FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[No Time 2 Slime!]

Hoo boy, this one was a really rough one for me, as it really felt like the most 'style-over-substance' game I've ever experienced in my reviewing career.

Expectations were so high based on initial impressions, and can you blame me? The game looks and sounds absolutely gorgeous, looking like it would feel right at home on the SNES next to my copy of Spike McFang. And hey, it's not even just the presentation, but the gameplay itself felt smooth too, and I liked the interesting Pac-man concept of gathering up power as a weakling until you turn the tables and become the aggressor: not only is the game reversing roles by having you play as a lowly slime, but you also reverse roles with your transformation gameplay, that's worth double points for meeting the game jam theme!

But after only a few minutes of playtime, my expectations plummeted and I've never felt so let down. It's really just the one room, summoning the same one type of goblin that you can easily dodge and beat, over and over? No evolution to the enemy types? No new rooms to move onto? I felt like that Zuko scroll gif, saying "that can't be it...where's the rest of it?" I kept playing more and more hoping that I'd somehow unlock new content or someone would show up to tell me the code to continue...but nobody came.

Now I do understand it was a game jam game, so don't get me wrong in that I didn't expect a very long game, but goodness, I think it's reasonable to expect a game that lasts more than a single minute! When it comes to game jams, I think the focus should be put on implementing a fun and unique concept, and to this end I would much rather prefer a big fun game with programmer art of colorless squares than this beautiful ga...well, can you even call it a game? Yes, it does show some promise, at least in the asset creation department, but I have absolutely no idea what type of concept or gameplay this is trying to prototype and how it would evolve into a full game from how little is to be played here.

Look, obviously you got a really talented team, and it's rough to make a game in game jam time limits and all that jazz, but I gotta review based on what I got, and what I got was a huge disappointment that didn't live up to initial impressions nor your historic pedigree. Take it as a compliment that you got me so built up initially. Best of luck in future!

[twenty, in total]

Cute little adventure! Made me think of those time-loop-gather-info-till-final-speedrun games like Majora's Mask, Deathloop, or most precisely Minit, but in a much shorter form: perhaps it should be called Secint? After all, I'm not even sure what the title was referring to.

Overall the game was nice: decent bit of variety in the puzzles for each key, cute graphics, polished presentation/gamefeel, nice dev room reward, and so on. Only negative aspects I could think of was that the box-pushing puzzle could be unfairly hard because of the awkward physics, and that, as mentioned before, the game was incredibly short and couldn't help but feel unsatisfied and wish there were even more worlds and puzzles to do! If only the twenty in total was the amount of keys to collect!

BNTFryingPan responds:

The twenty refers to the starting time (17 seconds) plus the number of keys (3)

[Switch.tv]

Not too shabby! Feels like a combination of plufmot's "basically" series combined with a streaming theme all wrapped in some classic Warioware-style gameplay. For a game jam game that was constructed quickly, it's understandably a bit rough in some areas, but it's not a bad concept and can provide some good chuckles on the first go.

However, while it does feel fun and fresh on the first go, subsequent plays of the same minigames become very tedious which is unfortunately very bad for a Warioware-style game since that's supposed to be part of the appeal. For example, you've got the pokemon minigame which has a rather lengthy intro to get to the actual gameplay part, and many of the minigames have very lengthy outros. While the game does provide ways to skip them and tries to shove that option in the face of the user as much as possible so they know about it, I feel like the better way would be to make the game snappy enough to not require a skip option in the first place. Even putting that aside, most of the games don't seem to have a good amount of variation to them to keep you on your toes.

As a side note, I know we're most likely supposed to feel great at screwing them over, but sometimes I honestly feel bad for them! Maybe it just hits a bit too close to home, or take it as a compliment that the acting was effectively and intentionally cringey.

Anyway, in its current state I feel like its a bit too rough, but I think it's a decent prototype that showcases a decent theme/concept for a Warioware-style game in there and could be great with some more polish and content, so in that regard, well done.

[Doodlepup's Missing Wagon]

Not bad! Certainly a cute little point-n-click adventure that had an impressive amount of depth to it with its multiple endings and all sorts of choices, as well as a focus on trying to be nice in this dangerous world. In particular I though the minigame where you have to try very hard to keep yourself cool and say nice things was interesting: I find that way more authentic than typical dialogue in games where its way too easy to take your time and always pick the right answer, and I'd like to see more games take after that!

