FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Artico]

Hmm, feels like a first-time student project or something: a nice start to someone's career as a game developer, sure, but is it actually fun? Not exactly.

It might be rather simple and bland, but it does show some good signs of design here and there. It can get pretty crazy fast as you build up speed, and the game promotes you going faster and having a wilder time with a score multiplier system that you get by keeping your combo up. There's an attempt at some nice effects, such as the snow particles coming off of the skies and the camera work for emphasizing speed. It's got its heart in the right place, I suppose.

Unfortunately, once you've played the game for a few seconds, you've pretty much seen everything it has to offer as it just loops the same stuff over and over. The game doesn't communicate information clearly either: you can lose your score multiplier if you don't keep going through slaloms at a good pace, but without some sort of progress bar or flickering flame or whatever, there's no way to tell how much time you have left.

The game is also drier than a Popeye's biscuit: death is so sudden and would be so much better with some sort of ragdoll, the player animation doesn't loop properly, the world is so drab and doesn't introduce anything new as it goes on like ramps or different obstacles, and so on. It's even difficult for me to offer feedback on this as there just isn't much to talk about, but you just know it could be way better.

And jeez, the username entry only supports three characters? Even Final Fantasy 1 on the NES had four letter names!

Hope to see something better from you in the future: this might not have been that great, but we all gotta start somewhere.

[Quantron's Game]

Hmmm, I just felt kinda confused by this one. Maybe it's my fault for playing it as a single player, but the option was there, so keep that in mind.

While it seems like a decent 2D platformer in some respects, I just felt like the game was very repetitive and generic, lacking an intriguing core concept or satisfying feel to it all. It felt like once you've played it for a few minutes you've seen everything as it just keeps recycling the same enemies over and over and not introducing any new obstacles or mechanics. Aspects that could've been interesting, like the AI partner which you can somewhat guide, or the different world's gravity, or the upgrade system, lack focus and just feel token, not adding anything but just stuck on as if just by having them it'd make this plain game somehow seem better than it is. Eventually it gets some stuff like boss fights but for me that was too little too late as I had already quit from boredom.

The most interesting aspect of the game I encountered was when I died and I was left with only my AI partner, who I could still somewhat guide despite being dead by signaling him to move forward, but he would automate his jumps and attacks. This was a rather unique control scheme that could be interesting and reminded me of games like Gyromite, but it really felt like it wasn't intentional and the way to play. The AI was largely unreliable anyway, regularly getting stuck on things or falling into pits.

The controls felt terrible, in particular with the way jumps kept you moving forward with momentum despite no longer holding the forward button, which would usually kill your momentum in other platformers, made it very awkward and feeling like you're constantly sliding on ice. Combine this with the way enemies can just rush in quickly from the right and smash into you and you've got a real frustrating loop of damage that feels unavoidable.

To add to the pile further, I really disliked the unnecessary scanline filter, which only served to hurt my eyes.

I dunno, maybe there's something interesting in here that could be salvaged, but right now it just feels like an unfocused mish-mash with bad AI, bad jumping controls, and at its core just a rather bland and uninspired side-scroller. Again, maybe if you focused on that unique aspect of helping to guide an AI through the battle, it might be a unique experience at least? Might've been a case where you needed to 'follow the fun', but maybe that's just me.

ImmanentDeath responds:

Honestly, this whole game was just my attempt at salvaging an idea. I wanted to make a generic video game and put my own spin on it. But it was rushed and overscoped. There's a lot more I wanted to add or change, but I just couldn't.

It is supposed to be a game where you just goof around with another player or the AI for as long as you want, and either laugh or get frustrated when one of you does something silly, by accident or on purpose. You are supposed to get hurt and fall off cliffs because losing is fun. I wanted it to feel like you and your partner are in this together against this broken universe.

[Rewound]

Not too shabby! It's not mindblowing or anything, but this felt like a good, short and sweet puzzler with an interesting core combination of a trail and rewind mechanic.

It's definitely got some rough edges: it takes quite a while for the tutorial to finish and the game to start proper, there are some lazy graphical issues like the POP FX being reversed if you die while facing the opposite direction and the actual exit of a level just being a boring fade to black despite all the fanfare/animation there was in constructing said exit, but the game was fun and addictive nevertheless. There was a good sense of progression of complexity with the mechanics as the levels went on, there were some nice touches like the pitch-shifted sound effects for jumping, and when it was over, I couldn't help but want more! Well done, especially for a jam game.

