FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Fall from Space]

Hmmm, this is quite the interesting Fallout/Zelda 2 adventure you got here!

Was definitely quite impressed with it in a lot of respects, obviously starting out strong with the very stylish and cinematic (albeit a bit over-indulgent) opening that plays when you start. But the game itself also had such a huge scale and variety to it: side-scrolling action sequences alongside top-down exploration, so many people to talk to and objects to examine with loads of flavorful text, a huge world map with all sorts of locations and random encounters, tons of secrets hidden around, lots of quests and unlockables...it goes on and on! Clearly, a lot of effort and love has been put into crafting a huge adventure here!

Having said that, though, the game also felt incredibly awkward, stuttery and laggy to play at times. Combat was particularly bad feeling with no satisfying and intuitive feedback to it: just made me never feel like I was connecting with my blows, and I was constantly getting surprised when I got hit despite being so far away or giving my best efforts to dodge the telegraphed attacks. While combat was the worst, the awkwardness also extended to other elements, like the pause menu taking so long to come up after a press, dropped inputs, or weird collision detection and such. I understand these might be limitations of the engine, and while you have my sympathies, it doesn't stop it from feeling bad nonetheless.

Apart from that, there were some other minor complaints, like how tricky it can be to keep track of quests: it seems like the log only tracks your main quest, but none of the other quests like tracking down the child. Yes, if you go back to the quest giver, they'll likely tell you something about what your current setup is, but still, that's so inconvenient and they didn't always provide all of the details you needed.

I dunno, I'm a bit mixed on this one. Like I said, I really appreciate this huge world you've built with so many characters and quests and such, but as much as I wanted to keep going, I couldn't get over how sluggish and bad the combat and general movement felt: it just sapped my motivation. Almost felt like the game would be much better if it scrapped combat and just stuck to exploring: perhaps that might better fit the limitations of the engine, assuming there is no better way.

JoelJGames responds:

Hi, thanks a lot for taking the time to leave so much feedback. It's really useful.

Lag and sluggishness I'll have to put down to perhaps taxing the Gameboy hardware a bit *too* hard, it's built to run on the 1989 OG Gameboy so I'm limited to how fast it can run in general and in New Grounds it's the ROM running in a Gameboy emulator (so replicates how it would be). It'd (hopefully) be more impressive running on the original device, but I'd still like it to be enjoyable in the browser!

Saying that, I'm going to make a note to look at how I can improve the responsiveness of the combat as while not modern console comparable, I'd like it still to be fun! The impacts in particular, I'd like them to feel more meaningful.

The pause menu has a wait before it, it was to work around a bug if someone pressed it straight away so I'll make a note to see if there's a better solution than that so it doesn't suffer on every press.

More detail in the log I agree with this too, I'll try and get some more guidance in there for the missing child quest!

Thanks again for the feedback

[TYP-HORS-DISSEY]

Quite the goofy little game! Love the concept of racing being done through typing and I love all of the kooky effects and juicy presentation, but ultimately my experience with this was a bit rough and left me kinda unsatisfied.

My initial experience was one of absolute confusion where I just couldn't figure out how to play. I kept typing in spur, spur, spur or faster, faster, faster over and over and it seemed worse than just plain mashing, though even with mashing being better it never gave me a win no matter how hard I tried, only incredible hand pain. Then I tried to experiment with the yeehaw command which seemed borderline exploitative at how quickly it can get you back in and got annoyed at how everyone else could instantly punch me off my horse if I get within their range: so confusing!

Eventually through some experimentation I discovered that the trick was to go back and forth between typing commands and mashing: from there getting first place was not too bad anymore, just a matter of looping faster, mash for a bit, faster, mash for a bit, and so on, maybe mixing in some yeehaws and punches if I can.

It was an interesting adventure to get first, just not sure how to think of it since it resulted in so much hand pain, haha. I think its a cute and funny idea, but I guess I wish it just had a bit more substance to it: feels like just a single minigame within an entire bimsy game, I suppose. But most likely it is just a fun little experiment and I do like the idea behind it, even if I wish it had a bit more.

