FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Orphanarium]

Cool little metroid adventure you got here! Got quite addicted to finding all the various tools and weaving my way through nuns by climbing around on cupboards: really captured that 'Home Alone' vibe of being a little kid avoiding scary adults!

Really shocked me with the amount of depth the game has in terms of endings: I beat it the first time with the bad ending but couldn't see how the game could be anything but that, but then ended up getting the good ending after realizing how many other tools and routes there were to find! Also thought it was great that the routes all led to big moments, like terrorizing the nuns or having a huge boss fight. Really cool stuff and I can't believe there's even more potential endings I could get beyond those two!

It had a few rough spots here and there but nothing too major: if you stop crawling through a gap it should keep you in crawl mode instead of standing you up and glitching into the geometry, and speaking of crawling, I would've loved the ability to peek downwards if I crawl as there were a few times I jumped and ended up getting hit by something I couldn't see below. Also the game could be a bit plain when it comes to special effects: having the same death animation for everything, certain actions not having any sounds or particles, that kind of stuff.

Veinom responds:

Crawling is underused. It only occurs in the basement for gameplay variety. It would be easier to just remove it!

I do agree about the special effects. I wanted to add some visual and sound effects for the Mirrors, but I kept failing, so I left it as it is.

Thank you for your input and I'm glad you enjoyed this little adventure!

Edit: Thank you for playing the game! Your video was very well made :)
https://youtu.be/of8wxqPhZpw?t=17852

[Kwing VS Cyberdevil]

Hah, this certainly gave me a few laughs and a lot of nostalgia, though for the latter, not exactly in a good way, as it was reminding me of the many terrible Flash-based 2D fighters I've played back in the day, and this unfortunately was just as an awkward mashfest as those were, lacking any sort of coherent feedback or sense of strategy despite my best attempts. Would've loved to have something simple yet deep like Divekick or Footsies, but this ain't it.

Looking past it as a fighting game, however, it was still an amusing experience: the raps were very cool, I loved the goofy animations (those speed lines for walking back and forth, omg), the menus and presentation were neat, and so on. The concept of having more power when it's your turn to rap is neat too. Could definitely be neat, but in its current state, probably better as an audio portal entry instead.

Cyberdevil responds:

Tough critique man, though I do appreciate the honesty. After testing battle mechanics again and again you probably do go a bit blind as to the optimal experience...

The difficulty curve seemed pretty balanced to me in how you wouldn't win all too easily as either one or the other character here, though victory does probably require more so finding and abusing shortcomings in AI response than actually combining moves in as thought-out and rewarding a way as possible, and with limited moves the tactics required are bound to seem a bit repetitive. Valid point on the need for more coherent visual feedback too.

I do think the strategy basis is here, but probably not ideally presented, or balanced, or timed, whatever most impedes the sense of intentional progress... the difference between attacks and block responses could definitely be clearer. Maybe you need more visible openings and lapses in enemy attacks for which you'd best time your own to give a clearer sense of strategy, or more visible forewarning with attacks, so you can dodge or counter accordingly... though personally I do enjoy that more aimless classic button masher battle variety too. :)

Ah well, glad you had some fun with this anyhow, and that the speed lines at least delivered! If there do be more fighting Flashes for the future: good points to consider here.

[Hell's On Hold]

Hah, this was quite a cute and challenging job sim you got here! Love the stylish presentation you got here with cute touches like the brochure tutorial and such (though the colors can be a bit too loud and hide elements at times), and the gameplay was quite addictive and fun to puzzle out! It certainly was a bit confusing and intimidating at first to figure out where to start with the client and how to figure out where they went wrong when it could be anything, but surprisingly I was able to make it through somehow!

It's nice and I probably shouldn't expect more considering its a game jam game, but I had such fun that I couldn't help but be a bit letdown at the low amount of dialogue variations and the lack of any sort of concrete end goal or sense of progression and escalation, as it did make it quite repetitive and made me eventually leave bored. There were also some clunky aspects like how there was no way to fast-forward text. But hey, for a game jam game, I think it did what it had to do: provided a nice concept that I'd love to see a more fleshed-out version of!

OblivionCreator responds:

Thanks for the feedback! To be honest, a lot of the issues with it getting boring over time were kind of known by our team shortly before release, but there wasn't much time to fix things, especially as I was working alone (on the coding side) on the final day trying to piece everything together.

Honestly the reception has been incredible so far and everyone on the team is definitely considering a full release with actually fleshed out dialogue/characters - (Though I'll make no promises on anything!) - At the very least I'd like to get a version released that matches the original vision we had for the game.

