FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[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!

[Dear Edmund]

Hmm, quite the promising management game with tricky balancing of many aspects, including morality! Reminds me a lot of games like Yes Your Grace, Papers Please, Frostpunk and the like. For the most part it has a pretty solid presentation and cool concept, and I was intrigued to play.

At the same time, however, it had a lot of rough aspects that I felt could use some ironing out:

My biggest problem with the game is that it feels rather toothless and unsubtle. Yes, you need to make decisions to try and keep both parties happy lest you run into a game over, so you might need to make some choices you don't like here and there, but the whole crux of this game should be that it's hard to be good and easier to fall into corruption and I just wasn't feeling that. For example, whenever a choice came up where I can earn some coin by being evil, it was incredibly easy to say no, because what the hell do I need money for? I'm a superhuman who doesn't need food to survive, modifications to my house don't provide me any tangible benefits, and I have no attachment to my wife just because the game says I should! Games like Pathologic and Vampyr have strong motivations within gameplay to tempt you towards evil through selfish survival or even the greater good: this doesn't except in very shallow ways. It's so blatantly and cartoonishly black and white instead of having some interesting grey areas.

Dunno what the whole point of the contracts spilling to the ground and needing to be picked up is? Even though you put them on the shelf, they get erased on a save file being loaded, so they don't seem to have any sort of actual importance. I was also disappointed that despite me picking them up beforehand, the guy berated me for not picking them up when he should've recognized that I already had.

The 'accept/refuse' system is a bit awkward at times in how it is handled: for example, when the guy with your wage appears at the end of the shift, it gives you an option to accept or refuse, but either way results in the same thing of you getting your wage, when you'd think refusing would be spitting in their face and not wanting the wage.

Found the money system rather confusing in that you have street budget and personal funds as separate things: don't know why it can't just be one thing and I was confused about how each of them work. For example, I thought, based on the instructions, I was supposed to be not collecting the money in the safe so it goes towards the budget instead of my pockets, but every time I was forced to collect.

Would be nice if there were some quality of life changes, like being able to speed-up or click to complete text being written out. Speaking of text being written out, it seemed silly that it starts to write out the program code for specifying text color before it suddenly transforms back into regular writing. Some of the menu navigation was a bit awkward as well, like I couldn't find the way to go back in the shop menu to the root, being stuck at the end of one of the branches.

Some aspects of the menu and UI were way too tiny, especially when it came to text: could stand to make some things bigger for better readability.

Best of luck in further development!

MindTheGrease responds:

Thank you for the feedback! It’s still in beta so there are many things that need ironing out such as accepting the wage etc. The main mechanics are in place and through feedback I plan on adjusting everything to a release standard.
Cheers mate

[Attack of Mechaningale]

Hmm, I really like the direction this game is going, but it felt like it needed more time in the oven!

As said, the concept behind the game is pretty solid: it's 'Rampage'-esque gameplay where you, well, rampage all over a city, destroying everything with reckless abandon while defending yourself from the resistance which continually becomes stronger until you get into a big boss battle finale! Everything gets very chaotic and fun, I like how you regain health by destroying things, the charge-up laser power is cool, and the cartoony-visuals are also quite charming. Overall quite promising!

When it came to the gameplay execution, however, it felt pretty rough in some areas. My biggest problem with the game came from how bland attacking felt: there just wasn't enough juicy effects when raining down hell to make the destruction satisfying and compelling. Where's the explosions, the rubble spilling out, the screams, the screen shake, and so on? The damage modeling needed to be more visible and progressive and that includes the player as well, as it was difficult to tell when you were being hit and how severe: I know you have a health bar, but it's all the way in the corner and difficult to keep track of when you're focused on the battle, so it would've been nice if the player would react more when damaged as well as looking more worn-down the lower their health went.

[Sleigh Ride Saga]

Hmm, I really want to like this, but it had some pretty rough edges to it!

For the most part, this is a pretty nice Christmas-themed Paperboy-esque arcade game: it's fun to balance the tricky flight controls with throwing the presents accurately and go for a high score. I also thought it was a nice touch that you need to 'prove yourself' on the title screen to unlock higher difficulties. General presentation and is pretty nice and juicy and such, so it should've been an easy lay-up!

However, there were aspects of the way the game is designed and constructed that brought down the experience for me:

*I found it kind of odd that there was no sort of bonus for speedy deliveries or some sort of time limit to make all the deliveries. Because of this, I found it all too easy to lame it out, moving very slowly and taking easy shots, when it would've been way more fun, challenging and chaotic if you needed to take risks. You'd think that he would be pressured to get it all done quickly before the night ends: it's Santa's whole schtick after all! Was hoping that maybe this would be the case in higher difficulties, but no, those just decrease your present allotment.

*I found the whole handling of failing a level very awkward: instead of a more common solution of living with your failure and moving onto the next level, or allowing you to retry from scratch, it instead forcibly decreases your difficulty level and lets you play the level again with whatever deliveries and damages you've made still there.

*I found the noise aspect a bit disappointing that all it does is blare noises and give you a point penalty: would've loved if cops start descending on you and try to blast you outta the sky, or maybe kids/paparazzi try to take pictures of you and you need to dodge as that seems like a more natural consequence fit.

*The most frustrating issue that I had with the game was how presents would be randomly dropped without my input. I'm not even talking about presents being dropped when you bump into stuff: that's ok and kind of funny. No, I had plenty of times where presents would, for example, drop in pairs when I just tried to drop one, or just drop completely out of nowhere, despite me being very deliberate and precise with my inputs.

It's still a nice arcade game with a solid core, but the execution was a bit off for me.

[Krampuslauf]

Hmm, this is a rough one for me as it feels more like a prototype that needs more time in the oven!

In theory, I really want to like it as it seems to be going for a nice Hotline Miami or Ape Out-esque gameplay loop where you bulldoze into rooms and cleave through a bunch of kids before they can raise a finger in defense. It even has some decent quality to its presentation and some nice effects like hit sparks and ragdolls (albeit the ragdolls awkwardly fly towards you instead of away for some backwards reason).

The execution left much to be desired, though. For being such a big and burly creature, Krampus is absolutely pathetic in how easily he is killed in one-hit, along with his wimpy and slow claw swipe animations which feel so awkwardly delayed: don't get me wrong, I understand that there should be some challenge to the game, but it felt like it was a huge mismatch. Speaking of challenge, the kids were very annoying with the way they instantly shoot as well as back away: kudos to how smart they are, but it felt like a bit much. It also has some slight problems like how easy it is to get caught on corners, and there are exploits that should've been patched out like being able to hit kids through a wall that should block such attacks. Just overall a frustrating and unpolished experience!

I think this game is heading in the right direction and shows a lot of promise with its concept: I want to love this! But, in the end, it just feels like it got a bit confused and wasn't fully polished enough for release.