FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[PINFALL, Classic Edition]

Whew, what a tough game! Definitely gives me Jump King vibes in a good way.

While it can certainly be challenging to the point of frustrating at times with the level of precision it requires from a player, I found the journey of this very addictive and fun due to the great level design that has solid progression of interesting obstacles being introduced in all sorts of combinations, a good amount of natural checkpoints, and a very smooth and polished controls/feel to it that makes movements reproducible with practice therefore feel very fair. Along with this, the graphics/sound are very pleasing with nice touches like splashes and falling leaves here and there. Was also glad to see it have a save system: usually Pico-8 games don't seem to have those for some reason (limited space I'm assuming).

Don't get me wrong, the game can be incredibly stressful and frustrating with the constant requirement to edge jump and other highly precise manuevers, the game speeds a bit too quickly to kaizo mario levels around the water/blue blocks area, and the stun mechanic can be a bit overbearing at times. But overall I found the journey very enthralling (though, we'll see if I ever beat it, haha). Cool stuff!

[BLIMBO]

Quite the goofy and fun little adventure that gives me very strong Earthbound vibes! Overall the experience is quite enjoyable and fun, especially due to all the wacky characters and interactions you can have with them: the world, while a bit juvenile, was charming, and I loved talking to everyone I met, including even searching out all those dead-end gags! Even the graphics, while looking very low-effort and lacking animations and the like, do have an appealing look to them, and there is some good effort in the music and other aspects as well.

Finding new people to talk to and seeing where the silly story went to was a strong motivation for me, but unfortunately, I felt like the combat really got in the way here. It's a one-two punch of random encounters and braindead combat where all you do is spam bash/shoot and occasionally heal, both incredibly archaic practices that I feel should be left behind in lieu of encounters being visible monsters on the map that you bump into and combat being more strategic and with a more defined mechanic, like the elemental weaknesses to exploit for stuns or extra turns, or Undertale's talk puzzles and bullet hell dodging. No, the combat isn't the worst as the game and environments are rather short, and you can find have some modicum of fun grinding it out, but I just felt like it wasn't the games strong suit and would probably be better without altogether, focusing instead on the funny world you've built and adding in quests and puzzles instead. I also wish I never bought that AK-47: it just slows down combat by making you have to always scroll down to Shoot instead of mashing Bash! Why!?

Again, as much as the combat got on my nerves a bit, the game still does a decent job at keeping the pace up, not requiring that much grinding as it seemed like it would, and it was fun to build up my character with new equipment despite it all just being numbers and no new abilities. It also helped that eventually I realized you could sprint by holding shift or clicking to move. Pretty fun stuff!

Shai-P responds:

Glad you liked it regardless of the lil irritation you got from the combat!

I'll keep all this in mind whenever I decide to do another entry.

[The Distant Door]

Nice point n click adventure here! It's not the longest adventure game and did feel less dramatic than I thought, but what we got was a rather short and very sweet adventure (well, sweet based off of the ending I got!) that felt very executed and very polished.

What really impressed me with the game was the sheer amount of interactable elements and amusing flavor text that comes from them: always love a game that packs a lot of easter eggs and jokes in every cranny there is, just like the old Sierra games this seems to evoke. Voice acting and general presentation were very nice too, and the story wasn't too shabby either: while I was expecting this to go in a more horror route, akin to something like Silent Hill 4 The Room, and I was a bit disappointed at the realization of the low stakes afterwards, it was a rather heartwarming tale in the end. All-in-all a nice adventure!

If I did have any complaints, they would be rather minor ones, like how sometimes the logic for interactions would be a bit odd. For example, the first time you talk to the super about the package, you can just talk to them directly and bring it up as a dialogue choice: however, all subsequent interactions require you to give them the package notice instead of talking to them. In a similar fashion, you'd think you may need to combine the tack with the written note to create a tacked note and then put that on the noteboard, only to see that can't and instead you must interact with the noteboard with them as separate items. Little things like that came up, but again, were not that much of an issue: just slight hiccups.