[Gacha Panic]

Pretty fun little autobattler gacha game! For as mindless and dumb as it can be, I had a surprisingly good time with this and ended up getting addicted to building up my army and watching them eviscerate enemies like a pack of piranhas. And as much as I say it's dumb, there is still a method to the madness where you need to decide how best to plan your gacha purchases around the rent time limits and so on. So yeah, nice stuff!

Having said that, there will a few rough spots I encountered:

*On my first playthrough, I kept just encountering slimes over and over until it got to the point where I couldn't earn enough money for rent. It wasn't until my second playthrough that suddenly I started encountering coffee cups and other higher tier enemies that could give me enough money to stay competitive. Maybe the spawn system could be better reworked to avoid this, or better yet, the spawn system could be removed and instead have different areas on the map where different tiers of enemies congregate that the player should move to as they get stronger? Might give it a bit of a journey/adventure feel where you're moving forward instead of running circles in the city: maybe you even need to pay to unlock the doors to these new biomes like COD Zombies to add more strategic elements.

*The game started to feel rather monotonous and unsatisfying as it went on as I don't think it delivered the sense of progression/evolution effectively. Compared to something like Vampire Survivors where you go from small stuff to thousands of bullets covering the screen later on, this game feels rather stagnant: the enemies change shape and the numbers are technically increasing, but everything "looks" the same. One change that I think would help would be the way money is handled: I was surprised when I started to get so much money later on because it didn't "look" like I was. Instead of only increasing the coin sizes like you do, maybe you should keep the size the same, but just spawn more coins: an explosion of 100 pennies looks more appealing than 4 quarters, if you catch my drift.

[Affordable Healthcare ALPHA Ver.]

Hmm, seems like it could be a decent idle fishtank game akin to Insaniquarium, but I'm not getting hooked in anyway currently. Yes, it is in alpha so I shouldn't expect too much, but still, there should be some sort of core appeal that shines through even early on that intrigues me, but I can't see it as the game just feels rather monotonous, lacking that addictive progression and evolution that these games typically deliver.

A big source of confusion and disappointment for me is the way that the game makes you purchase DNA: you need to purchase 3 to complete a level, with each purchase increasing the difficulty. Ideally, this should be a source of gripping tension and risk/reward: like maybe the user is a on a time limit and would never get enough in time, but purchasing DNA makes it so your blood cells produce more money, so you're pressured into increasing the difficulty to get that benefit to beat the level. But no, you can just play it safe and save up money to purchase all 3 DNA at once: how boring! You can just skip seeing all of the interesting enemies!

Also something to look out for was that by requiring the user to mash-click on enemies, that could lead to misclicks which lead to spending money on oxygen that you didn't mean to: yes it's a minor amount, but it still feels bad to have to be so cautious to avoid misspending.

gheedu responds:

I understand and agree with all your points. I actually kinda regret posting the game so early. I should've waited until it was more complete.
All the things you mentioned are going to be fixed in the following updates.

EDIT: just watched you play the game on your YT channel. Here is the comment I left, for anyone curious:

"Hey! thanks for playing and reviewing my game (Affordable Healthcare)! Watching someone actually play the game has given me a lot of ideas (as well as poked alot of holes in my game design principles for the game lol). Valuable stuff.

I fully admit the game is unbalanced right now, I kind threw a bunch of balancing numbers togheter cause I didn't expect to get frontpaged and so many people to play it at all, haha.
Regarding the difficulty, there are a couple things that increases it besides buying DNA: Buying Red Blood Cells (and not feeding them) and, as you mentioned, idling. For every fever you beat, the difficulty increases a little. One solution I have in mind to fix your issue with buying all DNA at once is just adding a cooldown timer to the button, but I also like the idea of having a time limit for some levels. Thanks again for the feedback."

[Jim Brimstone: Devil Advocate]

Heh, a rather amusing Pheonix Wright parody! Cute references, funny dialogue, nice text-controls: all in all a short and sweet adventure that gave me a chuckle or two!

In terms of feedback:

*Would be nice if there was some more music to it to help highlight the moments where you're on the ropes, and when you turnabout. Gets kind of dull to listen to the same atmospheric droning the whole time.

*Speaking of sounds, I also think that it should play a different sound effect, like a fanfare, if you get the not guilty verdict: playing the same sound made me think that I failed until I read the result, which made it feel rather unsatisfying.

*Wish there was some sort of prevention system when choices come up as if you're spamming keys to fast-forward to catch up to where you left off on a previous run, you can accidently end up selecting a response you don't want. Perhaps it shouldn't default to a choice until you use the arrow keys first, or use a different key for confirmation, for example.