[PINFALL, Classic Edition]

Whew, what a tough game! Definitely gives me Jump King vibes in a good way.

While it can certainly be challenging to the point of frustrating at times with the level of precision it requires from a player, I found the journey of this very addictive and fun due to the great level design that has solid progression of interesting obstacles being introduced in all sorts of combinations, a good amount of natural checkpoints, and a very smooth and polished controls/feel to it that makes movements reproducible with practice therefore feel very fair. Along with this, the graphics/sound are very pleasing with nice touches like splashes and falling leaves here and there. Was also glad to see it have a save system: usually Pico-8 games don't seem to have those for some reason (limited space I'm assuming).

Don't get me wrong, the game can be incredibly stressful and frustrating with the constant requirement to edge jump and other highly precise manuevers, the game speeds a bit too quickly to kaizo mario levels around the water/blue blocks area, and the stun mechanic can be a bit overbearing at times. But overall I found the journey very enthralling (though, we'll see if I ever beat it, haha). Cool stuff!

[BLIMBO]

Quite the goofy and fun little adventure that gives me very strong Earthbound vibes! Overall the experience is quite enjoyable and fun, especially due to all the wacky characters and interactions you can have with them: the world, while a bit juvenile, was charming, and I loved talking to everyone I met, including even searching out all those dead-end gags! Even the graphics, while looking very low-effort and lacking animations and the like, do have an appealing look to them, and there is some good effort in the music and other aspects as well.

Finding new people to talk to and seeing where the silly story went to was a strong motivation for me, but unfortunately, I felt like the combat really got in the way here. It's a one-two punch of random encounters and braindead combat where all you do is spam bash/shoot and occasionally heal, both incredibly archaic practices that I feel should be left behind in lieu of encounters being visible monsters on the map that you bump into and combat being more strategic and with a more defined mechanic, like the elemental weaknesses to exploit for stuns or extra turns, or Undertale's talk puzzles and bullet hell dodging. No, the combat isn't the worst as the game and environments are rather short, and you can find have some modicum of fun grinding it out, but I just felt like it wasn't the games strong suit and would probably be better without altogether, focusing instead on the funny world you've built and adding in quests and puzzles instead. I also wish I never bought that AK-47: it just slows down combat by making you have to always scroll down to Shoot instead of mashing Bash! Why!?

Again, as much as the combat got on my nerves a bit, the game still does a decent job at keeping the pace up, not requiring that much grinding as it seemed like it would, and it was fun to build up my character with new equipment despite it all just being numbers and no new abilities. It also helped that eventually I realized you could sprint by holding shift or clicking to move. Pretty fun stuff!

Shai-P responds:

Glad you liked it regardless of the lil irritation you got from the combat!

I'll keep all this in mind whenever I decide to do another entry.

[The Distant Door]

Nice point n click adventure here! It's not the longest adventure game and did feel less dramatic than I thought, but what we got was a rather short and very sweet adventure (well, sweet based off of the ending I got!) that felt very executed and very polished.

What really impressed me with the game was the sheer amount of interactable elements and amusing flavor text that comes from them: always love a game that packs a lot of easter eggs and jokes in every cranny there is, just like the old Sierra games this seems to evoke. Voice acting and general presentation were very nice too, and the story wasn't too shabby either: while I was expecting this to go in a more horror route, akin to something like Silent Hill 4 The Room, and I was a bit disappointed at the realization of the low stakes afterwards, it was a rather heartwarming tale in the end. All-in-all a nice adventure!

If I did have any complaints, they would be rather minor ones, like how sometimes the logic for interactions would be a bit odd. For example, the first time you talk to the super about the package, you can just talk to them directly and bring it up as a dialogue choice: however, all subsequent interactions require you to give them the package notice instead of talking to them. In a similar fashion, you'd think you may need to combine the tack with the written note to create a tacked note and then put that on the noteboard, only to see that can't and instead you must interact with the noteboard with them as separate items. Little things like that came up, but again, were not that much of an issue: just slight hiccups.

Wonder if this is based off of a real story?

[Dungeon Scroller]

Not too shabby! It's not the most complicated game in the world and can be beaten rather quickly, but overall it felt like a nice short and sweet autoscroller adventure that does a pretty decent job at keeping things interesting by slowly escalating the challenge and introducing new mechanics/obstacles, and has a cute lil twist at the end.

