FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Fit Cats]

Hmm, not much to say here! It's pretty much a suika game clone, but where other suika game clones put an interesting twist on the mechanics or add a lot of juice/pizazz to the experience, this one just seems to be a palette swap where fruits are replaced with cats. It's not necessarily a bad game as it still recreates that addictive suika gameplay, but it's just not that exciting: I had an ok time, but easily grew bored of the repetitive music, weird sounding cut-off meows, and so on.

[Ice And Fire Tower Defence]

Hmm, I think the game is rather cute and I'm always down for a fun tower defense auto-battler game, but I had a really rough time with this as it just felt very confusing and mindless.

I really wanted to engage in a tactical fight with the enemy, but the game just moves too fast and doesn't give enough feedback or information to give me something to go on. It would've been so helpful if there were tooltips where I could learn unit attributes like their role, strength and weaknesses, and it'd also be helpful if I could see how well my troop attacks are doing, such as with damage number pop-ups or health bars, as it all gets lost when they stack up into a chaos of combat where I can't tell if they're attacking or getting damaged, winning or losing.

Because of all that, and the way that resources seemed to keep growing faster than I could spend them, the gameplay just devolved into spamming, with both teams pretty much equalizing in the center and making no progress. I tried to experiment myself to find out unit properties, but it all just gets lost in the chaos due to a lack of feedback.

Perhaps I'm just missing what the ideal strategy is, but I don't think the game is doing well enough at giving me enough information/hints to find it. Still, I think you're on the right track, and the UI and all that was decently put together.

octopus58 responds:

Hello, thanks for checking out the game! I understand it might be a bit intimidating because of the speed, I purposely went more for a think fast and adapt design. There is a wiki article if you are interested describing unit attributes, types, hints, etc but I understand that it not being accessible straight from the game can be a little frustrating. I've seen people adapt a few strategies, and I linked a somewhat simple one in the description as a video, but I do see some people struggle a little with finding an efficient strategy (especially with spacing out troops). I do appreciate the feedback though, it feels good to know all the different thoughts and ideas. Thank you again!

[Sine Surfer]

Hmm, this is a decent little arcade game you got here! The whole aspect of being stuck to a track and only being able to slow down or speed up makes dodging a rather novel experience, and the enemy design, such as the muncher that is always chasing you, adds a nice element of push-and-pull that forces you to speed up away from slow, boring, cautious play. It's a nice, simple game and I had a few times where I got into a really addicted trance state, so well done.

If I did have a few points for feedback they'd be:

I was a bit disappointed that the game didn't evolve past its initial setup: would've loved if, as you reach certain thresholds, the game starts introducing new enemy types, obstacles, and so on. With only a incremental speed upgrade, the game starts to get quite dull, and the unlocking of flavors isn't that exciting.

Speaking about flavors, I was confused on what the point of the flavors were at first. Call me an idiot, but I kept selecting new ones, starting a game, and being confused as to why nothing was different, only to realize later on that you need to press a button to activate them: feels like an unnecessary step as you'd think selecting them would just immediately change it.

Was a bit disappointed that the game doesn't save your previous top score and flavor unlocks on a revisit.

Also, it's a minor wish, but I wish that the character itself would change to reflect its life, instead of the life counter being tucked away in the corner where it is difficult to see in the action. In a manner similar to Balloon Fight, you could've made the character lose a ball for every point of damage they take.

Roverkibb responds:

I'm glad you enjoyed it! I agree that I could have made the flavour selection a bit less complex since a lot of people seemed to have trouble with that. Lots of good suggestions here too. I wanted to keep the game very very simple since it was the first one I planned on fully developing and releasing, but I'll keep your ideas in mind if I ever make a sequel (working title: cosine surfer).

[Shape Crash]

Pretty decent puzzle game you got here! For the most part, it seems like a twist on the suika game which removes the size-growing aspect and replaces it with a more simple and traditional match-to-disappear system. Because of this, I didn't necessarily find it as novel or interesting, but it still felt well put-together in terms of overall construction and presentation. It didn't blow me away, but I didn't hate it either: it's ok.

If I had any complaints they'd be that:

It's not that complex of a game, but I felt like the help/tutorial section could've been done a bit better: right now it's just a big wall of text which is difficult to read. Ideally it could be spaced out or edited to be shorter, or even better, it could be replaced with more images/animations/video demonstrations.

I had a bit of a bad first impression, since I played the game on easy, where it's, well, a bit too easy: there just isn't enough variety in piece types to create a fun sort of stacked-up chaos and improvisation that the game wants, leading to me being bored to tears. I know you could say it's my fault, but I didn't know any better and lacked direction: perhaps the game should just direct the player to the ideal experience with just a single difficulty, or maybe having the difficulty increase as you go up in levels, and so on.

I also really feel like the game needs some music, or more pizazz to make up for the lack of music: without it, the game can be painfully dry and silent.

