FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Rogueblast]

Interesting little hacky-slashy game! It's pretty fun and addictive in how fast-paced and simplistic the general gameplay (combat and looting) is, but unfortunately it feels rather shallow and short-lived: once you've played one level of it you've pretty much seen everything.

As said, there definitely is a lot of potential here: while it is rather simple, that very same simplicity allows the game to never slow down and just keep you moving forward, and the game does attempt to vary things up with certain special events like scrolling rooms, hidden tunnels, and all sorts of equipment. There's a certain smoothness to everything as well: movement/animation feels very slick and the combat feedback is decently satisfying. And the music is a jam as well, to top it all off.

However, as said before, the game gets old quite fast and just ends up feeling repetitive. There's just an overall lack of feeling like you're actually progressing in a meaningful way, which should be the core conceit of these kind of games. Yes, the colors may change, but I was disappointed to see the same enemy types just get recycled over and over with higher stats, the same bosses with the same patterns, the same weapons and trinkets, the same rooms, and so on, with nothing new being introduced. The numbers may technically be moving behind the scenes, but nothing is changing since they all move in tandem: it's meaningless. Compared to something like Risk of Rain or Isaac, the equipment we get doesn't stack to create fun combinations, but instead just constantly gets replaced, keeping us static. It especially doesn't matter anyway since everything is just boring stat increases instead of fun abilities that would change your playstyle significantly.

In addition to that, there are some minor things that get in the way. The stat menu is very boring to look at since its just a bunch of text: it's practically a debug console instead of something the player should see, where's the nice equipment inventory tiles that you can mouse over for info and such? If an item drops at the edge of the screen, you can't even read what its tooltip says because it bleeds over the edge. Those same descriptions can be confusing too: a cape says it gives you +atk spd and its a trinket, but a claw says it gives you +atk spd but its a weapon when I thought it was a trinket. Speaking of trinkets, if I have two slots, why can't I pick which trinket gets replaced when I pick it up somehow? Finally there's just a lot of confusion where enemies can suddenly do more damage than you think they would, there's so many acronyms and shortened text that makes it hard to decipher, and so on. Balance is also a bit of a mess with weapons like the staff being just too useful.

Definitely feel like it could be something fun with more polish, balance and content, however! The core seen here is quite decent and ripe for expansion.

ErikSwahn responds:

Glad for your response on the game! Currently it is not meant to be super deep and I think renaming it to "Rogueblast Prototype" could be more fitting. I have uploaded a project file so people can edit my game in Construct 2, which lets people use this idea to expand it more. I am glad to hear about the critique though as it helps me with upcoming games :)

The project file can be found on my patreon page for free!

[Sorted Inc. Fully Automated Assembly Line]

Wow, this is some good ol' simple and classic arcade fun! I quite like it: takes me back to other plate-spinning panic-inducing juggling games like Tapper and such. It doesn't necessarily have a lot to it, but it does enough for some great fun. In addition, I liked the humorous theming and concept of robots fighting to keep their jobs as introduced in the cutscene and reinforced in the scoring: little touches like that really elevate the experience.

In terms of feedback, there were a few points of confusion:

*One was that I didn't realize that you only need one arm piece for both arms, when it seemed logical due to the way the arm tiles were drawn that they would need two: one for each. In comparison, leg tiles are drawn with both legs, so it makes sense that you only need one there and not two. My attention was split so it took me awhile to catch on: I just thought I was doing something else wrong.

*Two was that I didn't realize we could put items back down at first into the inventory: whenever I tried I ended up dropping the item altogether, so I thought that was all we could do. Eventually when trying to drop an item I did realize we could slot them back into the inventory, so maybe the accuracy required for the game to consider you to be slotting them back instead of dropping should be reduced to make it easier.

*My biggest feedback was that I felt like the game eventually descends into an unrecoverable mess where it is simply too fast and too on fire that you can barely do anything anymore but extinguish fires and hope for a lucky break. While this is part of the challenge and it is funny to have runs always end with everything on fire, I wish that certain parts of this could be tweaked to make it less of a hopeless situation. For example, maybe you get a higher score multiplier the faster things go, but if you mess up, you lose the multiplier and things slow down instead of staying fast, letting you recover (but you're still motivated to try to keep it as fast as possible for high scores). Maybe when things go on fire the conveyors stop completely (though that might make it too easy and lose the appeal of the chaos). Maybe when the conveyor speeds up, you the player should also speed up as well to keep things fair. I dunno, up to you!

[ScrapLegs]

Wow, quite the good puzzle game we got here!

