FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Vatis]

Quite the interesting arcade game! I gotta give credit to the cool vibes it gives off in terms of presentation: if it wasn't for that, I wouldn't have had the faith to stick with the game and get used to the incredibly bizarre controls.

Indeed, the controls are very difficult to get used to, and I'm very torn about how I feel about the game: sometimes I really get in-sync and start flying through, and other times it just keeps tripping me up and frustrating me to no end, like I keep forgetting that I will fly in the opposite direction when I hit the button.

On one hand I want to say it's a fumblecore game where getting used to the controls is part of the fun challenge, another part of me wants to say that it's just unintuitive and could've done a better job with its design. For now, due to how memorable and cool it is, and the way I keep learning new techniques and getting better, I'll err on the side of positivity, but I definitely wouldn't blame most people leaving immediately: after all, I almost did just that!

There are also some minor glitches: one time when I died the screen went red and stayed red, even though the game had started over and I was making my way through the levels again.

EDIT: Ok, I've been coming back to this more and more and have been getting really addicted. My brain is finally getting in-sync with the mechanics and it is a sublime experience to see past the veil. How could I have been so foolish? Can you ever forgive me? My eyes are open now and this is some crazy shit! I'm going maximum!!!

[Doll Dash]

Cute little game! The voodoo control scheme is certainly novel and reminds me of other weird escort games like Gyromite's sleepwalking stages. Dealing with its awkwardness of switching where to poke can be frustrating, but it's also part of the challenge, similar to fumblecore games like QWOP.

For the most part it was a fun little adventure, but there's definitely emphasis on little: the game is over as soon as it starts, and it feels like the difficulty ramps up too quickly with a lot of mechanics like comboing arms+legs for a slide being so sudden and confusing. As such, it doesn't feel like the mechanic gets as fleshed out as I'd like for a satisfying experience. It'd be nice if, for example, there were alternative endings for how many coins you collect. Still, I felt like you were heading in the right direction!

As a sidenote, mushrooms can be very confusing as they look like they should be part of the foreground and collide with you, but they're part of the background and not a threat. It'd be helpful if the graphic were a bit more faded and didn't have a strong black outline.

[WIZARD & WARRIOR]

Not too shabby of a boss rush! All of the bosses felt pretty good to fight as they had a good assortment of patterns and also had a nice evolution in intensity when low on health. Graphics were cute and there were some nice funny touches like the freeze-frame followed by explosion upon death. Just a nice short and sweet adventure that I wish had even more to it, but for a game jam, it's understandable and even impressive.

I didn't get to experience it in its ideal coop form, but the game was still playable and fun in the solo mode, so thank you for including that option. I'm actually not sure if I'd like the coop mode anyway: I tried to play coop mode by myself and I saw that if just one player dies its an immediate game over, while feels unnecessarily harsh and could lead to toxicity.

[Shoot Your Goo]

It's crass, juvenile, a bit janky and glitchy, but nevertheless pretty addictive, creative and fun as a grappling arcade game. Only on Newgrounds!

[untitled bunny game]

Not too shabby, and certainly shows promise as a challenging precision platformer with a lot of creative arrangements and a steady progression of new mechanics and obstacles. I also enjoyed the gibs that spill out upon death (even if they can clutter everything up and even end up hiding spikes).

Unfortunately the controls really hold this game back and make it feel very unfair and frustrating. In particular, the wall jump mechanics are terrible in many respects, one of them being that the character is way too clingy in general, especially when he shouldn't be: for example, if you're just jumping straight up next to a wall without pressing a direction into the wall, you shouldn't cling to it!

If the controls weren't so bad, I'd say this would be great. The thing about challenging precision platformers is that the controls have to be super-tightly designed and intuitive, lest it feel very unfair. After all, the game's challenging enough without having to wrestle the controller itself!

[Death To The Humans!]

