FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[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

[Gem Frenzy]

Hmm, this is a pretty decent and fun little job simulator! The presentation is a bit lackluster and inelegant, but I found myself getting quite addicted to the loop of making sales and upgrading the business, and I liked the complexity of having to find time to stop tending the front and go mine up some resources. Not too shabby!

While it was ok, I did think the game was rather rough:

*As said, initial impression from the rather lackluster graphics was pretty bad, but it goes deeper than that: the initial load time was so damn long too, and in my opinion, I wouldn't blame a lot of people for not even getting the game a shot because of that.

*The game has a distinct lack of pizazz, particularly in that pulling off actions like completing an order for a customer doesn't feel satisfying, and when that's the main driving force of the game, well...that's bad.

*Starting out the first day without any initial resources caught me off guard and led to me failing the first few customers as I scrambled to get my bearings. I know there was a tutorial and everything but still, throw me a bone here and slow down the pace when just you've just started!

*While I got used to it eventually and even enjoyed it, the way the movement mechanics for mining works is very odd. I don't know why you can't just use a more intuitive setup of allowing the user to move directly how they want to.

*I had an ok time but I started to get bored pretty easily as the game seems to lack depth (pardon the pun). All it was doing was adding more and more gems, but the core process of the game remained the same: would've enjoyed more complexities being added, like maybe different forges. It didn't help either that going up and down the stairs felt more like an annoyance than a challenge.

*I found it absolutely bizarre that you can get orders and collect ores that are beyond your storage capabilities. I started to get some orders that wanted the bright green ore, and I felt so bad that despite collecting them, I couldn't actually construct the gem because I didn't have the chest for sorting that ore yet. All I could do was let the clock run down and watch the customer leave in a huff!

pabten responds:

Hi! thank you for your feedback, we fixed the loading screen

[Excuse Me.. Are You Summoning Crokel?]

Wow, quite the interesting fast-paced puzzler you got here! It's a simple enough game to understand, but damn if I didn't get addicted to the intense challenge of solving these progressively-harder glyphs quick enough to beat the clock. It's definitely an arduous experience due to the ticking clock and the ability to lose progress: feels like you're constantly sprinting while holding your breath and while I enjoyed the pressure, I wouldn't blame people if they found it too be a bit much.

In fact, that leads me to my biggest complaint with the game: the pause button just plain doesn't work! It says it pauses the game, but technically the game still keeps the timer going and you can still interact with the glyphs even though they are all invisible. Even worse, there's no way to unpause once you do pause, so you're screwed if you just want a quick breather! Other than that, there were also some minor issues like how the glyphs can sometimes be so on the edge that they are hidden underneath the timer circle.

[Humblest Wizard]

Hmm, it certainly seems like it could be a nice dungeon crawler, but at the moment it feels very halfbaked and unfinished. I suppose it's understandable given the note that it was rushed for Pixel Day deadlines, but I still want to be honest that I didn't have a good experience with this.

The worst part for me was the combat, which considering it was practically the whole focus of the game, was a bad first impression. There's a lot of things wrong that I could list off forever, such as how when you attack the special effects are oddly offset instead of being on top of the enemy, but the primary point for me was the lack of feedback, both in terms of how unsatisfying it was to execute moves due to a lack of impact and how confusing it was to determine what is happening due to a lack of any signals like damage numbers or an event log or just a clean and intuitive interface.

I like the concept of playing as a mouse, I like the attempts at introducing some unique concepts like the meat system, and I like that the combat starts to evolve past brainless mashing with the introduction of sword moves and other enemy types, but yeah, the execution leaves much to be desired for me and I just couldn't stand playing enough to get far.

[Bird Tapper vs the Krampus Fellowship Clan]

Certainly nice to see an expansion pack for this game as I do enjoy it a lot...but sometimes, I enjoy it more in theory than I do in execution, and unfortunately many of the problems I had with the initial release are still present here.

I definitely still sing the same praises I did before: love running a track just to beat it the first time and then go back and puzzle out ways to build up a combo for that gold, and I love subtle touches like how animated the menu is when it calculates your score and unlocks new stages, as well as the way the sounds get higher-pitched as you're building up a combo. It's definitely a neato game, and the new levels add some great variety and innovations!

But yeah, I still have the same problem where every time I'm getting into a flow state, something gets in the way and brings me out. Part of it is my fault where I just can't accept the odd way that the character moves: those awkward states where, for example, you slide down off a wall and you're just standing there like a goof and need to punch to start moving forward. But another part is that the game just feels so buggy and inconsistent at times, especially when it comes to edge cases: I've had plenty of times where I lose a flap charge for no reason that I can see, I try to do an uppercut while on a wall and sometimes he just punches in place and falls down, I do a punch that gets me killed because I'm too close despite the fact that I can see a frame of my punch hitting them first, and so on.

Definitely a lot of potential and I want to love it, but it just feels like it is lacking that smooth polish and intuitiveness that challenging games like this need to have to make it feel fair.