FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[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!

[Wall Wizard]

Not too shabby! Gameplay concept kind of makes me think of Bomberman but with more steps, or an interesting subversion on the Qix genre.

I admit that I feel like the gameplay feels rather half-baked at the moment as it is easily exploitable with lame strategies and doesn't feel like it evolves at a significant pace or in a way that makes the gameplay change and introduce new tactics. I know it's a game jam game so obviously I'm not expecting much, but I still feel like we haven't fully uncovered the potentially fun core of this wall-bombing gameplay you've introduced here, only having scratched the surface.

Having said that, this game is a great example of what I like to see the most in game jams: instead of sticking with something normal and safe, you experimented with a wild and creative mix of mechanics to see if it worked, and despite my grumbles before, I still had a decently fun time with it in its current state, so I consider that a success.

Even more so, it really gets my imagination going for what the game could evolve into. For example, what if the trigger to explode walls actually came not by player detonation, but when you intersect a vertical and horizontal wall, similar to how you block out sections of the map in Qix? Or, what if there were some sort of combo system where explosions that occur from multiple walls being constructed or intersecting give more points, or do more power which is necessary to defeat foes with large regenerating health? Lot more to experiment with here and if you do so, I'd be happy to play it!

[Beneath]

Hmm, cute little game, but ultimately a bit generic and unexciting, though I suppose that's to be expected considering it might just be an asset pack showcase (but I'd still hope for more).

If I regard the game purely as a vehicle just for selling the related asset pack, then it's quite alright as that is the best part of the game, with the various animations and graphics looking quite decent. For example, I love the way the player character's cloak flaps as they jump. However, if I were to take the game as something to actually be played for fun, I find it quite lackluster with most of the weapons feeling very token and unnecessary and the levels and their obstacles being very easily overcome and exploited.

Take for example that one level where there are some skeletons and a bat atop a crumbling bridge you have to cross: it has the potential to be an exciting scenario, but all you need to do is just snipe the enemies with knifes from across the room and then just cross the bridge with no issue. Practically every level was like this, where there was no sense of design or intention, no need to think what weapons you need to use or act cautiously. Even worse was the fact that, upon death, the room doesn't reset to its original state, meaning that you can brainlessly brute force your way through without having to think by just killing enemies recklessly until the room is empty.

It's still a decent looking and feeling game thanks to the aforementioned asset pack you've made and the juice you've put on top of it, but I was disappointed with the brainless level design. Hopefully, I suppose, someone can take the asset pack and make an even better adventure with it, though, and since that is likely the intention, it's a win!

[Prickle]

Wow, this was a solid little puzzler you got here! For the most part, everything feels well-done: charming graphics/sound and presentation, interesting concept of sticking blocks together which is cleverly elevated with the porcupine theming, good level design that subtly teaches and slowly ramps up the complexity, and some nice juice on top with stuff like having the game show you can't rotate by playing a bumpy animation and that cute little dance and music jingle that plays at the end of a level. Sure, it's not necessarily gonna take the world by storm or revolutionize anything, but its a good bit of puzzle-y fun, so hey, what more can I ask for? Well...actually, if I were to ask for anything, it might be a save/load: some of these puzzles are tough and I would've loved to be able to take a break and come back later without having to redo everything to get back!

[Paula Poppet]

Huh, quite the interesting little game you got here! The main gameplay loop of picking up stuff up to throw it at enemies reminds me a lot of satisfying telekinesis-based games like Control or Psi-Ops, but the twist of having to throw your own flooring and thus risk reducing or scrambling your movement space adds a whole new interesting dimension to that gameplay. Also the game is surprisingly juicy for a game jam game: picking stuff up, slamming it down with explosive force and watching all the tiles scatter and replant themselves was very satisfying every time.

While I am quite impressed, I do feel like it is still in a somewhat rough state with a lot of systems feeling rather shallow, unbalanced, or confusing. For example, purchasing new bubbles seemed more like a hinderance than a help and I dunno why you'd even want them since it doesn't even increase your refire rate, there were some cases where I could've sworn I killed enemies but they were still fine for some reason, and it does get quite repetitive without some sort of greater goal or purpose to strive for. But hey, in my opinion, game jams should be primarily focused about exploring and experimenting with all sorts of wacky systems to see what has potential, and I felt like this had did just that and found something interesting, so I consider it a success!