FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Arc Breaker]

Yowza, this is some great stuff! Reminds me a lot of other fast-paced action puzzlers like Dandara, Ghostrunner and Scourgebringer, and just like them, I very much enjoyed finding the best route to slice and dice through all the enemies in a stylish manner. For a game jam game, I'm very impressed with the presentation quality: the transitions and slow-mo were very slick, and a special shout-out to the very stylish title screen which makes a damn good first impression! The boss fight at the end was a great cherry on top of this sundae: well done!

While I was able to make it through the game without much issue, there were a few aspects I wanted to point out:

*Some aspects could've been made a bit more obvious in how they worked, such as the launchers and how they have a teeny-tiny colored pixel on them that indicates how much power you'll get by going into them: I didn't notice this for a long time!

*The whole color tier system was weird and difficult to nail down. For example, it was annoying in how you start with an orange bar, and yet you're not really orange because you'll immediately go into the white tier once you start (hope you didn't immediately launch at an orange enemy!) I also wish the HUD bar would have the sections lightly colored even when not filled so you could always remember the order of colors as it increases. The difference between the red-orange breakable tiles and the red ones were too close to each other that it could confuse me as well.

*It's a small nitpick, but I wish the exit would open immediately upon killing the last enemy instead of waiting until your next dash following the kill: the weird delay can make me think I still have enemies remaining when I don't.

*Another small nitpick: I wish the game would let me click on the window to focus without immediately selecting an option on the title screen. Also, I wish the game would lock the cursor within it so I can't accidently click outside the game.

All in all, though, as long as you just believed in the game and moved as best as it seemed intended, it worked out, so it's not that big of an issue!

[Hyun's Dojo Sakura Love 🌸]

Pretty neat visual novel! I'm not familiar with Hyun's Dojo unfortunately, so I feel like I'm missing out on all the references and not in a position to appreciate it completely, but the game overall feels rather well-built and charming regardless. I was surprised at how many unique CGs, backgrounds, expressions and so on there were, and the effort taken goes a long way in making the world feel more vibrant and enticing.

I had a few issues that I wanted to point out:

*The game can be rather confusing in determining who is talking, and whether it is out loud or in their head. For example, at the beginning of the game, there is no nametag for the player or for the person on the walkie-talkie, so who's to say who is saying what. Not sure why it didn't use ??? for a nametag when it does later on. Furthermore, while the game sometimes uses parentheses to indicate them thinking instead of saying their line, this is only very occasionally and most of the time it is left vague without parentheses or anything else to distinguish it like italics. I need more consistency!

*I encountered a glitch in the game early on that froze me and I needed to completely restart. Best guess is that the freeze happened when there was a line that had a pause inside of it: maybe something awry with how it is set up?

*The backlog doesn't function properly, both in how it should start at the bottom, not the top, and that if you try to scroll it, it'll close once you let go of the scroll bar.

[Bunny Smoosh (Nokia3310)]

Cute little arcade game! It's rather simplistic and a little clunky so I can't see myself sticking with it, but the Nokia aesthetic is an amusing novelty and the foundation for an endless runner is executed decently, especially when you put it in the context of respecting the limitations of the Nokia. I like the neat little touches like how the game over screen keeps trying to roll over you until it finally does. Not bad for a game jam result!

Sjhillustration responds:

Thanks for the feedback! It was nice to just make something simple in a short space of time.

[The Children Under the Bed]

Wow, this was a pretty cool horror game! Love the ZX Spectrum aesthetic and felt like it pulled off the whole experience and atmosphere with style and aplomb! Surprised me at how much it had to offer: it's not that long, sure, but I was totally expecting it to end upon saving the kids only to see that I was only halfway through! I was impressed at how navigable the map was thanks to good landmarking, and by god, give that voice actor a medal (and a lozenge) for those screams! Great stuff!

I didn't have too many issues with the game, but I'll say that:

*As scary as the game was in theory, it didn't feel that scary in execution due to how easily the enemies and scares were circumvented with exploiting zone transitions. I suppose it accurately portrays the limitations of how a ZX Spectrum game would be, but I wish it allowed itself to cheat and have more advanced stalker AI and other aspects: I mean, it's already cheated with the whole spooky faces showing up (which felt underutilized). I didn't even feel that compelled to sic Peanut on anyone, which felt like a waste of an interesting mechanic.

