FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[The Device: No$ Ghost Finder]

Hah, this was quite the experience! Not necessarily all in a good way, but a memorable experience nonetheless.

First impressions were a bit rough. For one, call me paranoid, but I'm always a bit reluctant to give out location information and other such data, and two, I had no idea the game was meant to be played on the phone only: my attempts to play it on computer just had it error out for location permissions, not giving me any sort of direction to change devices. It may seem obvious, but I was quite confused for a good few minutes.

Anyway, eventually I sorted everything out and got my own little ghost detector on my phone! It didn't seem to be doing any that special except barking out random garbly words now and then, but I was of the impression that there must be some sort of cool AR puzzle game at play here: maybe if I get the readings up to 100 or so, it'll give me a clear ghostly message that I need to use the symbols on the phone to decipher which will point me to some sort of location/website which I then solve using yadda yadda yadda. So, I set forth into the neighborhood!

Eventually though some hot and cold deduction, I was able to get my ghost detector all the way up to 99.9, which seemed like the highest it could get! Unfortunately, all that I encountered was a fire hydrant: no ghosts, no special message, no puzzle, no nuffin'. None of the random words that were popping up during my walk seemed to have any sort of significant pattern or spooky message either. I suppose this is accurately recreating toys of old, but it didn't make it any less disappointing.

So yeah, a bit let-down, but nevertheless I admire your creativity with this and hope you continue to experiment: last year's phone adventure game was great, for example!

alsoknownas1 responds:

As always, thanks for the review. Getting your feedback is honestly one of our biggest motivations to qualify for monthly voting. You always engage with a project on its on terms, from striving epic to ersatz happy meal toy. Apologies that it took a bit of unraveling to figure out which of those we were going for this time. We always try to take all of your feedback onboard, but communicating that better will definitely be the key takeaway for our next more esoteric project, and there will be more. We're definitely going to continue to experiment, rest assured.

We're forever grateful for you championing GoTW. We have a bunch of super special projects coming up, but we're definitely still working on larger scale projects in this coming year.

It might sound funny, but apologies for your taking a--perhaps--needless walk. :) Hopefully, it was pleasant despite the absence of ghosts.

[Scary Scuffle 3D]

Hmm, seems like it has the potential to be a fun, goofy brawler, but in its current state, it's more like an early alpha or prototype, lacking a unique angle or significant pizazz.

As said, there's a decent foundation here: I like the different arenas and running around chucking objects at each other and all that jazz. But the game always seems to devolve into a messy brainless mashfest, as the movesets don't seem to have any sort of real strategic depth to them. Why bother blocking, for example, if you aren't able to gain any sort of advantage against an attacking player for making a smart decision? You may as well just attack him as well and slap it out. Would definitely love it if characters had their own special moves, and if the arenas had special events that would happen to help increase the chaos and push players together more, such as meteors raining from the sky in the UFO level and so on.

I realize that my feedback probably isn't ideal because I came from this at a single-player angle, but I still think most of it is applicable. Still, something to consider, as human opponents could change some things around (but not that significantly, in my opinion).

DaemonPlus responds:

Thank you for the well thought out feedback! Very close to my postmortem of the project too. I wish we gave ourselves more time... But learnt SO much under pressure. :)

[HALLOWEEN HUSTLE!]

Hmm, the nostalgic vibes in this are quite strong: I seriously felt like I was taken back in time, so kudos on representing the era so accurately! Unfortunately, as stylish as it is, I just didn't find the gameplay that fun, with most of the games just being incredibly simplistic and unchallenging. Even worse was all the technical problems: the ant panic minigame suffered from confusing hit detection, and the final car minigame broke for me, putting me in an endless loop down an empty street. I think it has potential for a fun little adventure, but yeah, I found it way too janky and unpolished in its current state.

Also c'mon, how you gonna let us play dress-up with Appy, but then have 'em go back to being undressed for all the other cutscenes?

[ENABLE]

An all-around solid puzzle game experience! Great presentation, interesting core concept of sliding blocks which evolves in challenging ways, chill vibes, and all-together just feels smooth and polished!

If I were to have one gripe, it would be the inclusion of the time limit around the half-way point. Two aspects of this stick in my craw:

1) If you don't think about it strongly, the time limit can seem like a fun evolution of challenge since it forces you to think fast. But actually, it's a completely fake evolution that adds nothing to the challenge, because there are no actual stakes. So what if time runs out? You don't have any lives, and the puzzle will remain the same, so technically you can just take your time to figure out the steps for the ideal solution over multiple 'deaths', and then just input it at the start of a run.

2) The inclusion of the time limit adds unnecessary stress to what has so far been a chill experience. Even if you realize the time limit is just fake pressure that means nothing, you still have shattered the chill vibes with a constantly tick-tick-ticking clock going on, adding a bunch of annoyance for no gain.

So yes, while my critique of the time limit might seem like a nitpick in some sense, and the game is still plenty fun, I think it is something that should be pointed out. It just doesn't feel well thought-out, like you were scrambling to figure out some sort of way to increase the challenge and, lacking any real creative ideas, just stuffed in an ol' reliable standby.

[Blood Gauntlet]

Pretty cool speedrun version of Castlevania! It's a rather short and simple game, but it felt very fluid and I enjoyed my time with it immensely: having to make both quick reactive decisions to dodge attacks and also more large-scale decisions as to whether it's worth it to backtrack for resources or just tank damage because avoiding it would take too much time were very interesting! The boss fight was a nice finale, and upon seeing that the game had a ranking system, I immediately went back for a replay, netting myself a nice B rank!

