FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[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!

[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.

Quest responds:

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