FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Lost For Swords]

Pretty neat game! Overall everything feels pretty interesting, well-polished and intuitive, thanks to the good use of animations, UI and feedback, as well as the tooltips/info you acquire through being able to practically right-click on any element: while the tutorial did a decent job at laying down everything I needed to know, whenever there was a part of the game I was slightly confused about, such as the aura cards, it was great to be able to easily find out more through a right-click. With that, I had a pretty good time getting to the heart of the game, strategizing and planning my way move-by-move through a room, nay, through the floors: fun stuff!

There were a few parts that did trip me up a bit though:

*There are some instances where tooltips and menus will actually go off-screen, rendering portions unreadable or actions inaccessible. An example of a menu going over would be the hero's deck, where the close button is only half-onscreen, and even an item as simple as the knife can have tooltips that go off-screen and make it impossible to read about the 'reusable' property.

*Whenever I wanted to select a card below my current active card, whether it be in the weapon or armor deck, it was very difficult and fiddly to pull off: you kind of have to put the mouse over it very slowly or something awkward, it was very inconsistent and would usually either not target the card below at all or refuse to move the targetter from the card on top/active card.

*While the tooltips are very nice, perhaps they could be reduced to be more brief, spaced out between sentences, or at the very least bold important words: they can end up just being a big wall of words that is difficult to parse.

*While I got used to it eventually, I found the durability system very confusing. On initial inspection of the cards, it seemed like the knife had 3 uses while the rusty sword had infinite uses, but instead the knife had 4 uses while the rusty sword had 1. Why not just list the durability on all weapon cards like that immediately instead of this awkward state where it has one more use when the durability counter is gone? As said, even if I accepted that the rusty sword is single use because it has no durability counter, it was really awkward to realize the knife technically has 4, not 3, uses, because it still has a 'zero' state after reducing reuses to 1. Usually when something has a 1, it means 1 more use, not two more!

*I found the death state of the player really awkward and delayed: sometimes I was surprised to find out that I'm dead because my guy still looks fine and enemies still play out the rest of their turn before a full game over screen pops up afterwards. I think when you die the game should full-stop immediately with no further turns from anything and it should have a bit more fanfare, like your guy exploding or keeling over with a scream, mayhaps.

*Call me stupid, but I was a bit confused at what the goal was initially of a run. The tutorial gives a certain precedence to prioritizing getting away and not necessarily killing everything, so I figured my goal was just to get to lower floors while picking up loot when I could do so without considerable risk. The whole 'backtracking' thing confused me: I didn't realize it was punishing me because I hadn't killed everything yet, I thought it was just making me walk into and out of the dungeon with my loot to complete a run. Eventually I realized that killing everything was the goal, but perhaps it could've been made more clear somehow.

*While I like the game, it is rather dry, both in a graphical sense and in a story sense: there's just a lack of a strong motivation through some sort of fun characters or ultimate goal or changing environments or some sort of progression of that nature. I understand this is most likely part of the active development, but I just wanted to be sure to emphasize just in case.

[Adventure Kitty: Drill Buster: Revamped]

Pretty cool game! For the most part, it feels really solid and well-polished in a lot of respects: gameplay is simple, fun and addictive, the characters and world are charming (especially with how the main character ignores the lore and goes straight into action), the game evolves with some interesting obstacles and new mechanics like the arrows, and I like most of the additions brought into this update such as the new level select screen, the 'close call' popup, the score screens, and the nice menus/buttons and transitions. Lots of good stuff here!

However, it ain't all perfect and there were some parts I wanted to note:

*While I do like the new menus/buttons and such overall, they aren't all created equal. For example, while the video and audio menus are great, the control menu is terribly bland and inconsistent in comparison. The title screen is also a bit static and could use a bit more animation to it. The level select menu was also odd is that it feels a bit too zoomed in: could stand to be zoomed out enough to see several levels grouped together, not just one at a time (also, the level select should only let you go as far as your last level, not beyond to the locked levels, pointless and confusing).