[THREAT != CONTAINED]

Not too shabby execution of your classic "avoid the stalker while collecting macguffins" horror game! It's not exactly the most original thing, but nevertheless I found it to be a decent short and sweet spooky adventure: of note is that I found the presentation and graphics to be quite cool, especially all of the various caged monsters (almost made me feel like I was viewing an art collab) and I appreciated that you didn't utilize ear-shattering jump scares! I also liked the small touch of being able to race by the guy at the start to interrupt him: always cool to see a skip mechanic be modeled in-universe!

If I was to have any complaints, it would primarily be that I could barely understand a single word that anybody said: would really help if you had some subtitles, or at the very least reduced the distortion that's present in everyone's dialogue. And in regards to skipping the dialogue at the start: as I said, its cute that you can do that, but it also might've been better if it just starts you off in the power room on subsequent plays?

Frosty responds:

Thanks for the reviews as always!!

[Mosa Lina Demo]

Wow, quite the interesting experiment you've got here! Only in the indies would you see a strange game like this, and I found it rather novel.

The fact that success is not guaranteed, your tools are limited, and its all up to you, can certainly be quite intimidating, but more so incredibly refreshing and stimulating, as there is something quite nice about a game that isn't afraid to let you own your mistakes and not baby you. It reminded me a lot of games like Psuedoregalia which allow you some wiggle-room to use the tools you have to sequence-break, getting past obstacles you're not 'supposed to' using your creativity and skill: those times were very memorable for me more so than the typical curated experience a game provides, just like how I really enjoyed my time here trying to desperately solve the puzzles however I could.

It really made me think about game design a lot as I played. Survival horror games, for example, while saying that you need to conserve your supplies, will nevertheless do everything in their power to ensure that you don't softlock yourself into an unwinnable situation, ultimately making the genre be a rather hollow experience if you don't play along and pretend to not notice. This game, by breaking those conventions, is brutally honest and inspiring how it leaves it up to the player to decide, similar to how Bennett Foddy pondered whether the obstacles he was making in Getting Over It were truly unwinnable, or if he was just not being creative enough and should leave it up to the players to see if they can overcome against the odds that even he might not be able to. Basically, this is the Action Park of video games: wild and unsupervised!

All pondering and chin-scratching aside, however, would I actually buy this and keep playing it, at the end of the day? Mmm, probably not. I'm not saying it's bad, but the biggest strengths of this game, being its lack of guarantee of success, its limited ammo, its wibbly-wobbly physics, are also its greatest weakness, as it can make any mistake feel so punishing, unfair, and just make the game feel pointless and have you give up. Combine that with the lack of some sort of greater long-term goal to strive for, as well as not having any sort of tutorial and explanation for the tools (still don't know what the green box flash gun is) and there's just not much motivation to keep me going. That's just me, however, being brain-washed to treat video games as designed to grant me validation, instead of it coming from within: I'm sure gamers more inclined to speed-runs and exploits and glitches and such would love this!

[Greedy Goblins]

Not too shabby for a little retro-style arcade game! Overall found it quite the charming experience and loved the little touches it had, like the funny cutscenes between levels that reminded me of Pacman with its intermissions. It starts out a bit slow and was feeling quite repetitive and unchallenging, but later on the levels did start to get more creative and provide new obstacles and layouts to keep things interesting.

The main complaints I have against the game:

*There is this really annoying friction that is apparent when you run against the walls that can slow you down or stop you in your tracks: feels very unnecessary and gets in the way constantly.

*There would be plenty of times that I would plant a bomb next to an archer, only for it to immediately explode and kill us both: I understand that they can set them off, but I swear I was leaving even of a space between us and it just felt dumb.

*As stated before, the levels can be a bit silly in how unchallenging and relaxed they are at times: most of the goblins and obstacles and collectables just felt like window dressing at times, not actually providing any sort of interesting risk/reward or strategy to take care of them. Yes, the bombs do provide a bit of excitement with how they can hurt you just as much as they can hurt the enemy, but usually it wasn't that much to keep me interested. I dunno, I know I'm being vague, but it just felt like it was lacking some core appeal or mechanic.

*It felt like I was constantly holding the run button to the point where I feel like the default speed should just be running and the button can be removed so I can relax, or perhaps invert the buttons purpose to become the walk button instead since it is needed much more rarely (if at all).

KageKMB responds:

Glad you liked it! If I'm not mistaken, this is the highest you've rated one of our games.

Response to the complaints:

-Wall issue should be fixed, (changed movement from move_and_slide() to move_and_collide() ). Please tell me if it's better.

