FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[PRAXIS FIGHTER X]

Hey, this is a really solid SHMUP you got here! For the most part, this delivers everything you want from such an experience: big flashy explosions, points galore, a wide variety of enemies to contend with that come at you in interesting waves within a cool world, big bosses, challenging combat, and so forth!

In terms of feedback: I'll admit that the mechanics, while fun, are a bit too simple to a degree where it can feel a bit mindless, and the few exciting powerups that there exist are very limited and can easily be lost. There was also a big stretch in the beginning where it was getting pretty repetitive and felt like it was looping and it almost lost me, only for it to suddenly right things by introducing a bunch of new exciting elements. Definitely feel like that should be a bit edited to keep the pace consistent through the experience, but it's not that bad.

[Rootin' Tootin' Lootin' & Shootin' Demo]

Hmm, quite the interesting game, feeling like a cowboy-themed top-down turn-based version of SuperHot! Coming to terms with how the combat system works and the addictive nature of experimenting with the various weapons you have certainly hooked me, and the game overall felt like it had a decent amount of polish, what with its nice HUD and special effects.

However, in its current state, I find the execution of its interesting ideas a bit rough:

The game was difficult in not letting me get enough information. For example, while I can see info on guns when I'm buying them, I was annoyed that I couldn't see information on guns that are in my inventory, and the gun info was incomplete, lacking details like the cooldown between shots. I found it confusing too that gun info only appears when you mouse over an item, when I feel like it should happen when you walk over it instead (or perhaps both). Speaking of, I would've loved to have more information, such as seeing a preview for attacks and explosion radiuses and so on since I wasn't sure how they'd play out, as well as seeing enemy health amounts. Other aspects were a bit confusing, such as how some enemies will fire in a rigid cardinal direction cross formation, yet they will still point a gun in your exact direction as if they're going to fire directly at you like other enemies do.

The game also just felt a bit lackluster at times. The levels felt incredibly cramped and claustrophic which made all of the gun fights quite boring as you have no space to move around strategically. It was really easy to run out of ammo and get in a dead-man-walking vibe where you just don't have anything to fight with and no cash to buy more guns since it disappears almost immediately from when it drops: would much prefer picking up guns/ammo from enemies or chests instead of buying as I think it would help create more improvisation.

Again, really interesting ideas you got here, just don't feel like its been executed in the best way yet, but best of luck!

RaspberryJamGames responds:

Thank you so much for the detailed feedback!
I am currently working on a new version of the game for Early Access, which will address a lot of your issues.

I intend to add tooltips to the inventory, extra tooltip info (such as cooldowns) and also tooltips for when you walk over an item.
I hadn't thought about attack previews, that's a good idea.
It feels like showing enemy health might clutter the screen to much, but I could give enemies their own tooltips.

I'm sorry that the levels feel cramped - At some point I want to revamp the level generation, so I'll keep that in mind.
About the money disappearing, that's quite a common criticism and I'm trying out some alternatives, but I still want people to play aggressively, rushing to get money as soon as it drops.

Thanks again for the feedback.
I agree with almost everything you've said and I will keep on improving the game.

[Ghost in the Graveyard]

Cute little arcade game! It's pretty simple, almost too simple that it lacks any sort of long-lasting appeal or strategy for me to sink my teeth into, but for what it is, it's a delightfully crunchy and juicy arcade shooter that crackles with energy and provides some decent fun while it lasted, really reminding me of the more simple games one would play on the Atari, for instance. There are some hints at depth here, such as with the ability to eventually break the very spongy tombstones for points (which I would've never assumed were breakable without the game over tips saying so), managing recoil, and how best to work with the magnetized pickups by standing your ground or seeking them out, but it just wasn't enough to keep my interest for more than a few minutes. Still, not bad for those few minutes!

[Uh Oh Bartender]

Pretty cool job sim game! Getting some real Papers Please vibes, and I had a great time checking IDs and getting better at processing the crazy recipes and their cryptic rules. Can't imagine I could ever get good enough to memorize all of the rules without having to rely on the cheat sheet, but I was nevertheless addicted and loved to challenge myself for high-scores, and the game has a really warm and goofy charm to it with little tidbits like customer chatter that made it all the more better.

In terms of feedback:

While I think that the tutorial is pretty solid and does a good job at teaching everything, I do think it can be a bit overwhelming with how much it dumps on you all at once. I would've much preferred if we had some sort of story campaign that introduces the mechanics bit-by-bit, like perhaps having your first day just as a doorman checking IDs, the next day making some simple drinks only, and then combining the two and enhancing the difficulty as it goes.

Speaking of story campaigns, I would've loved a bit more of a sense of construction to the game with all sorts of different modes, like a story mode, endless arcade mode, and so on. Something about the game feels a bit not fully-developed and lacking a sense of progression in its current state, like I'm unsure how long its supposed to go, whether I can save my session, and so on. Part of this is the lack of feedback in terms of scoring: would love a lot more details in how I'm being scored, better feedback like color-coding the two ingredient lists to make it obvious what I got right and what I missed, as well as a record of my scores and others to compete against, to give it a greater sense of how I can improve and a goal to strive for.