*Lots of minor typos in the script (mostly stuff like using "you're" when you should be using "your" and other unnecessary/incorrect punctuation) and minor graphical issues like the text within speech bubbles practically going over the edges: nothing too bad but it just gives a bit of a lesser impression of the game.

*Game felt very lacking in audio, and I'm not even referring to the fact that it defaults the audio to way too muted to begin with. Rather, sometimes it was just audio not being balanced properly with some sound effects being way quieter than others (like the laser shoot and explosion in the intro comic) and sometimes it was just that certain actions that feel like they should have sound, such as the elevator for ending a level or the score screen counting up ticker sounds.

*Speaking of the score screen, I found it very confusing to determine how to get a good rank. I'd have runs where I thought I did awesome get a B and runs where I died a bunch and thought I did terrible get a Z. I didn't know whether deaths factored into score since it is off to the side instead of being part of the main criteria, I don't know why or how tiles are considered part of the score (should I unnecessarily dig more tiles beyond what I need to get to the goal?), and so on and so forth. It would be very helpful if it had par scores/times/etc to go for, and if it would divulge more information on how your score added up based on what elements and how you rank for each individually.

*I didn't like how the game allows you to keep overflow coins from a previous level into another level: it's ok to be able to keep between puzzles within a level, but not beyond that, I feel, especially since if you quit out and go to a level from the level select, it'll start you fresh instead of preserving the coins you carried over. There should be consistency!

*I didn't like how the game allows you to keep coins/arrows you've collected when you reach the barrier without enough. It resets everything else, so why the exception here? I think the challenge should be to have to gather everything in one solid run: it's more fun and requires strategy and execution. If you go to the barrier without even coins/arrows, it should fully reset the entire puzzle, otherwise a player and tediously collect one at a time over several runs, optimizing the fun and challenge out of the game.

*Does the game really end with you just getting the earth element? I was expecting a bit more content, like other worlds to go to with their own elements to gather (they did say there were three at the beginning, yes?), and even if it ends with the earth element I was also expecting it to end with a bit more of a fantastic finish, like a cool boss fight or ending cutscene, not just fade to black and get booted back to main menu. Kind of a letdown despite the fun journey.

*Had a weird glitch: after I beat the game, I tried to go back to the main menu to check out the options but suddenly I couldn't access any of the menus: it'd make sounds when I press buttons but I couldn't go beyond the video menu or access anything, essentially being frozen.

Hoping there will be further development and levels for this game!

[Coglab]

Cute little art collab! It's just one screen and there's not much to it, but it's still nice to look at and pretty creative with its very animated layout and presentation: certainly a breath of fresh air compared to the typical 'slideshow' art collab presentation. Not too shabby: only major complaints I can think of is that it would be nice to have direct links to the author's Newgrounds page if you click on their name when viewing their cog, and that something about this concept really makes me wish it was even more crazy, like being able to drag the cogs around and make your own connections, or even making a whole cog-based puzzle game where you use these pieces within them, but maybe that's asking a bit much, haha.

Questtrek responds:

Those are excellent ideas. Thank you for the feedback (:

[Eggy]

Interesting little game! I like the intent behind it being a goofy little fumblecore game and while it was rather short, it did make a memorable and funny experience. However, while it was charming in its weirdness and I can understand a fumblecore game being a little fiddly and confusing to add to the challenge and said charm, this did go a bit overboard in having some elements being frustrating. For example, it was easy to lose track of elements like where the plates and eggs were due to everything being a mish-mash of tiny overlapping grey pixels, and the feeling of picking things up felt rather weightless and unsatisfying: could use a bit more subtleties to it, like some sort of confirmation feedback such as snapping upon successful pinch? Lots of potential here: just might've needed a bit more polish on the core controls and feedback!