Wonder if this is based off of a real story?

[Dungeon Scroller]

Not too shabby! It's not the most complicated game in the world and can be beaten rather quickly, but overall it felt like a nice short and sweet autoscroller adventure that does a pretty decent job at keeping things interesting by slowly escalating the challenge and introducing new mechanics/obstacles, and has a cute lil twist at the end.

While the game is mostly smooth, there were a few oddities that stuck out to me. For example, I found it very odd that enemies don't respawn when you die, especially when pig enemies do get their health back if you don't finish them off before dying. Speaking of pigs, aka the enemies that take two hits to die, I found them to be a rather disappointing addition to the mechanics as they just felt awkward and annoying to deal with by slashing/backdashing, especially since the dash slides you forward which usually ends up killing you. I was also confused by the wind graphics in the final levels: I thought it was gonna shake things up by pushing you around and having to adjust your movements based on where the wind was blowing, but it looks like it was just window dressing and not actually doing anything?

It was a bit rough and could've used a bit more meat on its bones, but it felt decent overall, like a great game jam entry or a first public project by a new developer. Nice work!

[Viva Hexagon! Feat. Ipulo]

Wow, quite the cool puzzle game you got here! For the most part it feels very well-put together and professionally made, bursting at the seams with a lot of content: impressive stuff!

In particular, I love how fun it is to move the player character around: gives me Pizza Tower vibes with how how animated and expressive they are which not only helps with making actions clear to distinguish, but makes certain actions, like slamming blocks down, very satisfying to pull off again and again. Speaking of satisfaction, the game, while not overly explosive in its pizazz, does still feature a lot of those subtle touches, such as playing a sequentially higher-pitched sound for chain bonuses. While it is a bit overwhelming to grasp their entire moveset at first, I enjoyed the challenge of getting it down and becoming not only more effective at scoring, but stylish in doing so. Again, it just overall feels well put-together and fun to play!

As mentioned, if there is one downside to this game, is that it can be a bit rough to grasp at first. To be fair, most of the design is rather intuitive and will be familiar to players of games like Puyo-Puyo and the like, but there are certain aspects that kept catching me off-guard despite seeing them multiple times, such as how similar color blocks will stick while others fall, how you need a full shape and not lines or columns of colors to score, how you can't grab blocks when standing by them despite the character doing the grab animation, and I'd just plain forget I had a lot of moves like dashing and attacking.

Similar to that is the tutorial, which can be rather overwhelming due to how verbose and jam-packed it can be. Kudos to making the tutorial very interactive and visual, and I appreciate trying to explain all the various oddities the game has, but it was just so much and that very same interactivity could screw me over at times where suddenly the text would move onto something else when I wasn't done reading it. If I were to have a suggestion, it would be to have the tutorial not be a single huge overwhelming sequence, but several split-up chapters, some for very basic gameplay and others for advanced techniques and special cases: a player could just do the basic chapters and get into play faster, coming back to the advanced chapters if they spot something confusing when playing, and it'd be much easier to just look up something specific without having to do everything from the start. In addition to that, I think there were a lot of cases where text could be more concise or replaced with a picture, or split up into separate pages to make it look less dense, and some things are just so obvious you don't need to waste time explaining.

Still, the initial process of learning the game, while it could be improved, wasn't that bad and it wasn't too long before I got into the game and had a bunch of fun!

zeddy1267 responds:

Thanks for your kind words! The movement is definitely the part I care most about, since I do really enjoy platformer's that play well.

Yes, the tutorial/general introduction to the game is definitely the roughest part. The game, being a unique/gimmicky puzzle game, can take a moment to wrap your head around at first. This is partly why I made the tutorial as verbose as it is. Think of it more like the included instruction book rather than a quick tutorial. It's the full, unskippable documentation.

I certainly WANT to improve the tutorial in some way. If I had to do this again, I'd something along the lines of making a short interactive tutorial to just quickly introduce you to the game, and then have the rest of the text stored in a separate in game handbook. Quickstart & full documentation.