[Moomoo's Maple Mishap v3 (Third Demo)]

Nice to see another chapter of this! Certainly a promising sonic-esque platformer that you're building up here, and it seems to get a bit better each time I see it. I'll just give you some play-by-play impressions as I went through:

Level 1: Decent level, basic stuff, very easy, but good to start off and get used to everything. Does feel a bit silly at times though, like how you can be standing right next to a rock wall and hit roll to smash through it: you'd almost expect to have to charge up or build up momentum. Can get health back so easy I practically don't need to think about it. Again, though, fine to be forgiving starting out.

Level 1 Cow Boss: Good variety of attacks, but sometimes it felt really confusing to figure out when you're free to hit him. Had loads of times when I tried to attack him right when he finished an attack, but he'd suddenly transform into a new attack right when I hit him and I get damaged instead.

Level 2 Snow Stage: Nice to see so many new mechanics like rails and see-saws. Can't really get a handle on rails, end up losing speed and coming to a stop, slipping around, reversing, feels awkward. Some nice puzzle sections like where you need to use the seesaw to make a ramp to get up...oh, maybe not and I'm just supposed to wall jump? That's a bit of a letdown. I appreciate the increase in challenge but it just started to get really annoying with so many see-saws and snowballs rolling down: a real uphill battle, pardon the pun. Felt like I was playing those annoying Hoth levels on Super Empire Strikes Back, it's just too much and I end up wanting to facetank through it!

Level 2 Hat Boss: Decent, fun animations, certainly easier to determine when I can attack compared to the first boss, but he was a disappointing one-trick pony.

Level 3 Mirror Stage: What a cool level! Love the whole puzzle element of having to look in the mirror to see invincible platforms and hazards reflected. I wanted more of this! Though, sometimes it was a bit annoying to be speeding along and suddenly you're in a mirror and you hit some spikes in the mirror you couldn't see coming. Speed and these puzzles don't mix well at times I guess.

Level 3 Eye Lasers: Again, I appreciate the increase in difficulty and having a unique race challenge, but I literally cannot beat this. Not only do a lot of the courses feel like annoying trial-and-error, but some courses I do not physically know how to build up enough speed to get away. I feel like maybe I'm missing some sort of hidden tech I'm suppose to learn about how to accelerate or something: maybe this is why I was having trouble with the rails earlier on, maybe I'm missing something. I tried everything though: spamming roll, spamming jumps while rolling, jumping and hitting down into a roll, backtracking to build up a head of steam, nothing works!

Side note: if you jump straight up when next to a wall, I don't think you could wall-cling to it unless you physically move towards the wall. Since this game doesn't do that, the character can feel too clingy.

Alzter responds:

Hi again! Thank you for playing my game and giving honest feedback, I really appreciate it!!

Level 2 Snow Stage: I'm sorry to hear that the grind rails were frustrating and unintuitive to use. A friend suggested I make it so that the player can turn around whilst on them, maybe I will have to make that possible for them to feel less uncontrollable and awkward like you said.

As for the seesaws, yes, initially I wanted the player to use the seesaw like a ramp, but I couldn't implement the behaviour well enough for it to work on its own, but clearly that's no excuse and having the mechanic not implemented in the way you expected was a letdown, so I will see if I can improve it to work more like a ramp in future.

Level 3 Eye Lasers: Damn, that's a shame that it's not intuitive or clear how to gain speed to escape the eye lasers. I will need to add some way of teaching the player how to move rapidly before this section so that they don't get stuck here like you did. If you're still stuck, try mashing the roll button whilst you are rolling, it gives you a short boost in speed, and tell me if you can beat the section using that technique.

Can't get to all of your points just yet, but I will say, if you want to disable Moomoo clinging to walls automatically without having to push towards them, turn off Assist Mode in the settings.

EDIT 28/03/24: I have decided to make the Gazers (eye lasers) NOT immediately kill you. They now only deal 1 damage like other enemies. This means that you are not FORCED to know speed techniques (which are not yet well taught to the player) in order to make it to Chapter 2's boss.

[Mother's Sword - Web Demo]

Huh, this is a pretty neat metroidvania! It's a bit of a mixed bag at the moment, but overall the general construction feels pretty solid, impressive and shows loads of potential.

As a big fan of games like Sekiro, this game's focus on parries and deflections is right up my alley. The feedback from a timed deflection was sublime and made it very satisfying to style on these mooks, and the fight against the boss was a big highlight for me, being such a great back-and-forth due to how aggressive he was and so cool to parry his combos and sword waves back at them. The other design mechanics that reward aggression and style with bonus resources were great too, and it felt good to get new trinkets and powerups.