For the most part, it feels solid in all aspects: an intriguing core concept of leg durability meaning you need to carefully assess each move, overall pleasant presentation and controls, smooth escalation of difficulty that hooks the player both with great tricks to keep them on their toes (like having to intentionally break themselves when you'd think you should always keep yourself healthy) and tons of new mechanics like grass and bouncepads that are taught to the player very intuitively, and bonus content that serves up additional fun challenges to go for. I was easily hooked!

If I were to have any complaints:

*I felt like the grass, which serves as a soft landing pad, could've been something else a bit more intuitive like snow. Snow would pop out a bit more strongly visibly (the dull green of the grass can easily blend into the dull brown environment) and more easily represent the quality of 'softness'. Would've also loved if landing on grass or snow played a soft sound effect, like a puff, to more accurately declare its use: maybe even have a puff come up visually as well. Bouncepads could also use some sound effects when you use them. But then again, the way you set up the level teaches the grass quite well, so I might be complaining about nothing.

*One big constant and confusing annoyance I had was picking up repair kits mid-jump and having you not have full durability at the end of the jump. Yes, if the repair kit is hanging up in the air and you grab it mid-jump, it makes some sense that landing after the jump will result in your having damaged legs, not full legs. But when there is a repair kit on the ground and you land on top of it from a jump, I feel like that should give you full legs, not damaged legs: so silly to have the very minute gap between grabbing it and landing count as damage.

*Also I found it a little silly that it represents the levels that still have a battery to collect with a pip: usually I feel like common sense would make it so the levels that I have collected the battery in would be the ones that have a pip, not the blank ones, as blank usually represents a neutral state. Also a bit strange that if you beat level 9, but not level 10 yet, the level select will have level 10 as a question mark, when I feel like it should be 10 since you are on it, similar to how the game starts with level 1 as not a question mark because its the one you're on. But whatever, got used to it!

*I did have a few glitches come up, like when I fell onto an elevator platform and instead of landing, it kept me on top of the elevator in a falling state.

KanartStudio responds:

Thank you soooo much for the review and feedback.

I agree with you 100% about the grass. It blends in a lot, but I couldn't think of anything else that would fit in this trashy/post-apocalyptic environment of the game. I actually added sound to the grass and the trampolines, but I didn't have the time to upload it yet. I also added a better tutorial since some people were having trouble understanding some of the game's mechanics.

About the repair kits, I actually thought about this during the development phase of the game. I tested the robot not losing a leg after falling on a Repair kit, but I felt that something was wrong because this was basically canceling the player's momentum from the fall. So, I went with a more realistic approach: if you fall, you still experience the momentum and break your leg when you hit the floor. You are not wrong tho, the game freezes a frame and slows you down when you collect a repair kit (something that I added later to improve the game feel). This really gives a false sense of security when falling, but by the time I realized that, I already had a bunch of maps 💀.

Those glitches are actually very rare, so rare that I couldn't find a consistent way to reproduce them. It's kinda hard to fix issues like these, but it's something that I will keep in mind for my next game.

[Tales From The Arcade: Starship Murder]

Quite the interesting game! It's a bit short and can be a bit confusing to even learn how it works, but for an experimental prototype, I found the combination of its polished presentation and intricate mystery generation systems to be quite compelling and gripping, and the confusion over the unorthodox controls just added an overlapping sense of mystery and discovery to the game itself which synchronized with the mystery of figuring out the murder.

Reminded me a lot of something like Night Trap: you're trying to pay attention to what each person is saying to gather clues, but the game distracts you by having multiple conversations to keep track of and errors that keep popping up that must be dealt with, meaning you could miss or misinterpret information from the scraps you pick up. Definitely found myself coming back to this a lot and seeing the different ways it can play out, both in how the scenario is initially setup and the different endings you can achieve.

There were certainly some rough spots here and there that I felt could be polished up, however. While I can understand the tutorial looping the conversations to ensure you pick up everything it is trying to teach you, I didn't like how it would also loop conversations during the murder mystery gameplay since it just made no sense for the characters to act that way, especially if they haven't been interrupted by the AI. There were other minor aspects like never being quite sure of the usage of the interrupt action, and the endings not being quite clear as to whether it was good or bad, but again, those aspects might just be mysterious and vague on purpose to add to the experience. And again, overall it was a very unique and intriguing experience!

[[BURNOUTS]:Tower Of Power]

Hmm, interesting little game that gives me a bit of a mixed impression!