Hmm, I'm not really much of an idle/clicker game fan, especially with my old man hands that can't take the strain, so I don't have much to say.

Overall it seemed pretty average, though I did feel like the game was pretty slick with its smooth cold open and funny with its news ticker, and while I didn't like the animation for the mothership shooting since it felt so disjointed to my clicks (would've preferred a missile being fired for each click), I liked summoning little scouts and watching them bombard the planet.

One thing I thought was really interesting was the fact that Earth actually fights back and you can lose resources: I feel like usually these games are just endless building so the fact that there is a bit of a war of attrition is a nice bit of welcome innovation and challenge. However, at the end of the day, it felt like humans were fighting back faster than I could build, frustrating me, and it didn't really add some strategy to the game like build order priority since you're still just clicking away as if there was no resistance, so I dunno.

blit-blat responds:

Yeah, I know what you mean about the mothership. I wanted to have the animation of it charging up the laser, so if lasers constantly fired on click, it would mean losing that animation or having it out of sync with the lasers. I could have gone either way on that tbh.

There is (some) strategy to the game, but unfortunately you didn't really get far enough to experience it. Once the humans start ramping up their attacks you need to balance between having enough ships to deflect attacks from the mothership and saving up for more upgrades. Although going by the reviews, most people's method is to launch ALL the ships as fast as they can - which incidentally is NOT the right way to do things! XD

[Rack and Slay (Demo)]

Pretty neato game! Overall the general construction and presentation feels high-quality and polished, everything felt very intuitive due to an excellent interface with loads of guides and tooltips, and the concept of a roguelike dungeon crawler being combined with billiards is quite the interesting combination! I found myself easily getting addicted and having a lot of fun.

If I was to have any feedback:

*At first I thought that the game might be a bit too easy with the targetting guide being present as default, but when you combine it with enemies that can blind you and it only giving you direction and not power and all the other effects, it feels like a nice decision overall. Still, something to consider as to whether that should maybe be part of a difficulty, or relegated to a power-up, or so on.

*I found myself really getting into the gameplay rhythm to the point where I would easily lose track of how many shots I had left. Therefore, it'd be really nice if there was some sort of warning when you're on your last shot, or maybe even a brief center-screen flash of how many balls you have left before each shot.

*While the gameplay does continue to technically evolve with more items and obstacles as you get deeper, it didn't always quite feel that way: instead it felt like I was just playing the same level over and over just with more trash cluttering the board. Certain obstacles like stoppers and boost pads didn't look like they were physically part of the board, looking detached and more like power-ups. Basically, just not sure about the long-term appeal if it's already starting to feel a bit repetitive with such plain and randomly-constructed boards. Maybe get a bit more pinball in your construction, in how they are more bespoke and make everything so flashy with all sorts of unique events and graphical themes?

*There are also certain events that I wish had a bit more pizazz to them. For example, when there are enemies left over at the end, it's super boring to just have 'X damage' pop-up and everything fade away: it'd be great and more intuitive if there was an animation where the enemies would physically ram into the player, either one-by-one or perhaps just all jump on him in a big dust-cloud tussle, and then bounce away. It'd deliver the information of why you took damage much better.

[JOKE, PLEASE]

Huh, quite the interesting game! It kind of throws you in the deep end and can be a bit tricky to figure out what you're doing, but eventually I got the gist of it, being that you need to dig up certain information on each client you're processing by checking their logs and then accurately process them, akin to other document-checking games like Papers Please, the challenge being that you need to be efficient in what logs you pick based on the facts needed.

It's definitely quite the novel experience and I had a good amount of fun once I got my feet under me, but the game was a bit confusing and rough in certain areas:

*I don't feel like the game delivered on the whole 'joke' experience, as it never even once seemed like the generated joke worked off of the information we gathered, and I don't see how or why it even exists in-universe in the first place. To be honest, it felt like you just made a document-checking game and then crowbarred in the whole joke aspect last minute to replace a more standard accept/reject process: I personally wouldn't give it many points at all for meeting the game jam theme.