I ultimately decided to leave the tutorial as-is. Since this is more of a demo for a true Viva Hexagon! game, I didn't spend too much time on the tutorial. For example, something I really want to do is a single player arcade mode/campaign, like what Puyo-Puyo has. This is something I want to tie tutorial into in some way or another (even just stuff like quick tips between stages). Not being able to do this in the current state of Viva Hexagon! (No arcade mode) definitely made me spend less time on the tutorial than I probably should have.

The tutorial is also just the most difficult code to work with, since it's very fragile. I realized the flaws with the tutorial, but just couldn't be bothered to fix them in this release of the game.

TL;DR yeah, I'm aware of how overwhelming the tutorial is. Thanks for the feedback!

[Madness SEVERED]

Wow, quite the impressive game! It's like some sort of Madness-esque combination of both Getting Over It and Endoparasitic and The Revenant, and as much as I had some frustrating, hand-crampy times with this, the overall experience was wonderful!

The journey that the game takes you on is wonderful and beautifully paced: the story setup is really cool and motivating, and the way you go from struggling to even crawl around, to climbing up cliffs, to then acquiring guns and using them both to stylishly blast goons and propel yourself around in slow-mo kept me addicted and enthralled. The cherry on the sundae was the great boss fight against the Clown: phase 2 in particular was very creative with how you set it up and absolutely magicial to beat (though I did let loose a few expletives from how hard it was). Really great stuff here.

That said, while I had a good time overall and look back at it fondly, there was a lot of frustrating moments with this. Unlike Getting Over It and other games like it, this felt very difficult to master the controls and feel fully in control. I think a big aspect of this was the way the game lets your hand and guns phase through walls and objects instead of colliding with them: there were times where I'd try to shoot someone but the gun would technically be in a nearby wall and block the shot, or when I'd be trying to do rapid-fire climbing and the hand would go deeper into the wall for a grab and throw me off, and so on.

Other minor complaints: why no gory death animation when you get killed? Why can't I pick up the SMG?

Again, overall this was a really great experience. Once my hand recovers from the cramps this put me through, I definitely want to give it another go and see if I can speedrun it...or at least I would, but the game seems to have me always start at the final boss despite me already beating it! Is there no way to restart for a new game?

[Madness: The Battering]

Hmm, seems decently built in many aspects for a good little tactical card game, but...well, I still haven't been able to get through a full match despite trying so hard!

As said, there is a lot to like here. First impressions were solid as I found the main menu very intriguing and stylish with its unorthodox navigation design, the tutorial, while a bit wordy, was decent enough at explaining things (though the game does a good job itself with intuitive design through universally-recognized symbols and the like) and the card battling did seem quite fun with a good amount of interesting cards to play. Was also impressed at the nice touches like including mini-games for loading/connecting. All in all, while a lot of the presentation is a bit rough, especially with the fonts, I think battling and building up my crew could be quite fun!

However, there were a lot of rough stuff that got in the way of fun:

*As said, while I was able to connect to people, I could never complete a full match: it always ended up, around half-way through or so, that suddenly the game would end and declare me the winner. Usually the round was still ongoing with no clear victor yet, so I don't think it was a rage quit or anything like that: maybe the other players were tabbing away like it warns against at the beginning, or maybe there are connection problems, I dunno: whatever it was, it all felt rather pointless.

*Mini-games, while not the focus of the game, were quite rough: for example, the fruit ninja game makes it possible to just click on heads to slice them instead of doing a full swish of the mouse like you should be forced to do so, and the hot dog runner game would sometimes creative unavoidable obstacles, like a railing and spike mat right next to each other that creates a length you can't conceivably jump over.

*Combat kind of felt like a slog: this was both due to me facing a lot of newbies who might've not known how to play (should make it more obvious how many action points they have remaining, when their turn is over, who they are controlling, etc), people taking forever to do their turn (maybe enforce a turn timer limit to keep the pace up), and an abundance of a lot of healing cards and low attack weapons (maybe healing should be rarer or removed). Meta-progression felt like a slog too with money barely trickling in and it costing so much to get just one pull of the gacha.

