FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Grave Danger]

Ummm...call me stupid, but...how do you start the game? I can walk around and dig but the title screen doesn't go away and the game never seems to start. It is an unfinished game jam entry? I can retry later if it gets patched or explained or something.

EDIT: Ok, now I've actually been able to play the game proper by holding down the key. It's a decent little arcade game, but unfortunately I found it rather awkward and frustrating. I like the idea behind the game getting more and more harder since burying creates tombstones that make it more difficult to walk around, but the execution didn't work for me: most of the time it just led to coffins appearing in blocked-off areas or on top of others which made it an inevitable failure.

Extar responds:

You need to hold X to start. :)
I've uploaded a more up-to-date version.

[Disguise and Conquer]

Cute game with a pretty decent idea where you dress for the occasion with your limited resources, but felt kind of dry and insubstantial, not making the most of it: would've loved it if for every costume we put together, we were to get a funny little cinematic where it shows us in-costume at whatever event we planned for and we can see the earthling's response and be graded. That'd feel so much better than the current setup and would really encourage replays. Also, when you put together a costume but then cancel, I don't think it should reset you to no clothes: keep everything on and let us adjust instead.

AhWham responds:

Thank you for the review! Cutscenes showing the consequences of your picks were planned, unfortunately, I didn't have a lot of free time during this jam to make it the best it could be so a lot of features and replay incentives were scrapped to put out a complete game. As for resetting the clothes, that was done to prevent a bug of rewarding the player with no points if they canceled and then hit confirm without changing the clothes. I admit it was a bandaid fix and if I had put more time into this, it could've been much better.

I do hope, if I have the time and motivation in the future, to make an update/sequel that'll push this concept to its peak and make an overall great game

[1-BIT HALLOWEEN]

Decent little short story game! In general the game feels well-made and polished, and I like the way it's all presented like a play where it's all on one screen with all rooms and elements visible: makes for some fun moments like seeing the kid interact with Eyezy while you're occupied talking with the mother still. Some of the visuals and interactions are quite creepy too.

I gotta admit, however, that I found the story rather unsatisfying. Once I got past all of the ways you can get kicked out before the story even starts by saying some rather innocuous things, it just didn't lead to a good payoff. It was also annoying for replays that you have the correct answer to the child's intro question about the rain as the second response: this means that, despite being able to mash through every other response to get back to where you were, you have to slow down there lest you get an immediate game over and start all over again. As a huge fan of CYOA books who enjoys finding all of the unique endings, this felt like a quantity over quality situation where all the bad endings are just insubstantial, purposeless filler and even the good ending fails to satisfy, so much that I wouldn't even be sure if it was the good ending despite it being the case.

[Expedition 32]

Huh, neat little game! It's a little repetitive and slow and kinda dry in some aspects, but I liked the general presentation, it felt pretty smooth with no major bugs that I encountered, and the core spraypaint mechanic was quite satisfying and novel to use both for solving puzzles and for deterring monsters! Was also impressed that you even coded it so that the solutions were randomized, so you couldn't just find the solution, die, then race straight to the exit with your previous solution memorized: this forces you to ensure that you do the whole run of searching for answer then making it to the exit legit.

[Ruins of Paradise]

Hmm, a decent little dungeon crawler! The story, visuals, and exploration were pretty good as I liked reading all of the logs, collecting items and seeing weird creatures, but the game was held back by the tedious menus/navigation, rather dry combat and annoying random encounters/resource management. It was short enough that I made it to the end, but it was good that it ended when it did as my resources started to fall apart and I needed to awkwardly redo the boss fight after dying and just spam it down.

Seethe-Thorn responds:

Thank you for your feedback I really appreciate it!