On the plus side, it seems like a rather charming game that is going for those quirky Earthbound-esque RPG vibes, what with its funny dialogue and characters, modern day themeing/aesthetic, and turn-based combat with QTE minigames. It mostly pulls this off quite well, such as with funny dialogue that is delivered with effective pauses for emphasis, by keeping the combat QTEs short as to not disrupt the flow too greatly, and my favorite part of the game was when it seemed like it was going for interesting 'puzzle' fights, such as the beer pong boss fight which needs to be defeated with the shoot move as it is invincible otherwise. I feel like there's a lot of potential here!

However, there were a lot of complications that brought it down for me:

For one, the general feel of the game felt very janky. No, it never bugged out of me fully, but there were a lot of minor things that just made it feel like it wasn't smoothly put together. For example, there is a strange, subtle delay when you try to navigate through menu options rapidly: if you're fast enough, it can end up ignoring your inputs, so it felt like I was forced to move through options slowly as not to break it. There were also awkward things like how moving to the equipment menu from the main menu has it laggily close and re-open a whole new window for some reason, and in combat you can have prompts come up for a brief second after you've already moved past them, like if you interrupt the enemy's prompt to do your attack, it'll go back to play the rest of the prompt out despite you already moving on. Nothing crazy, but it just is slightly annoying to deal with all these minor hiccups, like having a pebble in your shoe.

In a similar vein to above, the music minigame for Eli felt misaligned: if you try to hit the arrows to the actual beat of the music, it won't work because it is slightly desynced. Instead, you need to intentionally not follow the beat and just hit the notes according to the visuals, which just felt bad. In addition to this, feedback for hitting notes felt a bit confusing: yes, the overall feedback for the end result of the game was clear, but I'd like a combo count or affirmation for each note I'm hitting during to check my timing.

I found the font that the game uses to be a bit too fancy, garish and bold to make it rather difficult and annoying to read, and I would much prefer a more simple and clearer font, at least when it comes to dialogue: you can keep the stylish font for things like actions and titles and names, if you must.

I felt like combat was lacking a certain level of pizazz or juice. So many attacks play out with no special effects or animations and it really makes it boring: for example, practically all of the enemy attacks just have the enemy grow large and shrink. I feel like it would be much better to have special effects to distinguish attacks from one another and give it more character: for example, there should be things like a big music note explosion when Eli does his attack, a lighting bolt for Jolyne's spark skill, and when the philosopher quotes Kant as you, you should be assaulted by a bunch of word balloons and the sound of 'blah blah blah'. You put special effects for the death explosions, so just make more like that for everything else!

There was also some confusing inconsistency in the game, like how Eli's Fury Fists doesn't have a minigame for it, yet Jolyne's spark does, and I have no idea why the Superego boss fight gets a special QTE to defend from its attacks while every other enemy doesn't.

Finally, above all the rest, my biggest complaint is that a lot of the fights were pretty brainless and repetitive, boiling down to simple attack spam with the occasional heal. The game got me really excited when it introduced the special beer pong enemy shoot puzzle and the hint that you can interrupt enemies when they change color with a firebomb, and I thought, especially since the game is so fight-centric, that the rest of the fights would get even more creative and puzzle-like, kind of like figuring out to pray at the end of Earthbound. Unfortunately, the beer pong enemy was the only one of that nature, and firebombing the bosses that do change color didn't seem to have any significant effect as they still pull off their healing move. It was really disappointing: I wish more bosses required special strategies to get at their weaknesses, or even puzzles like maybe only being able to defeat the philosopher boss by talking to him and picking the right answer to confuse him like using the special talk action in Fear & Hunger.

Hopefully you don't take this too badly since, as much as I complain, I only do it because I think this does have a lot of potential, so best of luck on further development!

FCPXAV responds:

Thanks for the detailed review!
A lot of the jank things like some Eli music being misaligned are due to this being a PC game adapted to WebGL, so there are a few problems I'm still working on fixing :(

I like the idea of special effects on attacks! It's something I want to implement way down the line, but right now the project is just me doing everything and I'm not great with art so I can only do so much visually while still making the music/art etc haha. The fire effect halves healing and I do want to add more element-based things and more dynamic gameplay, it's just going to take me a while and this was more testing the waters and measuring progress. Glad you enjoyed and hope you like the other things to come!

[Bullet Hellween]

Hmm, decent and cute little bullet hell shooter! For a game jam game, I was quite impressed at the general level of polish and craftsmanship, what with the cute and animated presentation and especially with the great amount of enemy variety with all sorts of unique attack patterns to look out for! The boss was a great cherry on top as well, what with his very extensive attack patterns and telegraph animations for each.