*Almost got myself killed in the last section because the game didn't accept numpad usage for entering in the codes!

*As said, the game was longer than I expected, so I took a break at the halfway point, expecting my game to start over at the checkpoint, only to be disappointed that I had to start all over. Sure, it's not that long of a game technically, and it's good enough that I was fine to do it all over, but still, why not have a save/continue system?

I haven't looked to deeply into the whole plaque/language/puzzle stuff yet, but we'll see as it seems interesting!

[Battle of The Bands: Orientation Day]

Not too shabby for a music/rhythm RPG! I really enjoyed how cute and goofy the world and characters are, especially in regards to the amusing dialogue and the effort put into the sprites (was impressed at how many unique sprites there were for all the goth characters, for example!) The combat seemed to be pretty decent as well: hitting the notes on the beat felt pretty good and intuitive, and there was a good attempt at feedback in terms of having the characters getting hit by all the note blocks after an attack. Promising stuff!

That said, the game was definitely pretty rough for me to enjoy. A few aspects that stood out to me were:

*I felt like the game had a lot of issues with text and readability: tiny and slanted text made it difficult to read, and when you combine that with how overly wordy the game could be, it was a real hassle at times.

*Controls were rather unintuitive at times, like how sometimes you can use the mouse to click on options, whereas in other places you're forced to use the keyboard (like how you can't select where you want your player to move by clicking on the location).

*The game was rather lacking in pizazz/juice. For example, as exciting as the musical battles could be, the feedback for hitting the enemies with your notes just felt muted and unsatisfying. Outside of the musical battles, the world also felt very dull due to the lack of music and sound.

Overall, it seems rather promising, but it definitely feels like an early alpha or something akin to that as there is a distinct lack of polish: nothing that can't get fixed up though if you keep working on it!

[waxweaver]

Wow, this is pretty dang impressive! Feels very much like a clone of Terraria and just like it, I easily got into that addictive loop of exploring to discover new resources to build new stuff that lets me explore into dangerous territory to discover even newer resources and so on and so forth. All around very professional stuff that feels smooth, polished and intuitive: it's something I could easily see on the Steam store for people to whip out their wallets for!

If I were to have any feedback, it'd be that:

*Getting the game to play in the first place was really awkward. Trying to play it in Firefox just caused my computer to start melting down, fans blazing like a jet engine, and Chrome didn't fare much better, though it at least loaded up the game eventually. I followed the advice and downloaded it on itch, but still, there must be some sort of optimization issue going on that could be addressed.

*Would love it if the crafting menu organized objects into categories, or if some sorting/filtering options existed (beyond hiding uncraftables). It's just too awkward and tedious to try and find or figure out what you can craft.

*Would love if I would attack in the direction of my mouse instead of where my character is moving: so many times I had my mouse to the right of my character and they'd swipe their sword to the left, for example, causing me to get killed.

*Is there no way to pass time by sleeping? Resting in a bed only seemed to save my respawn location, whereas I was hoping I could use it to skip nighttime.

*Could be nice to have a targeting indicator for placing blocks, as well as a range indicator for objects like crafting tables so you can figure out the best place to put it when considering how far you can access it.

*Player footsteps are kind of loud and intrusive: I'd lower their volume or even remove them altogether. Maybe it'd help if they generated little puffs below your feet so my brain knows they are coming from me and not from an enemy I can't see?

*Could be nice if I could see tools that I have equipped in my hands at all times, similar to how I can see torches in my hand when I have those equipped.