[MATCHBOX]

Hey, this was pretty cool! It's short, sure, and a bit janky with weird visual glitches and some odd interactions, but I found myself really immersed into this spooky story experience! I wasted no time playing this several times over: even though the story always generally goes the same way, I still liked the little choices and interactions you could do and seeing the different responses, and was impressed at how some of them were more subtle than others, like not bothering to attack the creature with the knife. In general the writing and graphics were very evocative and it all led to a great 'title drop' finish as I doused myself and set it all alight!

In terms of feedback, as said before, the game can be quite janky in general. Some specific aspects that bothered me were moments like the photo appearing in your inventory before picking it up, weird visual glitches that sometimes even obscure text you're trying to read, examining the knife giving you the description of 'now covered with blood' even if you forgo attacking the creature with it, and whatever the heck was going on with the 'sound' if you can even call it that, haha. Nothing was too bad, but glitchy stuff like this did take me a bit out of the experience when everything else was doing its best to immerse me. It's a testament to the game that I kept continuing with the story in spite of the oddities because I just wanted to see the end!

WURMxFUD responds:

Wow, thanks for taking the time to play it so much! This was for a jam project so I definitely feel you on the jank- there's lots of areas that I think would benefit from more polish. That said, means a lot that you found it so immersive! Definitely will take your feedback into my next project, I appreciate such in-depth thoughts on it!

[Creature Collab 2023]

Pretty cool art collab! It may just be a slideshow of art, but I like the effort in theming the experience by putting all the art in their own test tubes, as well as providing some fun info to read about each piece. Also appreciated being able to go to an artist's profile by clicking on their name: makes it much easier to follow or check out the rest of their art if you see a creature that catches your eye!

If I were to have complaints:

I did feel like the aforementioned test tube theming was a bit low-effort: it all just looks incredibly static and boring, and the creatures don't even look like they're in test tubes, but rather standing in front of them. If you made the creatures color-tinted to match the liquid in their test tube, made them animate to move up and down a bit to simulate bobbing, and put some bubbles to float in front and behind them, then it would look like they were properly immersed and make it look a lot cooler, in my opinion. If you look at Xavier from @Zfert, that's getting somewhat close to what I'm suggesting where it looks like it is properly floating in the tube!

I also found the buttons to be a bit clunky, especially with the way you can hit buttons that are under the info pop-up which doesn't make any sense: you should disable any buttons that the info pop-up is blocking, or reduce the size of the info pop-up so it doesn't block those buttons, whichever works for you.

Nebulate responds:

Yeah… the creatures being static in the test tubes was also pointed out in the discord server. But the imiges was too big to be floating up and down or smth (i wassnt the programmer). Still glad that you found this cool. At least it was more unique than the previous creature collab.

[Mini-Putt 4]

Hey, this is a pretty nice! It's a bit old-school and dated, but for the most part delivers a solid mini-golf experience, with everything feeling quite intuitive and plain ol' simple fun.

I found it quite amusing that it tries to be so realistic: you'd think that for Cosmic Golf, since it's a video game and thus can do anything, it'd do some wacky stuff like portals and weird gravity mechanics and other sci-fi shenanigans, but it just does what a sci-fi mini-golf course would be in real-life, which is just shaping the courses like aliens and putting glowy neon paint on everything, haha!

If I were to have complaints, I would say that the game feels rather dry and incredibly plain, lacking any sort of excitement. I'm not asking for explosions or anything, but just more subtle sound effects like the rolling of the ball, slight bumps for hitting slopes, more fanfare for getting under par, stuff like that! One part that really disappointed me was when you finish a course and it just dumps you out to the main menu: c'mon, can't there be a little bit of closure, like some sort of award ceremony where you review the score and get bronze/silver/gold if you meet certain achievements?

I also found the physics simulation for the game to be a bit bare-bones and overly flat and 2D. I know it's to be expected, but I was just disappointed that some events aren't modeled properly: for example, if you're right in front of a hole and you hit full power at it, it'll just plunk into the hole no problem, when it should fly right past it, slightly bumping into the cup as it passes over, or maybe even riding the curve of it. Similarly, I'd have times where I'd be hitting a ball up a slope with power, expecting that it should get some air time, but it just says glued to the ground. Just little subtle things like that missing which made the simulation feel rather cheap: the game is still fun overall though.