[LAUNDRY DETERGENT QUEST]

In the context of a game that was made live for the Summer Fest, this is quite impressive in many respects, and therefore I'll try to be nicer than usual, haha.

Yes, it is pretty much a shitpost game, but it actually has a lot of quality behind its goofy facade. Good enemy variety and escalation that keeps things interesting as you proceed, juicy explosive feedback for blowing up enemies along with the amusing spectacle of gun upgrades, general smooth and lively movement and animations, and an...interesting choice of music. There's even some interesting strategy to the game where, especially due to the suicide enemies, you can choose to try and play it slow and cautiously, or just blow them up all fast enough to clear the bullets from the screen before they hit you (and be rewarded with cash for doing so). All in all it delivers a decent short and sweet adventure that doesn't outstay its welcome!

I play a lot of shooters on this here website, and to see something like this, while certainly lacking in long-term appeal, get so many things right in terms of juicy core feel that other more developed games lack, and to teach those aspects to people in a timely manner, is pretty inspirational, and makes me hope that more people step up and create their own juicy games.

However, even if I am being nice, there are plenty of rough aspects to the game:

*Collecting money was quite annoying, both in part to how you have to stand directly on top of it to pick it up (lacking the generous magnetic attraction that games of this ilk typically have) and that the level up screen can end up blocking visibility of the money (which just so happens to be the time that you want to collect the money!)

*No idea what the difficulty unlock on the level up screen was about: I'm assuming that it is a risk/reward element that increases the amount of enemies which in turn allows you to score more points, but I couldn't really tell.

*Certain elements like the recoil from shooting felt a bit frustrating to handle: didn't feel like it added enough to the game to justify the annoyance.

*The music is...uh...g-great!

LeviRamirez responds:

I made this for the summer fest in a day and a half, but I'll probably use this as the groundwork for another sizeable project, either commercial or not

thanks for the feedback, this will affect a future game! :) <3

[Resident Evil Ebola 5]

Bit mixed on this one!

If you view the game as a throwback to old-school Newgrounds games, it can be fun to laugh at all of its oddities, like the mismatched sprite rips from all sorts of games, the corny voice acting with variable sound quality, the overly dramatic story, the overall janky feel to the controls, and just that nostalgic aesthetic that's so synonymous with early flash games.

However, in that same respect, a lot of the game is just really sloppily put together and feels incredibly low effort and confusing: I can accept corny voice acting and such since that adds to the charm, but a lot of the errors and confusion I experienced were just plain bad.

A few examples of the rough spots which I feel could've been ironed out:

*The game was very inconsistent with its interactables. Sometimes the game would highlight them, such as having the lever have a sparkle on it, or having the back of the plane glow green: this was great as it let me know I could interact with them. However, for other aspects like the hole in the wall, or the bridge controls, and so on, there was nothing to let you know you could interact with it, leading to confusion. There were also weird times where, despite usually being able to just walk to the edge of a screen to go to the next zone, suddenly it'd want you to interact to move to the next zone. If the game was better with popping up a button to let you know you can interact or highlighting things, it'd be much clearer.

*Merchant behavior was very odd with how buying handgun bullets from him says you get 15 bullets, but end up getting 10 bullets actually. I believe there were other cases of similar miscounting when picking up bullets from the ground.

*All sorts of strange layering and clipping issues, like how some text when I picked up bullets popped up behind an object in the foreground which made it difficult to read, or how the green highlight for the airplane could still be seen when you open up the inventory. Just looks really bad.

*Despite the game saying you can open up your inventory wherever you want, there were plenty of screens where suddenly you couldn't: no idea why not.

*A lot of time when I'm shooting the enemy, it'll be like every other bullet will not hurt the enemy as there will be no blood splash or other feedback. Dunno if this is intentional as some sort of random chance to miss, or whether the bullet is actually hitting but just not triggering the blood feedback for some reason, or if the bullet is just straight-up glitching out and not hitting for no good reason.