Having said that, though, the game was a bit bland when it came to other aspects. In particular, the sense of exploration was not so good: plodding along with no fun traversal powers through these cramped cave corridors that are largely devoid of any landmarks or fun platforming, instead just packed with the same spongy enemies over and over...it got pretty repetitive and felt like a slog. Combat also dragged because it just turned into the enemies waiting their turn to get parried by me over and over: I ended up just running past them! Sure, there are a few sidepaths with some trinkets locked behind combat here and there, but it didn't so much for the overall slow feel of it all.

It's up to you on whether the above is a problem and how you'd want to solve this. For example, perhaps making the environments a bit prettier and varied would be enough. Or, perhaps enemies could have their health reduced so they don't reduce the players pace, letting skilled players cut through them like butter. Maybe there needs to be more exciting traversal like slides, fast falls, dashes, wall jumps, and so on. Maybe there just needs to be more puzzles or challenging platforming sections to serve as a contrast to the combat. Maybe more interesting attack patterns for both the enemy and the player could help, particularly if both the attacks and level design were more vertical instead of being so grounded. Again, up to you, and best of luck as this does have some great core elements already in place!

MonsiStudios responds:

Thanks for your feedback! :)

[Mighty Tanker Power Wankers]

It has a certain goofy charm to it and could be a decent top-down horde shooter, but overall the game just felt a bit too simplistic and bland, leading to feeling rather repetitive and unsatisfying. The boss fight at the end was pretty interesting, but also felt rather unfair in how unpredictable it could be, particularly due to lack of telegraphs when initiating or disengaging from a pattern: I suppose I'm partly to fault and should've gotten more speed/health upgrades instead of damage, but I'm not going to play the whole game again to make better choices because of a trap like that.

Fish125 responds:

Thank you for the feedback! We hope you can find it in your heart to keep an eye on us and our future endeavors

[AerPG BATTLE]

Huh, not too shabby! It's basically a cute Undertale-esque SHMUP boss rush, and it does a decent job at providing a good variety of boss patterns, as well as some goofy twists and turns like the guy who runs out of bullets, haha! I also like that it has some strategy to it, such as where you can optimize your damage by switching to the gun that only fires upwards, but faster, when it is appropriate.

In terms of feedback, the game is a bit rough. In general there's a lot of minor jankiness with animations and transitions that are a bit awkward. Additionally, I played for a long time without realizing you had another weapon and a grenade because it doesn't teach or provide a HUD that you could intuit this from. Speaking of weapons and abilities, it's also a bit strange that it doesn't provide any cooldown timers on the HUD, making me unsure whether I could throw the grenade or dash again yet. I also wish the damage/health was equalized across the board instead of being surprised when a boss attack does so much damage for some reason. I also just got really confused when the game changed characters to this blast jump dude and the jump controls were weird and glitchy and I had no idea what the game wanted me to do.

Despite its roughness, this was pretty fun at its core and shows a lot of promise in creating varied combat scenarios!

[GhoulScrapers - Prototype]

Wow, for being just a prototype, this was a delightful precision platformer! In general the construction of the game seemed high-quality: the graphics and presentation were very cute, the movement felt smooth, the jump mechanics were interesting and intuitive (and had some sweet hidden tech to them), and the level design was challenging and had multiple paths/shortcuts for the speedrunners. Once I beat it the first time, I had to go back and redo it a second time: it just felt that fun! I find it very promising and would love to see a full version of this.

In terms of feedback, the only bugginess I noticed was that if you scrape a corner of a platform but don't necessarily land on it, sometimes it can act a bit odd, refilling your ammo or ignoring your jump input.

So far I've gotten it down to about 2 minutes flat!

ShortCakeCafe responds:

Thank you for your feedback!
Me and a team of classmates are actually working on a full version of this game as our final college project and are planning to release it on steam once it's done!

[Jeri Tower!]

Wow, what an amazing short and sweet adventure! It starts off a bit simple and even potentially a bit boring (I worry this slow intro might be the reason people aren't applauding this game as loudly as they should), but it does an amazing job at slowly increasing the complexity, keeping the levels pleasantly bite-sized, and dropping funny little gags like the level titles that I couldn't help but keep going and going.

From there the game drops some absolutely dynamite twists and turns: the introduction of blue mode and retreading the old levels blew my mind, as did the way you created so many clever new levels with the mirrors and such, creatively flexing the full extent of the mechanics you made. It was addictive, challenging, fun, and very memorable overall! Oh, and the music is an absolute banger!

The only complaint I have is that I feel like this needs a save/load system: when I first started playing this I had no idea it was gonna keep going and going and really wanted to take a break, but I didn't for fear of losing progress (and thank god I made the right call).

succojones responds:

I get what you're saying about a slow start. People would definitely be more motivated to get through if they knew about the twist, but for now it's a "if you know, you know" kinda thing, and players who do stick around really love the surprise.
On that note it's felt wrong to spoil it in my posts or trailers, but I'm sure eventually people will get spoiled through word of mouth or videos and want to check the game out because of it. I suppose we'll see :)