Maybe I'm being a bit unfair considering it is supposed to be a blast from the past and my expectations aren't proper for that time period, but I just wanted to give my honest first impression without taking into account that type of subtle context I read afterwards as it might help for future updates!

[Home 15 Min Experience!]

Wow, quite the interesting demo! Definitely had a solid first impression: the art and animation of the world and characters was very charming with lots of fun dialogue and so much extra effort put into special emotes (especially since most games will shy away from creating emotes for things that might only happen once or twice), and the rhythm-based combat was pretty cool and felt surprisingly well-tuned (it's such a common occurrence for the note-charts to be annoyingly slightly mistimed).

That being said, while it was quite impressive and I'm overall intrigued, it wasn't all sunshine and rainbows:

The choice for inputs confused me at first: it makes you use the mouse at first so I was puzzled when it suddenly stopped, and instead of using standard buttons like Z/X, Enter, Space for confirmation, it used S, which I've never seen before (maybe it's common in other regions?).

I got really confused at the part where the game is teaching defense: I spent a long time thinking I was just messing up the timing, only to realize that I'm only supposed to defend against the red notes and instead attack with the white notes (maybe mixing attack and defense should be left until the next teaching sequence, or the coloring of notes should be explained better!)

And finally, the demo was pretty dang short and didn't allow me to get a precise feel of what the game is going to be like: I can make some assumptions, sure, but I don't know if there's going to be anything else beyond combat and dialogue.

SquishY-Bottom responds:

Great feedback! I'll try to release a longer demo in the future. I will change the key from z to s. I was considering linking notes to moves using more than just color for two reasons, 1 to make it more readable, 2 color blind people.

[Marelza's Cauldron]

Hey, this is a pretty cute game: reminds me a little bit of Bubble Bobble and Balloon Fight!

It's not the longest game as it does unfortunately seem to plateau around wave 5 where it doesn't seem to get any harder or introduce any new challenges, but in general the game feels very well-crafted and polished and delivers some solid arcade fun: I got very addicted to trying to get max combos with a full train of ghosts while dodging through the chaos.

I also appreciated some of the subtle quality-of-life touches, like how enemies entering from the side of the screen (bats/ravens) have a brief second where they are dulled-out and won't collide with the player: this is great as it prevents those cheap deaths from getting hit by something you have no chance of reacting to.

I don't have any major complaints beyond, as mentioned before, that I wish the game had a bit more meat on its bones like more levels, extra modes, etc: the game is so good yet so fleeting! If I were to be a bit nitpicky, I'd also love some slight touches like having a bit more of encouraging juice to push you towards getting combos: for example, it'd be great if the point sounds would get pitched-up in sequence the more ghosts you put in as a combo, and it'd be great if there was a little fanfare if you get a max combo, stuff like that! I do also feel like certain things like lightning and fire shouldn't be able to be destroyed by your bullets, and skeletons shouldn't be able to be collected after being shattered, as it can make the game a bit easy, but maybe that's just me being too hardcore, haha!

LuckyDingoStudios responds:

When I was tuning the difficulty for this game, I initially had in mind a steady increase in difficulty that, if you were able to survive for long enough, you would eventually reach bullet hell-like waves that would provide more challenge for players of higher skill levels. But in my playtesting, I found that there was a certain threshold at which having too many obstacles on the screen broke the core gameplay loop. It could very quickly get to a point where it was not worthwhile to go for bubbling ghosts to bring in a full chain, and you would end up just staying in one corner trying to stay alive. So that is the reason why it plateaus at wave 7, after hanging at the difficulty I personally found most fair and enjoyable from around wave 4-6. Maybe not the perfect solution, but it was the best I could come up with.