FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[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 :)

[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.