FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Pigment]

Hey, not too shabby!

I'll admit that my first impression of this wasn't that great, as there is a lot of rough spots to this in terms of the movement, some mechanics not being explained that well, lack of effects like a death animation, lack of a save/load feature, and so on. Definitely felt like a 'my first game' project, or something done on a short time frame that wasn't quite finished or given a polishing phase.

But I stuck with it and was surprised to find a rather decent puzzle game! I liked the very creative color/paint-based mechanics you unlock, and while it starts off simple, the later puzzles get rather tricky in how they make you use 'em! All that, and the overall presentation gave off very cute and pleasant vibes.

indyot responds:

I appreciate the review! I saw your video, and I gotta say it feels so fulfilling to finally watch someone play the game. It was in fact my first game, and I did not expect this much attention. Thank you so much for playing my game!

[Queen Boat]

Wow, this one really surprised me! Your previous story games felt a bit cheesy to me at times, and I was worried that this might suffer the same fate, but I ended up getting immersed into the experience more than I thought I would!

In particular, I really liked how some of the interactions were very artistically staged. For example, the part where you click on the various people to learn about the author's relationships with them, only for them to slowly be greyed out one-by-one as they ghost him, was powerful stuff. Likewise, the back-and-forth between the doctor and other people does a great job at reinforcing the cycle he was trapped in. And the way it loops back to the intro sequence once things are looking up was a punch in the gut!

I still think the game has some issues here and there: some of the dialogue is a bit awkward and it can be confusing at times to determine what can be clicked on and whether it will give new or repeated dialogue when you click on it again. But again, I think the overall experience won me over in spite of that. Thanks for putting this together and teaching me about this event!

[12 Vengeful Ghosts]

Hah, when I saw the title, I wasn't seriously expecting a 12 Angry Men reference, but lo and behold! It's quite the cute little SHMUP boss rush, and I enjoyed all the goofy dialogue and various attack patterns, so well done!

That being said, the bosses weren't exactly the most exciting or creative, pretty much encompassing what would be considered a basic starter pack of common bullet-hell patterns. It definitely feels like the story was doing the heavy lifting here as otherwise it would be considered rather simplistic, but then again, that's part of the magic behind game design, and it's not too shabby for being made in such a short time frame!

One little thing that stood out to me was the final boss. There's a part where he summons a blue ghost to help him, and considering the fact that the dialogue stated that there were two people who were blue, the player and the human, I thought it was a hostage situation and I was supposed to be careful and not shoot the blue ghost. Later on I realized that it wasn't the case: bit of a bummer because I actually thought that was a nice challenge and made me play very carefully with my shots to only hit the main boss!

DecadeDecaf responds:

totally agree with this description of "a basic starter pack of common bullet-hell patterns," and the game being more narrative-driven than gameplay-driven. i was definitely going for something more barebones and casual than your typical bullet hell, but hopefully that didn't alienate any diehard fans. thanks for trying out my game!

[The Toybox Collab]

Pretty neat art collab! I like the idea of using a crane game to snatch up all of the art pieces since it adds a little bit of fun interactive charm to otherwise flipping through a static gallery, and in general it feels like this is well-constructed with good presentation, menus, and some nice quality-of-life features like links to the artist profiles.

I'll admit, though, that I was a bit bummed out that the crane game is more like a gacha game, lacking any of the fun quirks and physicality you would typically get in a crane game like being able to see all of the toys packed in there, and the challenge of plucking out the one you want. Obviously I can understand that some concessions needed to be made in regards to how many art pieces are in the collab, mayhaps, but still!

As an addendum to the above, it can be quite monotonous and taxing to get all 200+ toys from the crane game when you need to slowly get them one-by-one. I wonder if some sort of cheat code could be allowed where you can just unlock the entire gallery immediately for your viewing pleasure, or maybe some other creative solution to speed up the process. Especially when it looks like it doesn't save progress when you leave: no way I can get them all in one go!

Creeperforce24 responds:

letsss goooo @Whimsical-wife we got a future cop! We might get famous!

[Chess Force]

Hey, this is a pretty decent SHMUP...but I gotta admit that I'm a bit underwhelmed! Maybe I'm holding it up to too high a standard considering the team who made it, or maybe I'm not being fair considering the jam restrictions, but I was kinda let down.