-On adjusting the bomb next to archer issue, unlike the walking it'd require significant adjustments to the backed of the game. Which in turn requires a lot of testing to make sure it doesn't break the game. I'm not going to rule out, but it won't be adjusted within this week lol. Hopefully resizing the hit-box does the trick.

-A trend with your feedback on CubePunk's titles tends to be related towards the complexity/difficulty being a bit low; Keep in mind the majority of people who play browser games skew more casual - and majority of feedback praises the rate the challenge increases difficulty level (with some saying the peak challenge was even too much). Future games will try to add "challenge" or "expert" game modes; made for the hardcore players; so that'll hopefully fix that issue. In the case of Greedy Goblins - an iterative sequel with a harder difficulty cap is more likely than an added game mode.

- If I ever updated it to reversing the walk/run toggle - it'd be an option in the settings and not the default. Going against the muscle memory/convention that's been a thing since SMB1; it'd frustrate the majority of players.

[Katti]

Wow, this was a solid, cute little puzzler! Overall feels very well polished and executed in all respects with no major complaints I can think of, except that I feel like I've played a Kultisti game just like this before, but hey, still fun, what more can I say!

[One Escape From Franky's]

Huh, quite the interesting mash-up of genres you got here! I found the concept of having to solve an escape room while simultaneously fending off intruders quite the novel idea, and combine that with the rather cute art, I thought this would be quite fun. I also enjoyed the subtle touches like hallucinations popping up. Unfortunately, I found myself rather confused and frustrated after my play attempts, not necessarily due to the puzzles (though they were quite tricky), but due to a number of design decisions, or lack thereof:

*I understand that you might not want to highlight interactable objects as perhaps that would make it too easy, but without that, it just felt too confusing to figure out what you can do in the world. This was made even worse by the incredibly unsatisfying lack of any sort of feedback when you do interact with objects: for example, you'd expect to see the plant rustle when you pick up an item from it, or have the cabinet open when you unlock it, but everything stays so static that you're never quite sure what you just did, if anything.

*Items were quite confusing to figure out without any sort of description tooltip: I have no idea what the item you get out of the plant pot is (a bolt? a flashlight?) and I had no idea where the key you get is supposed to go either (you'd think it would be for the obvious padlock, but its for the medical cabinet which doesn't even look locked?)

*Certain interactions like the clock felt incredibly unintuitive with their being no clear rhyme or reason for how to move the minute hand or hour hand: I'd try my best to work with it, but I'd always end up moving the wrong hand, or somehow moving them both at the same time.

*Without any sort of subtle cues you can use to identify if the intruders are getting to close without having to actually go back all the way to the door and visually confirm, like footsteps or music, it just becomes so tedious and annoying to manage. In addition to that, I had many times where intruders killed me in mere seconds after I just checked the doors and found them empty, leading to me losing confidence that the intruders were coded in a fair manner.

*There were also some weird glitches, like how you can pick up more scissors from the cabinet after you've already picked them up and used them on the doll.

Again, I do really like the idea behind this and understand that some of the limitations may come from the game jam: would love to play a more polished up version of this if it were made! For now, I made it as far as finding that cipher in the doll's head and getting no further.

[Sofia the Witch Curse of the Monster Moon - Demo]

Oh, this was a rough one for me. I really, REALLY want to like this game as it's just so bloody cute and charming on many levels, and I feel like there's been a lot of love and considerable effort into constructing this. While I'm a bit more of an action junkie, I did find the simple low-stakes scavenger hunt-style gameplay where you're searching and collecting friends to be cute and fun. All in all, there's a lot of potential here and it legitimately feels like it could be a great adventure that stands alongside other games like Kirby's Dreamland, Super Mario World, McKids, and so on.

But unfortunately, I found the gameplay to just be quite boring and repetitive, mostly due to how sluggish it is to move Sofia through these arduous and maze-like environments. For such a cute game, it was actually quite the stressful affair, and not in the good challenging way, but in a tedious way. Whenever I fell from a tree branch from a unsuccessful jump or died, I groaned at having to make the trip back: compare this to movement in a Mario or Kirby game, where I'd be glad to zip, zoom, and jump right back to where I was. I also hated having to check every nook and cranny to see if there's some friend lingering on the edge of the screen that needs a leap of faith to reach. It didn't help that every level just seemed to be the same thing over and over without any new things being introduced to keep it novel. In short, the core movement and traversal of Sofia is just so damn unsatisfying compared to other platformers, and due to the environments being so static and large with no flow or fun obstacles, it just amplifies the boredom.