While the game is mostly smooth, there were a few oddities that stuck out to me. For example, I found it very odd that enemies don't respawn when you die, especially when pig enemies do get their health back if you don't finish them off before dying. Speaking of pigs, aka the enemies that take two hits to die, I found them to be a rather disappointing addition to the mechanics as they just felt awkward and annoying to deal with by slashing/backdashing, especially since the dash slides you forward which usually ends up killing you. I was also confused by the wind graphics in the final levels: I thought it was gonna shake things up by pushing you around and having to adjust your movements based on where the wind was blowing, but it looks like it was just window dressing and not actually doing anything?

It was a bit rough and could've used a bit more meat on its bones, but it felt decent overall, like a great game jam entry or a first public project by a new developer. Nice work!

[Viva Hexagon! Feat. Ipulo]

Wow, quite the cool puzzle game you got here! For the most part it feels very well-put together and professionally made, bursting at the seams with a lot of content: impressive stuff!

In particular, I love how fun it is to move the player character around: gives me Pizza Tower vibes with how how animated and expressive they are which not only helps with making actions clear to distinguish, but makes certain actions, like slamming blocks down, very satisfying to pull off again and again. Speaking of satisfaction, the game, while not overly explosive in its pizazz, does still feature a lot of those subtle touches, such as playing a sequentially higher-pitched sound for chain bonuses. While it is a bit overwhelming to grasp their entire moveset at first, I enjoyed the challenge of getting it down and becoming not only more effective at scoring, but stylish in doing so. Again, it just overall feels well put-together and fun to play!

As mentioned, if there is one downside to this game, is that it can be a bit rough to grasp at first. To be fair, most of the design is rather intuitive and will be familiar to players of games like Puyo-Puyo and the like, but there are certain aspects that kept catching me off-guard despite seeing them multiple times, such as how similar color blocks will stick while others fall, how you need a full shape and not lines or columns of colors to score, how you can't grab blocks when standing by them despite the character doing the grab animation, and I'd just plain forget I had a lot of moves like dashing and attacking.

Similar to that is the tutorial, which can be rather overwhelming due to how verbose and jam-packed it can be. Kudos to making the tutorial very interactive and visual, and I appreciate trying to explain all the various oddities the game has, but it was just so much and that very same interactivity could screw me over at times where suddenly the text would move onto something else when I wasn't done reading it. If I were to have a suggestion, it would be to have the tutorial not be a single huge overwhelming sequence, but several split-up chapters, some for very basic gameplay and others for advanced techniques and special cases: a player could just do the basic chapters and get into play faster, coming back to the advanced chapters if they spot something confusing when playing, and it'd be much easier to just look up something specific without having to do everything from the start. In addition to that, I think there were a lot of cases where text could be more concise or replaced with a picture, or split up into separate pages to make it look less dense, and some things are just so obvious you don't need to waste time explaining.

Still, the initial process of learning the game, while it could be improved, wasn't that bad and it wasn't too long before I got into the game and had a bunch of fun!

zeddy1267 responds:

Thanks for your kind words! The movement is definitely the part I care most about, since I do really enjoy platformer's that play well.

Yes, the tutorial/general introduction to the game is definitely the roughest part. The game, being a unique/gimmicky puzzle game, can take a moment to wrap your head around at first. This is partly why I made the tutorial as verbose as it is. Think of it more like the included instruction book rather than a quick tutorial. It's the full, unskippable documentation.

I certainly WANT to improve the tutorial in some way. If I had to do this again, I'd something along the lines of making a short interactive tutorial to just quickly introduce you to the game, and then have the rest of the text stored in a separate in game handbook. Quickstart & full documentation.

I ultimately decided to leave the tutorial as-is. Since this is more of a demo for a true Viva Hexagon! game, I didn't spend too much time on the tutorial. For example, something I really want to do is a single player arcade mode/campaign, like what Puyo-Puyo has. This is something I want to tie tutorial into in some way or another (even just stuff like quick tips between stages). Not being able to do this in the current state of Viva Hexagon! (No arcade mode) definitely made me spend less time on the tutorial than I probably should have.

The tutorial is also just the most difficult code to work with, since it's very fragile. I realized the flaws with the tutorial, but just couldn't be bothered to fix them in this release of the game.