If I were to have one gripe, it'd be that I got a F rank on my first go, with most of my points coming from a 'death penalty'. This would make sense if I died on the second part or the boss and it revived me there, I suppose, but I only died in the very first part, which takes you all the way back to the start as if it were a new game...so why a penalty? What, because I didn't fully reset the game myself? It doesn't make any sense!

decafpanda responds:

You are correct. Giving a death penalty on the first level is an oversight on my part. The game attributes reset on the title screen. It should have been on level 1.

Pressing "R" will quickly reload the game if you die on your run and want to max your score. Any kind of death during your run will cripple your score. And yes there are checkpoints at level 2 and the boss. So that's where the death penalty makes sense.

Go for S rank! There are some tips in the Author Comments.

[Consealed]

Pretty neat game! The presentation is incredibly charmingly retro, and the concept of a fast-paced deductive whack-a-mole arcade game is cool!

However, while I like the gameplay in theory, I had a bit of a rough time with it! The game informs you of all the various tells there are, but I couldn't see any differences in their sweat or snot, which only left shaking as the somewhat reliable tell (piss being too random an occurence to be reliable). I was able to make it decently far by looking for the shakiest suspects, but I just felt bummed out because I feel like I'm missing a huge chunk of the intended experience. I understand you don't want to make it too easy or anything, but yeah, I'm a bit lost here: just how subtle did you make it!?

ProsciuttoMan responds:

I'm not saying this sarcastically, but are you colourblind? That might have something to do with it.
The sweat is slightly more purple and snot slightly more green for aliens (I think the snot is the more noticeable of the two, but I could be wrong).
Otherwise, solid review as usual.

[Brick Boiz]

Pretty neat arcade game! For the most part, I had a pretty good experience with this: the graphics are neat, and the gameplay is quite addictive and strategic in how there are so many obstacles and hazards to contend with as you build higher and higher.

It definitely had some rough edges that got in the way of the fun, however, such as the incredibly awkward targeting you need to do with the hammer, which might be one of the most un-fun and ass-backwards design decisions I've encountered. Also I was a bit disappointed with how short it was: was really hoping that it would have more features, like maybe an endless mode, as well as at least having a high score leaderboard that tracks the fastest times for getting up to the 100m goal.

All in all, I think it was a pretty good game jam result: while it is rough and a little unsatisfying, I think the core design is fun and worthy of expansion!

[HelioBacter]

Hmm, it seems like it could be a nice tower defense game: the graphics and theming are nice, and the whole aspect of having to set down a trigger for the traps was unique, I suppose. The foundation is there, potentially, but ultimately the game feels incredibly unfinished and rough, most likely due to game jam time limitations: missing attack feedback for the towers, the confusing and unintuitive nature of setting down eyeball triggers for traps instead of them just being automated like towers, the fact that it doesn't lock the cursor which results in scrolling for eyeball positions scrolls the browser window, and so on: there's just too many rough edges to this, and while you have my sympathy, I need to be honest in that I didn't have a good time here, unfortunately.

HelperWesley responds:

Totally fair. Not our best jam game to be honest, we regret some of the choices we made in the rush of the time limit. 😅

We made some fixes based on feedback from people since the jam ended, like the full screen button in the title screen, and auto-pick up for points at the end of waves, but the basic concept of the game is a little too far gone to bother updating more.

[Hallow Helpers]

Pretty interesting puzzle game! Reminds me a lot of something like Lemmings with all the weird powers you get, or maybe more so like Mosa Lina with how wild and creative both the puzzles could get and how my solutions could be: sometimes I wasn't sure whether I was solving it as intended or gaming the system in a weird way, like an immersive sim, but I nevertheless enjoyed that it embraced such aspects. Very memorable stuff!

I liked it, but I'll admit it can be tough to love at times, having a rather janky and low-quality feel to it, especially with the platforming, where the jumping physics would wonk out and be inconsistent. And as usual, the humor can be a bit hit-or-miss, though I still find it impressive how many unique lines there are. I think the bomb critter is my favorite.

[...Vincent: Mansion of The Dead]

Hmm, it's a rather decent attempt at a survivors-like game that gets most of the basics down-pat, but nevertheless is let down by technical issues and rather ho-hum bog-standard gameplay.

In terms of technical issues, there were a few weird ones here and there, like how the text is difficult to read, and when you select a power-up on level up, whatever you selected will remain in this selected state once you get another level-up, forcing you to awkwardly click away so you can unselect it and properly preview all the selections. But the most critical one is that the game doesn't properly pause when you enter the level-up screen: your orbital masks will continue to rotate and collide with enemies, and exp gems on the field will decay in real-time, unfairly fading away while you're just trying to view all your options.

Moving away from technicalities, the gameplay just felt rather plain: all you do is cut down a mob of enemies, with no special events, waves, mini-bosses, treasure chests, or anything to shake things up and add a bit of spice. No, all that happens is the enemies get spongier and spongier, becoming an absolute slog, forcing you to unfairly engage in metaprogression to even have a chance of winning, instead of allowing player skill be the determining factor.

I don't want to be too down on it since there is a decent foundation to work from here: the basics of cutting down enemies and building up your power to become a god is present, and the presentation is rather charming. I just think there's still a lot of work to be done to turn this into something special and fun, feeling like an early alpha in its current state.

NOTE: As instructed, I played the downloadable itch.io version for this review.