proper response for actions, and it results in confusion. For example, I tried using the bucket on a water fountain to fill it, and nothing seemed to happen: the bucket sprite still looked like it was empty, and my guy didn't respond at all. Later on, though, I learned that I did fill it with water from that action. Make that more obvious!

*As adventure games go, some of the logic for puzzles are total nonsense and it doesn't consistently offer hints to prod you in the right direction. For example, if you try to examine the grate, the character doesn't say anything, when it would be helpful to say "hmm, I think I see something down there...". Likewise, when you try and use the rope on the grate to fish something out, the character doesn't respond at all. Ideally, he should say something like "yeah, that'll reach, but how am I gonna hook it?" It's weird because the game does give hints for plenty of other stuff, like the part where you short out the electricity.

*I found it weird how you can't combine a paper clip with string to make a hook, but if you combine the string with the pencil first, and then combine that with the paper clip, suddenly it works and you've got a fishing rod. Why does it force that certain order? Surely you should allow it in any order, like to let me combine the string and clip first, and then combine that with the pencil.

*Maybe it's not technically that long if I knew where to go, but I was disappointed that the game has no sort of save/load feature, meaning that if I want to take a break (and I did want to), I've got to do everything all over again from the very start.

[Courtroom69]

Not too shabby of an ace attorney parody! For the most part, the game seems setup quite well with humorous dialogue, comical characters, and an intuitive interface: just feels well put-together! Despite lacking some certain niceties like music, I easily found myself getting sucked into the experience and wanting to see the case all the way through (and not just because of the cheesecake!)

However, while I did stick to it the whole way through, I was left a bit let down! Not only does the game end on a weird cliffhanger, making the whole thing unresolved, but the case itself and my involvement in it were rather unsatisfying. The mystery wasn't that compelling, I never had a nice 'eureka' moment where I felt like I needed to deduce anything, the game was so forgiving that you could just brute force your way through, and all of the revelations didn't come from me, but rather from the characters knowing information that I wasn't privy to, so I didn't even have a chance! It really felt like my involvement wasn't necessary, and that's a bummer.

Veinom responds:

I was working on a version that tries to fix that issue. I wanted to get it ready before you play it but I needed 1 or 2 more days of work. I remember that you make monthly videos, and I had that in mind in case you picked my game.

Thank you for playing!