While it was nice, I did feel like the game, for the most part, was a little bit repetitive with its constant fetch-quests. I know it even mentions this as if to make fun of it, but I would've preferred if you didn't do it in the first place: you're not fooling me! Anyway, I was hoping that there would be a few more puzzle elements to it all that might require some brain power or item combinations or what-have-you. For example, maybe instead of just literally getting ketchup chips and bringing them back which is boring, you could've mayhaps found a bottle of ketchup or even red paint somewhere and a bag of french fries somewhere else, and try to combine them to create ketchup chips: obviously that's not how it works, but perhaps you could've gotten a joke out of this shoddy imitation, like perhaps the guy doesn't even taste the difference when you give them to him?

There was also a bug I encountered where I couldn't interact with Beatrice and her bag of chocolate bars when she first appeared: only once I left the shop and entered back in was she now interactable. Odd!

Finally, and this is a bit of an odd complaint, but I did feel like the game was a bit awkward to play, as it felt like I was reading someone's fanfic that's filled with inside jokes and lore and friend shout-outs that I'm not knowledgeable about. Felt like it wasn't really made for public consumption, but just shared amongst some select friends, in a way. But hey, at the end of the day I was still able to have fun with the game and got the general gist of it all, and heck, what am I talking about, as where else would a Newgrounds fangame be submitted besides Newgrounds?

Loopykins responds:

I was really looking forward to receiving your feedback on the game, and I'm genuinely grateful that you took the time to play and share your thoughts!! Your input means a lot to me, and I'm thrilled that you enjoyed the game and had fun with it, despite some awkward moments. I completely understand your point about the fetch quests being a bit repetitive, and I intentionally acknowledged that while writing the game. I'm still learning and growing with ActionScript, so there's definitely room for improvement, and your feedback helps me identify areas to work on. I'll for sure work on improving those aspects with future projects. I also want to apologize for the bug.

Most of the content I create on Newgrounds is primarily for myself and my close friends, but it's awesome when people beyond that circle also appreciate and enjoy it. That's why I choose to share it around. The story to the game is a giant shitpost. Not supposed to be taken seriously in the slightest, but I had fun with making it.

Although I generally don't respond to reviews - beyond a reaction to show I read it - unless they're from friends or people I'm familiar with, I genuinely value the feedback, including the constructive criticism you've provided. Thank you so much for that!

This game represents a significant step in my journey as a game developer. As time goes on, I plan to dive deeper into coding and explore more ideas with mechanics, storytelling and the likes, which will hopefully lead to even better games in the near future. Your encouragement and input inspire me to continue. Thank you again for your kind words and thoughtful review; it truly motivates me to keep pushing forward!

[Re-Heart]

Hmm, this was a bit of a rough one for me!

On one hand, I thought the mechanics in this game, in particular the 'pillar summon' were pretty unique and interesting, and overall it provided some decent endless runner gameplay that keeps things exciting by constantly escalating the stakes with new obstacles. Despite the frustration I was dealing with, the fast-paced nature of the game and the insta-respawns made retrying actually rather addictive! But speaking of frustration...

As alluded to, the game was a very frustrating, and more importantly, unfair feeling experience. Instead of trying to get good at the levels, it felt more like I was trying to get good at controlling the character at a basic level: so many random dropped inputs and wonkiness made me feel utterly confused and not knowing what the hell the game wanted out of me. To add insult to injury, even when I did somehow master the controls, the levels came down more to trial-and-error memorization as the obstacles just come way too fast due to a combination of the camera not seeing far ahead enough and the base speed being very high that there's no way to react on your first time.

It certainly could be a rather nice endless runner, and the difficulty could be considered as intentional to create a 'rage game', but I feel like challenging precision platformers or rage games only work if the controls are polished enough so that a player's failures feel like their own fault, and with this, that unfortunately wasn't the case. Perhaps if it wasn't constrained to a game jam time limit, this could've had a bit more polish to make everything work! Would like to see a better version of this as that pillar summon was rather memorable!

RaidenKramata responds:

THANK YOUUUUU!!! I do plan on making a revamp of this soon once im finished with a big nutty project i have in mind so yea, THANK YOU FOR YOUR AWESOME FEEDBACK!!! I hope you play more of my games soon in the future

[Diro da Blob]

Pretty interesting game! It's kind of like Mario Maker where you need to prove that you can beat a level before you can submit it, but by forcing you to put in a certain amount of spikes, it creates a fun back-and-forth of planning and executing to make the level hard but not impossible to beat. Overall it feels pretty well-crafted and makes for a fun short and sweet adventure.