*There were times when I would drag a card over an enemy, only for the enemy next to them to get hit: wish there was some sort of targetting indicator, like highlighting the enemy that's going to get hit when you're holding a card over them but haven't placed it yet.

*There were some confusing aspects that caught me off-guard. I thought that using the shield cards would defend my guys, but it actually looked to not add to their shield, but replace it, and with a lower value? Also didn't realize I could skip a turn to collect more action points: my initial thought was it would max at 3 and not overflow, and I needed more powerful crew members to play the more powerful cards. Also despite the game updating to give grunts 3 energy per turn, the tutorial text hasn't been updated.

Basically, I really wish this game had some sort of single-player mode, both so I could practice before facing people online and so I could actually complete a match without some sort of connection issue, as I do think there's a fun card game in here that I just wasn't able to play. Would love if this game was actually recreated into some sort of single-player Slay the Spire story campaign where you build up your deck and crew as you go forth.

[Madness: Fueled By Hotdogs]

Wow, really impressive stuff here! Really gives me Severed Steel vibes with the way you've setup these really fun and frantic firefights where you're constantly on your toes, diving through gunfire and grabbing whatever guns you can get your hands on when you've run dry. The Madness vibes are great as well with all the cool gore, varied executions, and tons of weapons to try out. I also liked some of the crazy systems in play, like getting tac bar back if you dive through gunfire, making effective use of it very rewarding. Again, really neat stuff!

Unfortunately, while I think that the game is pretty cool, I'd say it is more cool in how it has loads of potential, as its current setup is just way too rough and unrefined:

*While it starts out alright, as the game went on it felt like combat was just way too fast and confusing to keep track of. The combination of enemies suddenly being able to spawn out from monster closets wherever and whenever, enemies always being aggressively locked right onto you and firing undodgeable hitscan weapons, the player getting practically no feedback from damage (especially tac bar damage compared to health), not being able to keep track of enemies positions through things like footsteps which are absent, and so on and so forth made a lot of fights frustrating messes where you just get constantly killed before you realize and can't do anything except trial-and-error memorization.

*Diving could've been the savior of the combat here, especially since it looked like you were going in the right direction with being rewarded for good dives and making it possible to tactically chain them together. But without slow-mo for a dive, it felt pointless as it was impossible to get any accurate shots off during, and despite always trying to dive through shots, it didn't feel reliable to get the tac bar reward, leaving me unfairly high and dry. The worse part as well was how absolutely terrible it felt to hit space and C to dive: just make it its own button for gods sake, like shift!

*There was also tons of jank with the game. For example, ammo counters were incredibly unreliable as it seems like they don't update until you fire the gun: whenever I picked up ammo from the ground or picked up a dual wield weapon or swapped from a dual wield weapon to a new single one, the old ammo counters would remain what they were before until I fired, making me think I had more or less ammo than I did. Not ideal for frantic firefights like this where every bullet counts and I need to know what I have! Weapon management was annoying as well: when you run out of ammo for dual wields, why can't I throw my weapons like I do for single guns? Is there a way I can swap back to single from dual? And so on and so forth.

*Also it felt like the game lost the whole central hotdog mechanic? Felt like it was so important initially before being thrown away. It's ok as a gag but the idea of having to tactically use these 'berserk' powerups could be iterated upon.

*There's also the fact that the camera can bug out and turn way more than you wanted at times: I don't think its necessarily an issue on your part through as lots of these HTML FPS games have this bug for some reason or other.