While I do feel like the game is pretty neat, there were plenty of aspects that dragged it down for me unfortunately:

The enemies felt like they were incredibly spongy and became such unsatisfying slogs to defeat when you've gotta pepper each of them with so much gun fire (er, wand fire). I understand that, near the beginning where enemy density is low, high health for the skulls can be necessary to ensure they live long enough to get some attacks off, but when the game ups the enemy density, that sponginess becomes incredibly frustrating.

Speaking of enemy density, it does get rather overwhelming in the later levels and becomes a real unfair nuisance due to the way that enemies will stack on top of each other and not only become a spongy mess, but with the way that they will hide each other, making it impossible to see bats charge up their tackle attack, among other things.

Another subtle aspect of the feeling of sponginess present in the enemies is the lackluster sound design and feedback for kills: the game overall feels very quiet, muted and bereft of exciting notes which really dulls the satisfaction of combat. Screenshake is also very repetitive and just reduces the screen into a vague mush of confusion.

Powerups were ok, but rather unexciting and basic. But even more so than that, they felt silly and unfair: you'd think adding bullets onto your wand would be an additive powerup, but no, 2-shot or 3-shot are separate powerups that don't stack and override each other. Similarly, the powerup to transform your shots into larger shots can show up despite you already picking it up, yet if you pick it up again, nothing will change.

Checkpoints were a mixed blessing, or rather a curse: if you make a bad powerup choice or end a round with very little health, you could now be stuck in a very bad situation with no way out for recovery. I'd much prefer if the game were to just restart completely upon death to allow for the player to make better choices and get to where they were with more health, especially since it is already short enough.

Finally, as much as I am getting this game some considerable stick, it was a rather short game and it did make me want more! If this game wasn't a game jam game and got to have some more time in the oven, I could see it being incredible: while it isn't balanced in this iteration, I can't overstate how impressed I was with the sheer creativity and diversity in your enemy design! Would love to see more games in the future.

Meiallu responds:

Me and Nagasaki may do a bigger version of this game, if this actually turn to be true, I'll 100% fix everything you just said. Thanks!

[Elephant Rave 2]

Hmm, a bit mixed on this one! As a preface, I'm coming at this from a place of having no knowledge of Elephant Rave 1 or other related pieces, so take that as you will.

For the most part I am rather positive on it as it is a wonderfully energetic and psychedelic experience which absolutely assaults the senses (in a good way). Despite being so short, the way the presentation fires on all cylinders really served to add a certain level of wonder and mystique to the gameplay that makes it all very memorable and addictively gripping.

However, part of me is a bit more cynical, instead seeing the game as a very 'style over substance' experience, the equivalent of jangling keys in front of a child to distract them from the rather simplistic 'dodge laser beams over and over' gameplay that is at its core.

Now, there's nothing wrong with using juice and pizazz to elevate an experience as that is a huge part of game design, and the game does take steps to elevate the difficulty as it goes on, introducing factors like a scrolling background and big lasers and so on. I'm not trying to call you lazy fraudsters or tricksters or anything like that, but the game did feel a bit short-lived and shallow.

The most important aspect that I think the game gets wrong is the difficulty curve. It starts out really strong by slowly evolving the gameplay over stages: faster and denser lasers, weird gravity mechanics, the scrolling screen and so on. But then, when it looks like it is going to introduce a brand new challenging mechanic of darkness, making it so that you can only see your elephant in-between flashes of light, suddenly the game pulls its punches by allowing you to be able to see the elephant plain as day. Why set it all up and get my hyped only to drop the ball? From there, the game retreats back to standard laser dodging, and it continues to do so with no other significant evolutions until the game just...ends. It felt like such a letdown! The game was building up slowly and getting more intense, only for it to just stall out and lose all the momentum.

Again, I think it's still a fun and memorable experience, and I very much enjoy the charm and warmth of this revisit to Newgrounds after a long absence and all that jazz, but if I have to be honest and take the game on its own merits, I really felt like it lost its momentum halfway and soured the experience slightly. If anything though, take it as a compliment that it grabbed me and made me want so much more out of it!

[POKO LOCO]

Hrmm, this is a rough one for me! I really want to like this game as it does have a decent level of polish and juice to its craftsmanship and presentation, but I found myself very bored in no time as the core gameplay is incredibly shallow, repetitive, and one-note: it takes no time at all to see everything the game has to offer and there is no significant evolution as it goes on. It feels more like a rough draft or a prototype that hasn't yet found a core gameplay loop or unique concept yet.