TL;DR yeah, I'm aware of how overwhelming the tutorial is. Thanks for the feedback!

[Madness SEVERED]

Wow, quite the impressive game! It's like some sort of Madness-esque combination of both Getting Over It and Endoparasitic and The Revenant, and as much as I had some frustrating, hand-crampy times with this, the overall experience was wonderful!

The journey that the game takes you on is wonderful and beautifully paced: the story setup is really cool and motivating, and the way you go from struggling to even crawl around, to climbing up cliffs, to then acquiring guns and using them both to stylishly blast goons and propel yourself around in slow-mo kept me addicted and enthralled. The cherry on the sundae was the great boss fight against the Clown: phase 2 in particular was very creative with how you set it up and absolutely magicial to beat (though I did let loose a few expletives from how hard it was). Really great stuff here.

That said, while I had a good time overall and look back at it fondly, there was a lot of frustrating moments with this. Unlike Getting Over It and other games like it, this felt very difficult to master the controls and feel fully in control. I think a big aspect of this was the way the game lets your hand and guns phase through walls and objects instead of colliding with them: there were times where I'd try to shoot someone but the gun would technically be in a nearby wall and block the shot, or when I'd be trying to do rapid-fire climbing and the hand would go deeper into the wall for a grab and throw me off, and so on.

Other minor complaints: why no gory death animation when you get killed? Why can't I pick up the SMG?

Again, overall this was a really great experience. Once my hand recovers from the cramps this put me through, I definitely want to give it another go and see if I can speedrun it...or at least I would, but the game seems to have me always start at the final boss despite me already beating it! Is there no way to restart for a new game?

[Madness: The Battering]

Hmm, seems decently built in many aspects for a good little tactical card game, but...well, I still haven't been able to get through a full match despite trying so hard!

As said, there is a lot to like here. First impressions were solid as I found the main menu very intriguing and stylish with its unorthodox navigation design, the tutorial, while a bit wordy, was decent enough at explaining things (though the game does a good job itself with intuitive design through universally-recognized symbols and the like) and the card battling did seem quite fun with a good amount of interesting cards to play. Was also impressed at the nice touches like including mini-games for loading/connecting. All in all, while a lot of the presentation is a bit rough, especially with the fonts, I think battling and building up my crew could be quite fun!

However, there were a lot of rough stuff that got in the way of fun:

*As said, while I was able to connect to people, I could never complete a full match: it always ended up, around half-way through or so, that suddenly the game would end and declare me the winner. Usually the round was still ongoing with no clear victor yet, so I don't think it was a rage quit or anything like that: maybe the other players were tabbing away like it warns against at the beginning, or maybe there are connection problems, I dunno: whatever it was, it all felt rather pointless.

*Mini-games, while not the focus of the game, were quite rough: for example, the fruit ninja game makes it possible to just click on heads to slice them instead of doing a full swish of the mouse like you should be forced to do so, and the hot dog runner game would sometimes creative unavoidable obstacles, like a railing and spike mat right next to each other that creates a length you can't conceivably jump over.

*Combat kind of felt like a slog: this was both due to me facing a lot of newbies who might've not known how to play (should make it more obvious how many action points they have remaining, when their turn is over, who they are controlling, etc), people taking forever to do their turn (maybe enforce a turn timer limit to keep the pace up), and an abundance of a lot of healing cards and low attack weapons (maybe healing should be rarer or removed). Meta-progression felt like a slog too with money barely trickling in and it costing so much to get just one pull of the gacha.

*There were times when I would drag a card over an enemy, only for the enemy next to them to get hit: wish there was some sort of targetting indicator, like highlighting the enemy that's going to get hit when you're holding a card over them but haven't placed it yet.

*There were some confusing aspects that caught me off-guard. I thought that using the shield cards would defend my guys, but it actually looked to not add to their shield, but replace it, and with a lower value? Also didn't realize I could skip a turn to collect more action points: my initial thought was it would max at 3 and not overflow, and I needed more powerful crew members to play the more powerful cards. Also despite the game updating to give grunts 3 energy per turn, the tutorial text hasn't been updated.

Basically, I really wish this game had some sort of single-player mode, both so I could practice before facing people online and so I could actually complete a match without some sort of connection issue, as I do think there's a fun card game in here that I just wasn't able to play. Would love if this game was actually recreated into some sort of single-player Slay the Spire story campaign where you build up your deck and crew as you go forth.