In terms of other feedback beyond the core gameplay:

*When you use the wand to make bubbles, you shouldn't be able to make them within walls, and due to the way the wand currently makes bubbles at an exact position no matter what, this is what unfortunately happens. If you create a bubble when standing close to the wall, it should create the bubble at the nearest open position: it just makes more sense.

*I understand that water is a witch's enemy, but I was shocked when I was killed by jumping into a waterfall: I thought I only needed to look out for jumping into a pond of water, because waterfalls looked like they were just part of the background, not the foreground, and thus I thought I was just jumping past them, not into them.

*When you bounce on a turtle enemy to flip them over, you shouldn't take damage when you land on their flipped state afterwards: it just feels unnecessary and cruel and damage should only be given when you make contact with their unflipped state.

*The save/load function didn't seem to be working for me. I beat the first two levels of the forest zone, took a break, and then when I came back, I was back at the moon altar and the first two levels were locked again. Why did it not save after beating those levels?

As much as I'm harsh on this, I hope, considering this is a demo, that the feedback can be helpful in making this out to be the best it can be in the final version!

jakemacher responds:

Thank you for all the feed back. I'm going to look into some of your suggestions.

Saving is done manually. In your home there is a spell book where you save your progress. After you complete the tutorial level the owl tells you this, and the cat in your house reminds you too. To make this easier on the player if you hit select you can teleport right back home where you can save your game quickly.

The bubble going into walls is not something I can control sadly, it is a limit of game engine I'm using, sprites do not have collision detection like that.

[Sporit]

It's a decent little game for a bit of fun, but ultimately it did feel rather dry and generic, both in gameplay mechanics and especially due to the lack of any sort of juicy audio/visual effects. Basically it was the equivalent to eating a plain piece of toast: not bad, but not necessarily good either. Obviously it is understandable that it is mostly likely not going to be something crazy good due to the game jam restrictions, but I just want to be honest (and have actually been surprised plenty of times by game jam entries).

If I had any notable bits of feedback other than the obvious, it would be:

*I felt like the visual clarity was lacking for some elements such as the pushable rocks: I didn't even notice them the first time because they are so faded and desaturated and therefore blend into the background. I would prefer if they were treated differently, such as having a more striking outline like you did for the spikes: that would make them pop a bit more into the foreground.

*The difficulty curve was a bit odd. It felt like the levels were doing a good job at being nice and bite-sized until suddenly you have this rather early level requiring you to make long back-and-forth journey with a sizable amount of precise jumps over spikes, all of which can make you have to start the entire sequence all-around again. It really stuck out to me as an unnecessarily tedious roadblock.

*Would appreciate a save/load feature: most likely not the longest game but it can still be nice to take a break.

[cyber_serpent]

Hey, this is a pretty decent arcade shooter! It's not exactly bowling me over with innovation or breaking any new ground which I'd want to see from a game jam, but it nevertheless delivers a simple and fun explosive experience that's just plain fun. I had a couple of times where I wasn't even sure how I died because of all the visual chaos, but I felt like this game was very juicy and had a very good amount of enemy diversity that keeps the gameplay evolving and addictive, so all in all this was very nice.

Speaking of gameplay innovation and such, at the risk of sounding like an armchair developer, I feel like you might've missed a trick here. I noted that you made the design choice that enemies hitting your tail get damaged, and I thought that was very interesting and could've been utilized to create a more exciting gameplay loop where, instead of having generic guns that allow you to shoot from safety, instead you need to dangerously get close to enemies so as to trap them within your tail and make them crash into it. Obviously it doesn't work because you've built enemies specifically for the guns to handle like the laser walls, but I tried it in the early game and found it a very fun and more exciting way to play: perhaps it'd be worthy of experimenting with in the future, or a bonus challenge mode!

As a side note, I found the controls quite odd: you use the d-pad to navigate the menus, yet you can only use the analog stick to move within gameplay. You'd think they would be interchangable where you can use both of them for menu and gameplay movement, instead of them being locked to their own sections. It was a short time, but it was still a source of great confusion when starting out since I thought my controls weren't working!