Don't get me wrong, as I still think it's a nice game. It has an overall high-quality and polished feel to its overall construction, what with its charming visuals and animations for not just gameplay, but for the menus and other elements as well. There are a lot of levels and bosses to chew on, and the chess theme is played around with in amusing ways, such as the options which shoot in manners related to their piece.

But as I played, certain elements just kept getting in the way:

*Overall the game just feels rather dull to me, first and foremost from how slow and ineffectual your bullets are: I can understand wanting to start out weak, but it just feels bad to me and even the upgrades don't fix this weak feeling. But more importantly than that, it's from how levels are filled with tons of dead air from the incredibly low enemy density. Couple this with other facts like that the bosses are spongy and repetitive with not enough patterns to keep them entertaining, there aren't any special mechanics for the players to set it apart, and so on, and I found it hard to want to keep playing despite how cool the game seemed.

*Some enemies and bosses have weird and unclear invincibility phases that awkwardly extend combat engagements in boring ways, like how the flowers in the forest levels can't be hurt when they are opened up for some strange reason.

*It's rather bizarre that there is no life system, but even if you accept that, it's so inconvenient that the death screen takes so long and boots you all the way out instead of giving you the option to restart or spawn at checkpoint immediately.

*There are some weird graphical oddities here and there, such as how the background scrolls faster than the foreground, leading to a parallax effect that's the complete opposite of how it should be. There are foreground elements like statues which look like you'd collide with but don't, and others that you do, leading to confusion.

*I really wish I could preview what the upgrades even do, so I know whether I want to use my points to purchase them. For example, I regret purchasing the knight upgrade once I realized the weird way it shoots missiles.

*Speaking of the upgrade system, there is a weird glitch you can do where you purchase an upgrade but then hit the 'X' button instead of the 'Check' button to close the menu: you'll keep the upgrade but it will refund your credits like as if you cancelled it! Why does the upgrade menu even have a distinction between cancel and confirm, especially if it doesn't work?

To sum it up, the game's OK, but I don't think it's good enough that I'd want to buy a shirt of it, no matter how much it keeps insisting! Good attempt nonetheless.

[Slasher Click 2: The Tale of Magawa]

Hey, happy to see a sequel to Slasher Click! The game may not be a looker, but I enjoy the surprisingly deep combat strategy through clever use of terrain, range, debuffs and so on, as well as the addictive sense of progression where you're slowly building up not only your stats through leveling, but acquiring new pieces of gear and new moves to add to your arsenal.

I'm very happy with most of the changes that have been made in this. For example, having a visual indicator for the enemy attack cooldown, as well as other touches like the enemy circle turning red when you're in range, makes combat so much clearer to understand! Other small touches like enemies reacting when hit, new sounds, amusing dialogue, and so on, add some nice flair. Nice work!

It's solid stuff, but I still ran into some issues:

*There are some weird glitches, like how I lost to the griffin, but when I talked to the quest-giver, he treated it as if I had won and moved me onto the next quest. I would also have instances of enemy 'ghosts' that remain on your screen from zone to zone in the same position, but aren't really there.

*The way enemy respawns are treated is a bit odd. I'd expect them to only come back after resting or going to a totally different zone, but they seem to come back immediately upon any transition. This can lead to some cheese where you can walk back-and-forth on a transition until you get a combination of enemies you prefer, instead of having to deal with what you're given.

*Speaking of cheese above, as fun as the game is, it does feel like it's possible to cheese it by buying a ton of potions or grinding enough to overpower things. For some people this is fine, but I'd like it if the game was like a puzzle where you can't cheese it but need to figure out a strategy. Perhaps I'm wrong though and just haven't played it enough to get to the real hard stuff.

*The enemies shaking on hit can actually result in weird random instances where, if you're standing right outside their range, they shake into attack range briefly enough to suddenly get an attack off. Ideally, the shaking should purely be a cosmetic effect that doesn't actually affect their true position in the world.

*The notification bar overlaps with the menu button and leads to an annoying few seconds on every level up where you need to wait until it goes away for you to click on it.

*I didn't realize I could be moving with WASD this whole time! I kept using the mouse since I thought that was the only option.

*Maybe I'm just old, but I wish the font chosen for the game was a bit less 'fancy' to make it more readable.