*Speaking of having to re-do runs, I have no idea why it's possible to get a guilty verdict if you've made it to the end of a case after choosing all the right answers. At best as I can tell, this happens if you make it to the end but made mistakes on the way? Seems like the game expects you to do it all perfectly without losing any hearts to get the not guilty verdict: what's the goddamn point?

[APOLLO]

Hey, this was a cute little metroid game! Not exactly blowing me out of the water with anything unique or creative, but it looked good, felt good, sounded good, had a nice sense of progression and challenge, and ran smoothly without any significant bugs or glitches. Even had some cute touches like the hidden dev room and the fact that the game infinitely loops. Just a nice short and sweet adventure! It also had an absolutely banging soundtrack!

[Would you still love me if I was a worm ❤️🪱?]

Wow, this one really surprised me as it feels like a very well-crafted autobattler strategy game, so much so that I wouldn't guess it was made for a game jam! Overall it has a very goofy charm to its presentation with loads of satisfying pizazz and lively animation, and while it throws you right into it without much direction or tutorials, I was able to figure things out rather quickly due to the intuitive UI. The minigames threw me for a loop but was a very creative system to bring into the strategy! Wasn't long before I beat the whole game and felt like I had a great short and sweet adventure!

Ok, despite heaping all that praise on, I will admit that the game does have some rough patches to it that did stifle my enjoyment: not enough to stop me from beating it, but enough to give me pause. So here comes the feedback:

*While the game starts off easy enough with squires and archers and all that which are just summoned units, it started to get really confusing when minigame one-and-done units like rain and protectors and so on showed up as I had no idea how to use them, was annoyed there was no way to distinguish them from others, and no tooltips to read on what they did. Eventually I figured out how most of them worked as best as I could, but it was really hard and required a lot of experimentation: I still have no idea how tickle works to this day!

*While it is quite fun at first, the enemies eventually stopped putting up a fight and it just devolved into spamming my best cards: would love a bit more depth to the strategy!

*While it's not that long of a game, a game like this with currency and a map screen and all that jazz begs for a save/load system and I was disappointed to see that it didn't save my progress after taking a break.

*If you unfortunately allow yourself to stock up too many cards, you can get screwed at the sacrifice altar as there's too many cards to list and no way I could find to scroll the list to target cards I wanted to sacrifice that were off-screen.

*There were a couple of times after beating a level that I went straight to the shop or altar, forgetting that money spawns as a reward. This made it so that the money was lost forever: ideally the game should just add the money to my total whether I pick it up or not.

[SummonWare]

Pretty decent warioware-esque game you got here with an amusing necromancy theme! The shining star here is the graphical presentation which is top-notch and made the game feel so lively and charming. You even went to the extra effort of creating failure animations for each minigame instead of just having them fade to black or whatever. I had a nice time!

Now, this is all nice and good when I take it easy and put it in the context of a game jam game where you had a limited time to develop. But if I were to be more honest with how I feel, it definitely feels like a style over substance situation: sure it makes a solid first impression with its great visuals, but it doesn't take long for the game to become very boring due to a small amount of minigames and even more importantly, the fact that the minigames do not evolve or add any new tricks or challenges as the game goes on, as a proper warioware game should.

In terms of other feedback:

*Bit disappointed that there is no game over screen: feels so lackluster for the screen to just go black and boot you back to the main menu when you die, especially considering how over-the-top everything else is in regards to presentation. Also feels bad that there is no high-score tracker or scoreboard integration.

*Initial impression was a bit rough because the instructions and objective are practically hidden on the sidelines instead of being front-and-center for clarity. I got used to it, but it just feels bad to have critical information so spread out and attention-splitting.

*Kinda weird that some games require mouse while others require keyboard: it's not bad, but I kind of wish it stuck with one control scheme for consistency and fairness as I don't want to waste time switching back-and-forth. C'mon, I want to stir the pot with the mouse: it would be so much more fun and satisfying!

*Games aren't that well-balanced in terms of difficulty: some are incredibly easy yet provide you loads of time as if they were hard (like placing the skull) whereas others like dragging the gems into the mouth are pretty hard with barely enough time.

*Not sure what the bouncy balls that come out are? Feels like they are just superfluous but maybe they have some sort of purpose that I'm missing?

[awesome calculator]

Hah, amusing little joke game! Doesn't have much to it so I struggle to call it a game, but it nevertheless did gave me a nice little chuckle from how 'epic' it tries to make calculations be and from all the various secrets and references it has. I had no idea what that 9 plus 10 gag was: I guess I'm getting old. Would've loved to see more calculator or number related achievos: can't believe you don't have one for 69, or 80085?

Deaen responds:

its a project i made in like 2 hours even i wouldnt call it a game i have 0 idea why its this popular lmao