FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[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!

[Recital]

Ooo, I love me a good boss-fight, and this delivered a pretty cool one! Love all of the different phases, attack patterns, and sense of escalation, especially the fun middle part where you're falling down. The use of reflection as your only means of attack was pretty cool, too: always a classic since it forces you to put yourself in harms way. Overall this was a great short and sweet experience, all wrapped together nicely with some cool music, neat visuals and style!

The downside for me was that the game was in a rather rough state. Some of the roughness are just nitpicks, like how the text boxes aren't layered on top properly, meaning their text can be occluded by foreground elements like trees, or how the world is so flat and the character is just kind of on top of everything instead of being in front or back of elements. An explanation of the controls would've been nice too, but I figured it out without much issue. But there were some more annoying aspects like how you can get caught on the wall instead of naturally sliding across it, or how some hitboxes and transitions would just glitch up or work improperly. It wasn't enough to stop me from enjoying it, though!

CMulholland responds:

Thanks for playing Future! Always nice to see you're still playing small games and making videos

[Let's Make Television]

Huh, quite the interesting game! Certainly starts out with a strong first impression as the game has a real sense of showmanship with all the fancy presentation techniques it shows off, and I was really intrigued to see how it plays out! While it's a bit controversial, I thought the experimentation with AI was interesting as well and how it influenced chatting and the minigames, among other things.

Overall I was pretty impressed, but there definitely were some rough aspects to it, so here's some feedback in regards to that:

*I thought the chat sequences were pretty neat at first because it was cool to see how they respond to all manner of questions. I started off with some natural chit-chat about the game itself and who they were and they always seemed to respond appropriately for the most part, apart from the very eccentric NPCs, of course. The magic started to wear off though once I realized that chit-chat wasn't going to help me befriend them: instead it seemed like the optimal thing to do was just spam compliments and it just made everything feel like a superficial, annoying slog. Honestly, I'd prefer it if was just minigames instead and get rid of these chat parts.

*While the AI responded appropriately in most cases, there were times I felt like I couldn't trust them, or that it was all just hollow and pointless and I couldn't take it seriously. For example, some of the answers they gave in the pictionary minigame were just nuts and made no sense, and made me unsure if I would get screwed over later on through no fault of my own.

*I found the menus pretty weird and inconsistent in how they were controlled: sometimes you can select stuff with the mouse and keyboard, other times you're forced into using the mouse for some reason. Just made it a bit awkward to figure out what the game wants at times.

*Game was rather glitchy and janky at times, with the most prominent glitch being that when I disengage from a conversation, sometimes the camera would stay locked and zoomed-in on the NPC instead of unlocking and zooming out.

*Would be nice if there was some sort of save/load option as the game can get quite long to do in one sitting.

So yeah, kind of rough at the moment, but I like its experimental nature and that you're exploring new designs, so kudos on that!

xtrarare responds:

thank you for the thoughtful feedback!

[Vox Regis]

Hey, this was a pretty neat game! The game is very amusing and charming overall and I loved the concept of manipulating the populace to try and keep them balanced. Really creative stuff and everything was intuitive and looked and felt good, which is quite impressive for a game jam game! It's rather simple and doesn't last that long, but I had a nice time with this.

For feedback, I'd offer this up:

*Window size is a bit awkward in that it is too vertical and doesn't fit easily in a browser window.

*Once you play it once and the razzle-dazzle wears off, the game can be quite simple and boil-down to the same strategy everytime without any curveballs. Curious whether the game can be expanded upon in some way. I suppose you could always add more factions to make balancing more difficult, but I wonder what other mechanical challenges there could be, like spies or false intel or something like that. I suppose it's fine for a one-off standalone game, though.

*Bit bummed out by the scoring system as all it does is tell you how many speeches you made (6) and nothing else. Would've loved if there was a ranking system and it gives you a little epilogue for how well your kingdom did based on your rank or something like that as without that, I'm not compelled to replay that much.

[Daymare Cat 10-year Anniversary Edition]

Neat stuff! Unfortunately I haven't played the original Daymare Cat so I'm missing out on the sense of nostalgia as well as a point of comparison for changes made between versions, but it was still interesting to see this piece of history as a newcomer!

Overall I thought it was a decent short and sweet experience, but if I were to be rough, I'd say that the game is largely carried by its vibes, as while the art style and music are very cool, the game itself is pretty ho-hum, being short in length with janky feeling platforming and no real sense of puzzles or challenge. Perhaps this is unfair as I'm comparing it to games nowadays instead of back then. But then again, those vibes and their sense of mystique did push me all the way through the game, so hey, it was clearly enough, and I enjoyed seeing the music come together with the ending cinematic!

I'll have to check out Slice of Sea sometime!

[Raide]

Another Kultisti classic! Love the puzzles in how intuitive, challenging and creative they are, love the charming story and visual design, love the chill vibes, love the overall smooth as silk feel to the game, and love the extra bit of secret mysteries to keep you going! Not much else to be said: it's just cool and fun and I'm always amazed at the consistency!