Kwing responds:

Thanks!

I'm surprised you had the issue with the Griffin because I've died to a bunch of other bosses and never had this happen. If you poisoned it with Toxin it's possible you actually did kill it that way immediately before dying. Otherwise, I'm not sure what the issue is and no one else has had that happen.

EDIT: This has been fixed as of 2025.05.06a

The "ghost" enemy glitches and accidental respawns are an issue with Ruffle (as mentioned in the description.) Neither of these glitches happen in Flash Player and I've brought these bugs up to the Ruffle team to no avail.

Enemy respawn "cheese" is actually intentional, and this is actually encouraged in one of the cutscenes (if you talk to the NPC next to the ghost before killing the ghost, Magawa says you can leave an area and re-enter if an enemy is too hard - you can also do this to force rare enemy spawns for bestiary completion.)

Potions and grinding are an intentional way to bypass the difficulty in the game because I wanted people to finish the story (the tone becomes increasingly serious and introspective, especially once you reach the volcano.) I do like making games difficult and cheese-proof, but after years of making games that no one finishes, I decided a pity system was necessary for a game that was both long and had a story that I wanted people to experience in its entirety. Even after adding these features, medal metrics show only 36 of 799 users have beaten the game. As a judge you beat 0/5 bosses in the first game and 1/11 here, so from my perspective it's hardly beneficial to implement any change that makes completion of the main story more difficult.

I might consider some kind of achievement for completing the game with without potions or with some kind of stat cap, but as it stands I think I'm okay with this game being a bit more breakable than a game like Gloom: The Pyromancer (which has no qualms about annihilating you if you don't know every enemy inside and out.)

EDIT: As of May 12th, there are now difficulty settings in the main menu that make it increasingly difficult to brute force a completion of the game, in part by throttling the potion cap.

Noted on the enemy shaking; I made the shake effect apply to the actual enemy position instead of just the sprite as a matter of laziness and never bothered to fix it because the hitbox "glitch" seemed like too rare of an issue to bother with.

The notification bar can be dismissed by clicking on it, so you don't need to wait for it to disappear to click a button behind it.

[Inn & Out! 2 (APRIL FOOLS)]

Hah, I'm always conflicted with these kinda submissions! It's like, yes, I know it's just a joke and not to take it too seriously, and it is amusing and somewhat impressive how authentically you've recreated the game considering the limitations of the Tiger handheld system. But at the end of the day, the game just isn't that fun, and therefore I kinda feel like the effort is a bit wasted and better spent elsewhere, sorry! Oh well, hoping for a proper sequel to Inn & Out at some point!

[MMO Healing Simulator]

Hah, as a fan of MMO dungeons and raiding, especially from a tank or healer role, this is right up my alley! I always appreciate a game that gets right to the good stuff and cuts out all the needless grind: reminds me a lot of 'Fellowship' or 'Rabbit and Steel'.

Anyway, this was quite fun and rather challenging, capturing the plate-spinning improvisation that a healer has to go through to keep their party alive in an authentic manner. Loved the various mechanics that the bosses had to keep you on your toes, and the replayability and strategy that comes from deciding your own loadout. Also loved the little gags for never getting the loot you need through a multitude of reasons, haha!

If I were to have some feedback, it'd be:

*I wish the game had a bit more juice to not only make things more exciting, but also make it clear what is happening. For example, it'd be great if portraits would shake or turn red when they get hit and especially so when they get crit. Special effects for attacks would also be nice: you could even visualize the attacks as bullets so you can see who is getting hit more clearly. Having said that, perhaps you could argue the current vagueness and lack of effects is part of the intention, to recreate just staring at health bars and not at the actual fight, I suppose.

*There are some small control quirks that get in the way, like if you are casting a heal on someone and change targets mid-cast to prepare for casting on the other person, it'll cancel your current cast. That's not how it works in any MMO I've played! It also doesn't have a proper buffer system where you can hit a spell button near the end of a current cast and it should do the next one immediately once the current one ends: instead, it cancels it.

*I couldn't tell if the game had an aggro system or anything like that since it doesn't display a target icon. It seems like the second party member is the main tank as they get hit the most, and I couldn't tell whether other people getting hit is because it was random or they stole aggro, like can I steal aggro by overhealing?