EDIT: Revisited on hard mode and had a pretty good time: really warmed up to the game! Final score: 7470

JacksonTXG responds:

Aside from the music, I can probably make the experience more catered to the player by making some adjustments to the overall gameplay. For the tutorial, I can see your point, and I'll try to make it short and simple in the future. As for the origin of this game, it's quite simple: I planned to make a Halloween game with the same match concept but with different candies in different sizes, but failed to finish on time. I soon refined the design with this project. Thanks for the feedback, and for playing the game.

[George The Gentleman Frog]

Oh man, this is a rough one for me, as I really, really, really want to love it! The game is just so incredibly juicy and polished in many respects, absolutely bursting at the seams with style, animation, and life. But man, I just had so much trouble with this game and it left a really sour taste in my mouth.

My biggest annoyance with this game was the physics. Say the screen is scrolling right, and you jump straight up: logically, you should expect yourself to go up and land in the same place where you were standing at the start. For some reason, though, this game has you move with the scrolling when you're airborne, which is completely unintuitive and threw me off constantly, making the precision jumps that this game requires impossible. It's just so silly and it's like there's some sort of wind blowing with the scrolling: if you jump with the scrolling, you fly across the screen, yet if you jump against the scrolling, you barely move forward at all.

In addition to that, I think the game's beautiful and colorful graphics actually work against it, as the screen devolves into a visual mess. Along with the busy background moving around, when you combine all the enemies, candies, symbols and player flying around every which way, there were loads of times that I lost myself, or would hit a small fly that I thought was a candy piece, and so on. Definitely needs to be some way to make critical elements pop into the forefront more and be distinguishable.

In addition, the game just felt really hard straight out of the gate, even playing on the normal difficulty. Part of it was caused by things being difficult to distinguish and the physics being so unintuitive, but I also think that part of it was just how many enemies are flying around (both not only in large quantities, but in large variety) without having some easy levels to ease you into things. If I were to guess, I'd say it's a classic case of the developer being the only playtester and getting too used to their game, cranking it to be way too hard by mistake.

There were also other quibbles like how I was always annoyed when the level transitioned the scrolling to be upwards suddenly: without having any platforms for you to jump up with, you always had to awkwardly fall down and reappear on top, almost always hitting an enemy that you have no chance of seeing in time.

[Darkwood]

Hmm, for the most part, I think this is quite a promising little action RPG roguelike: it's got a nice graphical style to it, decent amount of loot, enemy, and event variety, and its quite addictive and satisfying to build up your character and face ever increasing odds.

I couldn't help, though, but have a bit of a rough time with this, despite it being so promising. I don't know if these issues necessarily kill the game for me, but it was quite annoying, like having pebbles in my shoe.

The character movement was very strange to me with the way he awkwardly adjusts and moves irregularly. For instance, if you walk straight in one direction, and then walk immediately in the opposite direction, your character will do a bit of a weird curve, as if they're a car/tank having to u-turn. It's minor, but it just felt really odd and constantly threw me off slightly.

The camera was really annoying with the way it framed the action and made it difficult to look ahead. Despite the level being a big field, the camera attempts to slice it into 'rooms', but without doors/transitions between these 'rooms', there were tons of times that I would get ambushed by enemies that were just off-camera, aka in the next 'room', and it was impossible to see them ahead of time.

Some interactions were very annoying to figure out. For example, I wish it was easier to compare armors and see previews of their positives and negatives, like seeing my stats turn green or red when I hover over an armor piece: whenever I found a new one, I had to hover over each piece and memorize their stats to compare instead of being able to see them both at once. There were also times when I was at a shrine and I wanted to learn what the symbol it was referring to meant, but it doesn't allow me to open my menu to find out until I step away from the shrine: why?

Attacks and damage was also very difficult to parse at times. For example, despite the orc having an obvious swinging animation, it was still possible to just walk into him and die instantly from mere contact: I feel like enemies should either have contact damage or animated damage, not both. Plenty of attacks just felt like they come out of nowhere and can insta-kill you without even knowing what hit you, like the tree boss root attack.

As said, I still think it's a neat game, but there's just a lot of clunkiness, particularly with its core feel, that really ruffled me: if it could just get polished up, I think it'd be great.

ErikSwahn responds:

I am happy for the support! The movement, camera and combat were not the strongest elements for this game I admit. The thing about the orc was a new piece of information. It is important that it feels convincing getting hit by an enemy, so it definitely needs work. Glad you spend time going through the game :)

[Lairun]

Pretty decent endless-runner game! For the most part I found it to be a nice arcade-y experience: dodging enemies until getting the sword and having your vengeance was a fun gimmick, and the way it kept speeding up made things really tricky and challenging. I especially enjoyed the music!

I did feel like the game was pretty short-lived, though. Don't get me wrong: I'm not asking for a 40-hour story campaign from this, but it just feels like you see everything the game has to offer in the first few seconds, and it was disappointing that it didn't evolve in some way as it went on, beyond the speed going up.