As said, the game is quite lively and juicy, yet simultaneously very bland as well. Apart from some nice special effects for timed bounces and the psychedelic animated background, the game has a very bland, empty and almost clinically sterile look and feel to it when it comes to elements like the paddle and the unchanging world as you proceed forward in levels.

Compared to the lively title screen, I was really disappointed at the bland wall of text that is the tutorial. I'll grant you that it is at least categorized properly and tries to space out the sentences to help with reading comprehension, but I would much prefer if there were pictures or animations to help. Also the tutorial keeps repeating the same instructions over and over for some reason: if you can't even proofread the tutorial properly it doesn't give me much faith in the rest of the game. And to top it all off, the game says I can use WASD in the tutorial, yet it doesn't work and instead I had to use the arrow keys.

Bump timing for powerful bounces could be a fun mechanic, but it just felt incredibly frustrating and awkward to get used to it: it felt like you need to time the bump way too early when I expected it to be right when the ball hits the paddle, and even taking this into account I was constantly having my bumps not bounce the ball, leading to tedious gameplay in an already very repetitive game.

As said, the game feels like a step back from tons of other games that have come before it. Compared to more exciting powerups like being able to shoot bullets, summon multiballs, slow-mo, catching the ball, and so on, this game's powerups that just adjust paddle width and speed feel dire and don't excite. The bonus level doesn't even feel like a bonus level since it doesn't have its own music track or exciting scoring system. And as already said, every level just feels the same with no interesting layouts or new exciting mechanics: a couple bouncers being added here and there doesn't thrill me and keep me engaged. It just feels like a big waste of effort and is so incredibly outdated: I'd rather play something like Arkanoid on the NES which, for being decades old, has many times the amount of content and variety than seen here.

I want to like this game and think you've got a potentially great team here that can get stuff done, but there's just absolutely nothing exciting or fun about this game in its current state: it is the most bland student project paddle game, a bland scoop of vanilla ice cream with no sprinkles or whipped cream and definitely not a cherry on top. Make sure there is a focus on fun and addictive core gameplay in your next project before anything else.

KageKMB responds:

I fundamentally disagree with a lot of these criticisms. This game is a culmination of what I learn doing these leader-board focused browser titles. A key thing I honed in on, was what clicked with NG players, and what didn't.

To use Masahiro Sakurai's definition of game essence - your main criticisms can be summarized as "this game lacks game essence." However, things that increases game essence decreases broad appeal. There's a threshold with your target audience that if you cross it - they get frustrated at the challenge rather than entertained by it. Part of being a successful game designer is knowing how to be a people pleaser.

I personally play games with a lot of game essence. I also have to remember, one of Friday Night Funkin's common criticisms can be summarized as " too little game essence" - but it's also like the biggest game to come out of the NG community in a decade. If I dropped a game that fundamentally required you to do fighting game quarter circles and dragon punch motions, I'd be more to my taste, but I also don't see it getting past 3 stars.

Poko Loco was made with this site's general player-base in mind, (the itch.io uploads of the games never get hits lol)- and looking at the majority of feedback, I think I've demonstrated I'm honing in on understanding what works for this group. I'm not saying this with the intent of having an ego - but to illustrate that I had an intention, and got result in the ballpark I intended.

_________________
regarding some things like the WASD issue - that was a minor over-site and i've been wanting to do a minor adjustment patch sooner than later - but need to find the time.

[Spider Collab]

Cute art collab!

While it is a bit disappointing that it is just a slideshow which is what I consider very basic and minimal effort (c'mon, you couldn't do something a tiny bit more creative, like arrange all the pieces in a spiderweb-esque gallery view? it took me seconds to think of that, I'm sure you'd think of something way cooler) it does nevertheless have some nice presentation to it with its animated background and cool music, and I was pleased to see that it does have the critical convenience functionality of allowing you to click on the artist's name to go to their respective Newgrounds page (though I almost thought it didn't since it doesn't look like a button due to not reacting on mousing over).

Would also love if there was some ability to zoom in to the art pieces as some of them, like Anonymous's-Frog piece, can be difficult to see all the intricate details at the scale it is currently presented in.

Anyway, at the end of the day it's always nice to see a community event like this, and ever since I brokered a deal with the spiders in my closet to let them live since they kill other bugs for me, its great to see them respected here.

Thetageist responds:

Yo, that'd be cool! If there's another Spider Collab, that should totally be how it's presented!