*The game can be quite challenging, and sometimes in a rather unfair way. Sometimes I'll be healing someone as optimally as I can but they just die from unlucky crits or other random crap. Made it feel rather frustrating, especially because I couldn't change my loadout for the specific boss to work around its mechanics without starting all over for some reason. Some spells just don't feel balanced properly either, like I swear Greater Heal doesn't have enough of a benefit to make it worth it.

*I made it all the way through and was a bit disappointed that there wasn't a satisfying ending or anything, boo! I didn't even get the final piece of loot because I didn't have enough DKP! It's not my fault that Crashim was feared into the eggs and spawned too many whelps, c'mon!

mksfbirdup responds:

I appreciate all the detailed feedback, I think a lot of it is definitely spot on.

This was one of my first projects in Godot last year, so there is definitely a lot of stuff I would touch-up if I was rebuild it with my current skill set.

[Annalynn MD]

Wow, this is a pretty charming Dr Mario-esque puzzle game you got here! The audio/visual presentation is off the charts and gives the game such wonderful vibes, and the puzzle mechanics are uniquely interesting with its 3D rotation. It's easy to grasp but can be quite challenging, and I loved some of the subtle touches that the game does to help like the tics on the cells that show you how close you're getting to a full row. I loved my time with this!

That said, while I did love my time with it, I don't know if it has as much staying power as I'd think it would. I was having a good time playing, but around the point I got my first megacure and cleared the board, I looked at my level progress and though 'Damn, I'm still only halfway? This is taking too long!'

Basically, it only took a short while until it felt like I had 'solved' the game and was just going through the motions, easily keeping the cells and germs contained to the bottom. The game wasn't throwing any new tricks at me, was too forgiving with its mechanics, and was too consistent in how it doled out cures at a rapid pace. There was none of that excitement of not knowing when a line piece would finally come and having to improvise, for example.

You could argue that I was playing on Beginner, but I tried the harder difficulties and they only seemed to up the speed, which isn't enough to keep my interest. Still, let it be known that I think the game is overall very cool, but I feel like it needs a bit more meat on its bones.

EDIT: Ok, yeah, definitely some of my feedback was a bit premature since I was playing on Beginner, haha!

[One Pencil]

Pretty neat Undertale boss game! Feels pretty well constructed and polished on all fronts with a decent set of moves to dodge, different actions to take, lots of interesting reactions and routes, and topped off with a lot of personality through dialogue quips and other quirks. I was easily enraptured and enjoyed my time with it!

That said, I do feel a bit conflicted about it:

*The game does suffer from some less-than-ideal design decisions. For example, compared to the fun challenge of having to closely and quickly draw varied shapes for attacking, having to just mindlessly scribble for the vandalize option got boring and repetitive quickly. Of course, maybe this is done on purpose to make attacking more enticing? Even if that's the case, I dunno if I'd agree with it.

*I'm really not sure if I understand the story or the themes. Here's a little recap of my journey through the game:

Even though the duck seemed like a con artist who was trying to take my soul (pencil), I initially tried to resolve it peacefully by using actions instead of attacks. So, my order of elimination, I used the vandalize option until I was able to bid and get the contract for free.

However, that all seemed like a waste of time because I don't want the contract even for free because the duck is a con artist, and sure enough, the contract says that it takes your soul. So, I refused to sign it and switched to my only other option: attacking him. This continued until it got all dark and I dealt the final blow to him.

I just don't get it: why does it treat this as such a dark thing to do? The duck is clearly a charlatan trying to steal my soul, and to my knowledge, I didn't have any other options like being able to show mercy. Maybe there was an option I missed, but I can't go back and check because it saves your bad ending just like the genocide run does. Oh well!

Like, I get it, you're doing the genocide run thing where it's goes from goofy to dark and all that. But it just feels really misdirected, superficial, undercooked and dumb. Yeah, maybe the duck, as bad as he is, doesn't deserve death, but I really don't care because the game doesn't build it up appropriately. Fuck him!

kr0tyara responds:

it's mostly just a story about a doomed artist in the era of oversaturated media and their failed attempts to achieve at least some recognition. the duck is neither a good guy nor a bad guy, he is in the same pit as the protag. you could tell he's not doing very well either. both endings were designed to leave you unsatisfied: it may be disappointing, but that's what the protag gets for falling for fishy ads :D