*Game's difficulty was pretty wild: first couple of times I played it, it seemed incredibly demanding for just the first day, failing my nearly perfect run due to a minor mistake. But then upon revisit later on, the first day now seemed to be rather easy due to randomly lowered requirements. Not sure what was going on there.

*As said, the whole joke theme and story aspect felt very confusing and not well-defined. I was disappointed that the game ended so quickly instead of continuing to evolve, and the ending just felt unclear what was happening.

*Game is also riddled with strange bugs: for example, I had a lot of logs for people containing repeated facts, or facts bleeding into each other.

Definitely seems like a fun concept, but the execution does waver significantly, most likely due to the game jam limits. It's cool enough that I can see the potential past the bugs and would want a more fleshed-out version of it, though, so that's a good jam result.

Frogrammer responds:

hey, thank you! always appreciate the honest dive-in

you are very much right it has absolutely nothing to do with jokes mechanically and we knew that from the start, I really hate the theme, and after losing the first 16~ hours just trying to come up with a mechanic that would actually incorporate the theme we just decided to ball. i haven't seen a single game that would incorporate the theme well either, most of them are just "funny"

so yes the game is about reading and remembering with a touch of manual management

about the difficulty: originally I uploaded a harder version of the game but after noticing the struggle of players I re-uploaded a version with lower quotas so that might be what happened


thanks again!

[Dino Time]

This one was really rough for me. On the face of it, this game is pretty much "baby's first game project" in that it is just an incredibly simple arcade experience where you jump up, collect points, and avoid falling to your death from the ever upwards scrolling death zone. Nothing really exciting or memorable about the experience: just a very bog-standard experience that attempts to elevate it by using goofy art and sounds.

If that was it, that'd be fine: every game dev needs to start somewhere and this could be ok for a few minute(s) of fun. However, the game was plagued by absolutely terrible controls which felt incredibly unintuitive and awkward. Trying to move had a weird delay on start-up and some very slippery momentum that didn't seem to have any natural reason to it: you go from not moving at all to slip-n-sliding to your death.

The strangest thing was that, I tried playing the game with a controller, and was able to control the character just fine with the analog stick: no awkward delay or slipperiness or anything! However, that didn't help in the long run because then I noticed the busted jump controls, which, despite using the same power for the button press each time, would randomly change the maximum height that my jump would reach, sometimes making me unable to proceed upwards and getting an unfair death.

If I was to be charitable, I'd say that the controls were part of some intended challenge, and perhaps some of the slipperiness is to make you utilize wall bounces, or something of that nature. But while I've played a lot of rage games which utilize difficult, tricky controls, the difference is that they all managed to elicit fun out of the process, whereas this absolutely did not, coming off as just badly programmed, if not straight-up broken.

NattoSumi responds:

Smh some gamers just aren't ready for momentum based movement. Btw the jump takes ~1 second to charge up all the way after landing. Hope that helps!

[ENERGY SEEKERS: IPD CONTRACTS]

Hmm, it's a little bit janky and doesn't have much meat on its bones in terms of content, but I quite grew to like the core mechanic and found it to be quite fun and promising!

I really like the back and forth strategic juggling of switching characters, where you both need to factor in their strengths when dealing with certain enemies, while also covering for each other's cooldowns. Also, the art and animation is quite impressive and makes for a good first impression.

As said, though, the gameplay is a bit janky: could use some input buffering as I was getting ignored inputs when trying to spam shots, hitboxes felt a bit unclear and disjointed as there were times I'd be hit by an enemy that I had already killed. Was also rather short-lived as the game seems to run out of interesting enemy types and wave compositions rather quickly, meaning that eventually you just quit the game out of boredom instead of dying from increasing challenge.

Would love to see this in a future state with some more polish and greater depth/variety in gameplay!