*Player damage was really confusing: I'd be miles away from an enemy but still end up flashing red outta nowhere, getting hurt but no good reason I could tell. I'd even get hurt by leftover corpses of enemies: not sure if this was some intentional design like acid blood leftovers, but there was no way to avoid it if that's the case, so it's bad either way. On the flip side, however, there would be enemies sometimes that would come right up to me and not hurt me at all: they'd just latch onto me and jitter around!

I could go on and on, but you get the gist. So yeah, it was a fun trip, but in a way, I do wish it was put together way better: I'd prefer to be laughing with the game instead of laughing at it, if you know what I mean! There must be a way to get that old-school look without making it feel so outdated and clunky to play.

MetaMike responds:

Many thanks to you for taking the time to type this. It's greatly appreciated. many of these things you pointed out are small technical issues that I could've easily ironed out. I guess I skipped over some of them in the end, but I'll definitely be making some adjustments and fixing them.
The Merchant actually rips you off, that wasn't a glitch...(jk lol) the ammo count is one I definitely didn't notice. Some of the coding from the merchant was carried over from previous chapters and the values obviously weren't the same. I'll be making various fixes rn, thanks to your feedback.

EDIT - I fixed just about everything you mentioned.

[Bullet Bunny]

Wow, quite enjoyed myself with this one! I wasn't all that impressed at first glance as the survivor genre is overpacked with competition, but I was surprised at how this ended up addicting me with its pretty fun gameplay, so kudos in that respect!

The vibes reminded me a lot of 20 Minutes Till Dawn, especially when it comes to the build variety with different focuses on summons, traps, elements, damage, projectiles, reload, and so on: wouldn't be surprised if it was a direct inspiration or straight-up lifting from its playbook, haha! I thought at first that the summon build would be the only fun build, but color me surprised when I liked laying down traps or having light-based radial slowdown/fire or having chain explosions and so on. No matter what the cards dealt it felt like you could get something cool going in lots of different ways!

For the most part, the game was pretty well put-together. As said, I quite like the build variety and the power progression as the game goes along, especially when combined with the enemy escalation with all sorts of different types of enemies that go beyond just simple statistical increases, but actual different patterns that make you change up your strategies. Game also offered a lot of interesting weapons and heroes, and I liked that you can try them out before actually having to buy them (though I was disappointed that there was no way to try out hero super moves).

That being said, while the game is fun, I'm not quite sure about the long-term appeal. The fact that it's just a single map (or rather a single screen) with no special events or quests or modifiers that can really shake up the experience from run to run, can make it feel a bit repetitive and pointless. Furthermore, the game doesn't really have a unique selling point to it: as much as I have fun with it, it is, as I mentioned, just like 20 Minutes Till Dawn, so there's nothing this really gives me that that game doesn't already, so why would I buy this? Not sure if the game is going to develop some sort of story, or multiple levels, or other interesting aspects and content to keep people playing. It doesn't necessarily need to, but without some sort of larger purpose or sense of greater progression beyond just goofing around with different guns and maybe cranking the difficulty, I feel like I wouldn't be compelled to stick with it for long, let alone spend money on it.

In addition to that, there were a few confusing aspects here and there:

*For example, I found it frustrating that you can get cards like +50% poison damage when you don't even have a poison weapon: because you can still get these despite that, players (like me) can be fooled into thinking the card will give you poison damage, only to find that it doesn't.

*I found it a bit odd that killing enemies will sometimes have that explode in a satisfying manner, whereas other times they will just poof away in an awkward manner: thought it was overkill damage at first, but that didn't seem to be the case, so I don't know why there is an inconsistency.

*It was strange that the game doesn't offer a way to manually reload as a strategic decision to make. I also thought the reload bar was a bit odd: I expected it to stretch all across the player, but it ends like half-way.

*Would've liked if there were some HUD elements right next to the player, such as an ammo and health count: it's difficult to keep track of those considering they are crammed in the corner of the screen which is hard to peek at during combat.