I really do want to love this game: I think it has loads of potential to become a Madness version of Severed Steel or Trepang2 or so on, but the general combat is just too awkward and unrefined at the moment. If the inventory/ammo management was fixed, slow-mo was added to dives, enemy AI and spawning was refined, and so on, I think this would be some top shelf stuff. Please continue to polish this up as I want this to be great!

frdy responds:

Thank you for the detailed feedback! This was exactly what I was looking for. I'm struggling with the control scheme, since there's a big balancing act with keeping as few keybinds as necessary while maximizing the amount of control players have. A dedicated dive button is a super common request.
Dual weapons are a very tricky design problem. I had many ideas for how running empty with them should be handled.
At one point, I created an animation for switching the gun in your left hand to the one in your right hand if you ran out of ammo for the right gun. If I wanted to retain all of the features of single guns (bashing, turning into a melee weapon when empty), that'd require an entire new set of animations and a lot of extra programming, which I didn't have time for.
If having one empty gun while you're dual wielding were to let you bash/throw while you could still control the loaded gun as normal, there'd have to be a choice -- have the respective mouse button either bash or throw.
I think I just rubberducked. Letting you throw the empty gun would work.

Would you like to join my development discord server? https://discord.gg/DVprYTP8p
I seriously appreciate any sort of blunt feedback.

[Madness Combat - The Sheriff Clones]

Hmm, this unfortunately felt quite rough to me.

It definitely had a pretty solid first impression, as the general gunplay, gore, weapon swapping and so on seemed great: felt and looked pretty smooth and well-animated, and it was very satisfying and fun to blow people away with guns and watch their gibs and blood fly all over the place. Certainly feels like you've built a decent core array of assets.

However, while the game showed a lot of potential initially, the gameplay itself very quickly just ended up feeling very bland, simple and repetitive, making it all feel like a very style over substance situation.

Once you play the game for a minute or so, it felt like you've seen everything it has to offer. It just felt so tiresome to run around this maze chasing these Sheriff clones, spamming the dodge button over and over to keep up with them. The world felt so dry and annoying to navigate, and the way enemies were spaced out made the flow of combat very awkward: sometimes you'd have huge patches of time with no action, then suddenly you get this mass of enemies all bundled together. It looks like the game might have a clown boss later on, but I just didn't have the patience to get there.

Upgrades were very boring as well, not only being the same three things but they didn't add anything to the gameplay and were typically so minor as to be unnoticeable. As enemies start to get guns later on, combat gets more annoying since the cramped corridors combined with the fast bullets means dodging is practically impossible and you just take so much chip damage, especially since you need to chase the Sheriff.

Melee feels absolutely terrible. I can understand having melee be a bit weak to drive the player towards seeking out guns, but even if that was the case, it's just too rough here. The range is so short n' stubby and there's no stun/knockback for hitting people so you frustratingly can't deal damage without taking damage, making it feel pointless.

The game also had a bunch of glitches, such as invincible enemies that would phase through walls for some reason or other.

Again, it has a lot of potential for some good Madness-style shooting action as it does a lot of things right in terms of combat, but the core gameplay loop of chasing Sheriffs around this maze just made wore me down and bored me quickly: with a better world and more interesting objectives/events, I believe this could be very nice.

Aalasteir responds:

Thank you, your thoughts are greatly appreciated and insightful.

[Unloop]

Not too shabby! Seems like a nice little puzzler, primarily focused on finding the right order of operations to take for untangling a series of wires, which can be quite satisfying to pull off and very meditative and chill, accentuated by the music and graphics (particularly the background).

It wasn't really hooking me in at the beginning, but once it started introducing things like splitters and track switchers and upping the complexity in general, it got me good. Level design felt solid: not only did the progression of difficulty feel nice and smooth (though as mentioned, a bit of a slow start), but I also felt like the levels did a great job at subtly introducing and teaching new mechanics very intuitively.

All in all, the bite-size levels, chill atmosphere, good sense of progression and just general polish/craftsmanship made the game very addictive and more-ish and I found it very hard to put down despite these types of games not being my wheelhouse: nice work!

ThreeTreesEU responds:

The first levels are indeed easy, as they serve as the tutorial basically.

They get more complex as new elements are intorduces, and a lot more complex later in the game (Mobile/Steam versions have 150 levels with the later ones being a lot larger and intriguing).