I would've loved if when you reach certain score thresholds, if more mechanics, obstacles, and so on were introduced to keep things fresh and interesting. For example, you could maybe have moving walls, or fireballs coming down the screen, or maybe even some events like a mini-boss with its own challenges. It also would've been nice if the graphics would change up a bit to give you a better feeling of progression: the way the game is a dull brown the whole way through makes it feel so pointless.

In addition, I did find that the controls were a bit odd: why not just make it so that you hit right or left to move over one space, instead of having them all mapped to absolute positions? I suppose it added a bit of novelty and challenge to get used to them, but it was just a bit unintuitive. Even if it was done intentionally to make moving from one side to the other a single press, I don't know if its worth the potential confusion.

Also, while its a minor nitpick, I swear I've seen these fonts/sprites/etc before in some sort of asset pack. There's nothing wrong with using assets, but I'd caution against beyond the initial prototype phase as it can give off a certain look that can be a bit unappealing, where someone might be unsure whether it's just some low-effort asset flip clone.

[Funkee Worms]

Wow, this one really surprised me at how addicted I ended up getting with it! I ended up really liking the core gameplay of moving things around to form rows and make upper layers fall down, and I also liked the general goofy worm aesthetic that pervades the entire experience, including the various menus.

Having said that, my first impression of the game was really rough, and it wouldn't surprise me if a lot of players quit in confusion: I feel lucky that I stuck with it as long as I did! Could definitely use a bit better of a tutorial, as I spent way too long thinking that there was some sort of color-matching mechanic to focus on, like you'd see in games like Puyo-Puyo: the little tutorial gif made me think I was supposed to sandwich opposing colors or something, and it was a surprise to learn it was just row-clearing like Tetris!

Heck, even now, despite liking the game, I still don't know the rules fully as I sometimes get these combo/chain clears beyond just the row I'm working on that I don't know how I did: for those it would be nice if something would pop-up, like 'color-match combo +50 points' to let me know and feel good as well.

Also, I'll say that despite how goofy and energetic the game looks, it was really letting me down in the audio department due to a lack of music and sounds: could definitely use some more work there, as while some places do have music and sound, that only serves to make their absence in some spots like the title menu all the more awkward!

I also wasn't a super huge fan of the fact that you need to gamble to acquire these puzzle pieces: I don't even know what the unlocks actually are, but having to do such a mindless luck-based grind to do them isn't my cup of tea. But I'm probably in the minority for that, so you do you.

[Cthulhu Merge]

It's a rather decent Suika game clone, and for the most part, delivers the experience you would expect. However, while I wouldn't necessarily call it a bad game, it did have a lot of aspects that made it a much lesser experience than the original.

This is a bit vague, but there was just something about the game's core feel: the slowness of the physics, the awkwardness of the hitboxes, the lack of pizazz such as music and sound effects, something just put me off and made the game feel a bit unsatisfying or frustrating.

Furthermore, the lack of differentiating color for the objects, the sizes being not as hugely contrasting, along with some of the objects looking incredibly close to each other without serious examination (the two fox-looking monsters which are right next to each other on the evolution), made the game rather confusing. These attributes made it difficult to feel like I was progressing, difficult to get a general read of your situation at a glance, and led to a lot of mistakes where I thought I was matching but the object was different than I thought.

Basically, it's decent, but I think it needs a good amount of polish and juice added to the experience to make it worthwhile compared to the competition.

[ART GALLERY COLLAB]

Hah, a rather amusing art collab! I do like it when an art collab gets creative in its construction, and while this may be a generic slideshow at first glance, the presence of these audio logs of hoity-toity artists overanalyzing the pieces is a novel addition, elevating it far beyond my initial impression.

I'm a bit torn about the low-effort interface aesthetic, though. On one hand it does have a certain weird charm to it, and it can be an amusing juxtaposition to the hoity-toity analysis, as if to say 'why are you talking this so seriously?' But on the other hand, it does, even if its intentional, feel incredibly low-effort, and makes me as a viewer less-inclined to have faith and stick through the whole collab experience. It's important to have art framed and presented properly, just like how food has to be plated for maximum effect, even if technically it tastes the same.

Because of the above, I'm inclined to believe that it might've been better if more effort was put into the interface. For example, if you were to make the interface very high-class and like a museum, with classical music playing: to see these goofy pieces get analyzed as if they were within a fancy wine-and-cheese event would be rather amusing and coincide with the audio logs better, I think! But perhaps I'm overthinking it and not accepting it for what it is.

In addition, as much as it might go against the low-effort aesthetic, I do wish there was a bit more quality-of-life changes in the interface, such as links to the artist's NG profile if you click on their name, as well as a back arrow and a index/gallery view.

Thetageist responds:

That’s an interesting take, and I feel like your suggestion recontextualizes the comedy, though I’m unsure if it’s in a negative or positive way. In the current setup, the narration is more of the punch line than the artworks themselves, because it’s the one thing that doesn’t fit with the rest; what you suggested would make the artworks the unexpected element and therefore into the main punch line.

Looking at it through that lens, I’m actually inclined to agree with you on this one, and I hope this gets tested out in another Art Gallery Collab!