*Would also love if the number of damage you took as a player would pop up as it was really confusing to determine how badly I got hurt: maybe it'd be nice if you just normalize damage with hearts instead of numbers? So weird to take '18' damage as a normal thing instead of a basic round number like 10 or 5 (i know, i know, it's because of all the percentage defense stuff you can get).

*Finally, it was really awkward that the visual effect for the knockback that comes with levelling up happens immediately when you level up, but disappears before you're done with the level up screen and then the knockback happens afterwards, making them feel disjointed: feel like you should freeze/delay the visual effect until you're done with the level up screen so that both visual effect and actual knockback happen in sync.

I'd say you have a really solid and fun core gameplay here that I'd love to see iterated upon: best of luck for the eventual full release!

penusbmic responds:

Hey Futurecop! Thanks for the feedback, so valuable :)

A lot of what you feel is exactly how I feel! Number of damage you take is a great idea that has slipped by my mind. Also HUD stats by the player, I think I may add this as an option.

I grouped Poison/Dodge together since early on in playtesting they were both kind of weak/lame to pick. I've thought about exactly what you said, but don't want to remove dodge at the moment, perhaps an overhaul to both is the right move!

Reloading was also in the early build ultimately decided to remove it as "Reload Bomb" was the only build testers wanted and it did a fix amount of damage. Perhaps I can revisit this now that there's a ton of different/viable build options.

As for you main point about long term appeal. I have tested out a few different kind of game modes, 1 in particular is fun but a tad hardcore. I'd love to somehow incorporate some sort of story/lore kind of in a subtle way, but as a solo dev that keeps getting push down the list :(

anyways, again thank you for you valuable feedback, greatly appreciated! :)
Pen

[Acro-bot]

Wow, was really impressed with this game! Feels like you were going for 2D Mario 64 and, as strangely backwards as that sounds, it felt like you pulled it off pretty dang well!

It certainly took a bit to get used to the controls since there are so many movement options in place which can be quite overwhelming (especially since some of them double-up, like the long jump and the dive) but once I did, thanks in part to your great tutorial zone, I was having so much fun just playing around by itself, let alone making it through these great gauntlets you've setup that make you use everything in your arsenal in fantastic chains! It just never got old or stopped being fun since you kept shaking things up with tons of secrets and new mechanics and tricks, and the controls felt very smooth with just the right amount of subtle air control influence to allow a bit of wiggle-room for adjustments. And even a cool boss fight for the ending (which I wish had maybe one more phase)!

It did have some rough spots here and there. For one, as much as the simple graphics did help with visual clarity, and you weren't a slouch with the expressive animation for the player, the game did nevertheless have a rather dry, sterile, and crude look to it overall that got a bit repetitive, especially since it doesn't change up significantly the entire playthrough. There were some physics glitches here and there as well, such as how jumping from a platform moving down will have you awkwardly feel like gravity is pulling down heavily due to you retaining momentum from the platform (it's ok for upwards, but downwards is weird feeling). Also, I'm not quite sure of the necessity of this whole 'don't stop moving' mechanic or the stamina meter: kind of felt unnecessary and even annoying, especially since some spots, like for patrolling guards, can have you want to stand in place to wait a bit. There are also some obstacles that feel like annoying 'gotchas' that you just have to trial-and-error your way through.

Really though, any negatives I can say about the game are mostly trivial nitpicks compared to how the fun the movement was in this, especially with the great obstacle courses you setup. I'd say this should be put this right beside other cool movement platformers like Gappy's Playground, Fancy Pants Adventures, Pseudoregalia, and so on!