*While there is nothing wrong with imitating your favorites as it's a great learning tool and we can always use more of a good thing, this game is very much a Terraria clone to such a degree that, well, it makes me want to play Terraria instead of it since Terraria has much more content and quality-of-life in comparison. I would love if this game had some sort of unique twist to it to make it stand out: perhaps if it leaned more into this 'wax' theming?

kaiakairos responds:

there was originally gonna be more space related stuff to make it less derivative, but they all ended up not being very fun, and cutting it was better for the game and better for me and the scope. sorry about the performance!! the game doesnt work on firefox at all (unknown why) and generally whether or not the game chugs on chrome seems unrelated to computer hardware (ive gotten it to run flawlessly on toasters and its chugged on high end machines. i am not smart enough to fix it lol)

[FAIR AND FACTUAL FREE PRESS AGENCY]

Pretty decent document checking game! It doesn't quite have enough meat to really sink my teeth into in terms of mechanics and newspaper variety, and there could certainly be some improvements to the presentation, such as actually changing the button symbols when the controls are flipped, but the concept is solid and something I'd love to see expanded upon, and isn't that exactly the result you want from a game jam in the end? Not too shabby at all for being made in such a short time frame!

As a side note, sometimes I would get confused as to whether a headline was good or bad, particularly when it involved celebs that I wasn't sure were on the shit list, so to speak. For example, is the president exploding really a bad thing? What if he was a bad president and so it's something to celebrate?

[Hatsune Miku Bomb Squad!]

Whoa, pipe bomb! So cool! Jokes aside, this game really surprised me!

I gotta admit, my initial impressions weren't that great as I was expecting more varied and elaborate bomb defusal minigames like you'd see in Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes, or perhaps more appropriate, Terminator 2 on the Game Boy. To see that the game was just the same simplistic password entry over and over was quite a let-down. Still, I figured I should give it a shot...for Miku.

However, as the game went on, I started to get really impressed with the way it kept upping the stakes with very creative twists to the hint system and the amount of symbols/colors/spaces you need to juggle! Combine that escalation with the bite-size nature of the puzzles and I was absolutely addicted and couldn't stop playing! And all of this with some delightful chiptune remixes of famous Miku songs playing the whole time!

If I were to have any complaints, it would be that I wish the save system was better: I had to replay a lot of stages because I was under the impression it was autosaving with every puzzle, not that it required my manual input. It was also a bummer that there isn't a cool graphic or animation of the explosion, but perhaps you don't want to reward failure like that, haha!

[Arcane Board]

Hey, this is a pretty solid Slay-The-Spire-like with an interesting tetris block twist! It's certainly an intriguing concept that I had fun learning the strategic ins-and-outs of, all helped along by the the game is designed with all sorts of tooltips, highlights, animations, feedback and other subtle hints to make it all intuitive and easy to learn. Definitely a great first impression!

If I were to have any complaints, it would be that as cool as the game was, I found myself falling off after a short while. It just felt like it takes so long to get to the good stuff of actually launching big attacks since it takes so much prep work and lucking into getting the tiles you want, and when you combine that with spongy enemies and a huge map, it all can really drag out and tire someone as impatient as me. But I don't know whether that's an actual fundamental issue with the game, or just me being the unintended audience: up to you to decide, and for me to maybe give it another try to see if I change my mind once I get good enough!

Other than that, there are some things I would like spruced up a bit, like the very tiny text that's difficult to read even in fullscreen. But for the most part, this is very promising and professional stuff!

FancyReckless responds:

Thanks for the feedback! You're certainly not the only one that feels like the game is quite slow paced at times and I often get that feeling as well. I'm experimenting with stuff that could improve that, hopefully there's some trick I will figure out to make it more dynamic, but meanwhile I will try to reduce health on some earlier minions.

[AGUJERO]

Holy moley, what an absolutely bizarre yet enthralling experience this is!

When you boil it down, it's technically just a quiz or choose-your-own adventure that you can trial-and-error your way through, but the game does so much to create a palpable and intense sense of atmosphere and mystique to it, what with its unique organ-based HUD, strange premise, weird characters and dialogue, and the music, my god, the music! Like the tunnel we're descending, the game just feels like it has so much depth to it: while I've 'beaten' it, I feel like I've only just scratched the surface and haven't even delved into all the possible metaphors and meaning the premise/story might have.

If I were to have any complaints, it would be that the dialogue interface is a bit messed-up with the way it immediately clears the last line of text once it's done being written, instead of waiting for me to finish reading. Other than that, goddamn if this isn't amazing and something I'm going to remember for quite some time!