Sikowny responds:

What a fantastic review!! Your critique is noted and highly appreciated! Thanks for playing, for the kind words, and for tips on improvements. I hope you play again in 1.1 :D

[Detective Bass: Fish Out Of Water]

Nice game! It feels a bit clunky and awkward for controls and graphics in some minor respects, but for the most part I found the game quite engaging and addictive to go around and collect all of the clues, especially due to the very amusing and varied dialogue/mouth-sounds/portraits between the characters and the way it kept adding and tying up threads. The notepad mechanic was pretty impressive with how it kept track of all the various clues and let you present them to whoever for their response. I also liked how the music subtly changed as you moved through rooms.

As mentioned, there were a couple of rough patches here and there, but nothing too major:

I didn't like how the intro moves along without your input, making you read faster than you might be comfortable with.

Interacting with the notepad was a bit clunky at first: for example, my first instinct was to look for a back-button for certain things, like going back to the list of people after looking at an individual, and I kept trying to click off the notepad in empty space to close it only to realize I had to click on the notepad icon itself to close. Those and other aspects like it were fine and I got used to it, but it just felt a little unintuitive.

There were inconsistencies in signaling for interactions: for some reason, despite everyone having an exclamation point above them when you can talk to them, the salmon filet doesn't have any response which made me think I couldn't do anything with it at first, then the frying pan does get a highlight despite the salmon not having one...weird stuff. Because of this, it made me really unsure if I was missing clues and whether I should just be spamming the interact key to get something that might not be highlighted.

There were also some weird interaction logic, like how you can have the food ready for the captain and show him it directly, but that doesn't work: you need to go back and redo the question about the business contract and that leads into giving him the pie. Speaking of that, you can also have all 6 people who dislike the chef's food ready to go, but the chef will brush you off the first time you bring this up despite being ready: it's only until you repeat the same question that you bring up you have all 6 (this led me on a weird goose chase since I figured I needed one more since he didn't react the first time despite it). Similarly, you just have to talk to a lady normally to ask about make-up instead of being specific and asking them about the clue about the make-up, for some reason.

I liked it, but I did have to admit that I got pretty annoyed once I discovered that it had no save/load function. Yes, I imagine it might not be that long of a game if you played it straight, but it can be rather arduous with the amount of interactions and questions you need to make, and now realizing I would have to do that again...yeah, kinda kills my motivation. Yes, yes, I know, it was most likely cut because of game jam time limits and all, but still, its a bummer.

[Super Gravoor]

Pretty decent little game! Reminds me of other games like Irritating Stick or Super Monkey Ball with this maze-like thread-the-needle arcade-style gameplay. It's certainly a simple yet fun concept, I liked the polished presentation, and for the most part I felt like the game did a good job at changing up the layouts and introducing new mechanics and hazards to keep things interesting.

However as I got further I slowly started to lose my interest due both by the game recycling similar levels/hazards, having some really long and/or annoying trial-and-error levels, and also just being a bit bland in general. It just got kinda repetitive. I certainly wouldn't call it bad, but it wasn't quite great either: was just a merely good, average-ish game.

When I first started the game I thought it might be a bit more faster with the movement being more momentum-based and drifty and wall-bouncy like Super Monkey Ball, so I was a bit let-down that it was so slow and plain and so punishing for hitting walls: not saying that the game needs to be like Super Monkey Ball, and it's my own fault for having weird expectations, but it did feel like the game lacked a certain je ne sais quoi, leaning itself to that 'blandness' I felt.

In terms of other feedback:

I found it a bit odd that, when you pick up a key, that the doors remain and wait for you to approach before they open and then re-close: typically I'd expect the doors to disappear immediately when you pick up the key, or leave behind a ghost of where they were. The fact that they were still there kind of threw me off: sometimes I would think 'wait, did I not pick up the key?" when I saw they were still there.

I wasn't a big fan of the levels with the false exits, or the landmines, or the doors that suddenly appear out of nowhere to close on you: those mechanics just felt like pretty annoying gotchas that didn't add much, but rather detracted from the experience.

There were also some weird bugs like, when growing big, only some of the rock dudes would get scared while others remained stoic, which made me unsure whether I could barrel into them or if they were immune exceptions for some reason.