That being said, I do feel like the level design is a bit out-of-whack. The difficulty curve and leeway for spike requirements felt like it was going all over the place: I feel like it starts out strong, then gives you way too much leeway where there's barely any challenge, then suddenly the stairway levels have you pretty much figure out the one single way the developer intended with no leeway at all, then it goes back to giving way too much leeway once again. I suppose you could argue that it does give some variety, and I'm not totally against levels like the stairway where they are more rigid one-solution puzzles, but as a whole, the game just felt all over the place and didn't generate a smooth rising increase in difficulty, making it end with a bit of a whimper instead of a bang. Feels like it might need to decide whether to make rigid puzzle rooms like the stairway levels, or perhaps rooms with more leeway but you get bonus medals for putting more spikes over par so as to still have a challenge.

Still, while the levels were out-of-order and all that jazz, I still found the concept very cool and I'd love to play even more levels in this, so I'd consider that a good game jam result in that it was memorable and made me want more!

[Beswitched]

Pretty cute puzzler with a really neat gameplay concept! For the most part, everything felt really intuitive and I enjoyed some of the mind-bending puzzles you setup based on this transference technique! Game also felt pretty smooth and nice in terms of visual appeal and game feel, what with the nice touches like puffs for walking and landing, the cool slow-mo effect for transferring, and so on. Very impressive overall for a game jam game in that it was very memorable!

It's definitely a little rough in some aspects though. For example, the controls can be a bit jank when it comes to special actions like trying to jump off of a jumping frog platform: many times my inputs were ignored for those. And I hated how sometimes when you transfer into a frog it'll force an immediate hop, mostly into spikes! But more so than any of those things, the biggest issue I had with the game was the level design, as while it started off pretty decent, it felt like it started to devolve. Not only did the levels start to feel out-of-order, with some really easy levels coming after very hard levels, but also a lot of the levels just had extraneous elements that had no bearing on the puzzle solution: if I were to be nice I'd say they were intentional red herrings, but it really felt sometimes that I was skipping the intended solution and the levels weren't constructed well enough to not realize this exploit.

Also, just as a nitpick on the side, I did feel like starting off the game with possessing moving platforms was a bit boring compared to possessing other living creatures like frogs and tanks and such, but it's fine. Oh and I would've loved a save/load feature as well since I had to leave half-way, and I dunno if I wanna work all that way back.

Frogrammer responds:

hey thank you so much for all the feedback! as always really appreciate it, the controls definitely could use a big improvement as most of the players have mentioned it too. the forced jump is a bug that we unfortunately didn't have the time to fix and as for level design I can see what you mean and with more time we definitely will be able to craft the structure more carefully for levels to feel intended but also not to limit the creativity. oh and you can skip levels with the button in the top right corner if you don't feel like going all the way back :)

[CRAB JUICE]

Pretty neat game! Makes me think of a more simplified puzzle/arcade version of Carrion. Overall it was a pretty short but sweet adventure that was very lively and nice to look at, did a good job at increasing the difficulty and adding new complexities to the formula bit-by-bit to keep me hooked all the way through, and with the cherry on top being the immediately-recognizable and energetic beats from ConnorGrail!

If I were to have one main complaint, is that I found the graphics to be very confusing at times, mainly due to a mismatch between collision boxes and the way the world is graphically rendered. The way the walls can be seen implies that the game is being viewed through a tilted 2.5D perspective, but the collision boxes don't match this since you only collide when you hit the 'ceiling' of a wall, if that makes sense. This made aiming very confusing. There's also the fact that doors leave behind frames despite being open, leaving you to think you might still collide with them if you hit them instead of going through the center gap (it's actually nice that its forgiving, but still, can be confusing). If I were to guess, I'm assuming that the game's graphics were changed at a later stage from birds-eye view to tilted-perspective walls, without moving the collision boundaries to reflect this.

[Frogger Tower Defense]

Wow, quite surprised by this one! It's definitely a bit rough in a lot of respects, but at the same time I had a lot of fun so I think it was a good result for a game jam!

As said, the game is definitely rough and lacking in multiple areas. Straight off the bat, the game was very confusing due to a lack of tutorial or any instructions: the only way of learning was to experiment, but due to the limited resources, this was dangerous to do, even more so because a lot of the items have awkward properties, like the traps only working for small frogs while bigger frogs don't get hurt at all despite triggering them all the same. The general feel of the game was quite janky as well, with annoying bugs like enemy corpses still colliding with bullets which can feel unfair if you're trying to kill enemies precisely with a certain number of shots.

However, once I got past that awkward period of learning the rules and finding ways to deal with the jank, I was having a lot of fun! The core shooting mechanics reminded me a lot of my favorite game Tapper where you need to be good at firing out the exact amount of bullets to be efficient, I thought there was a good diversity of enemies with some being fast but weak and others slow and strong and so on that promoted strategic thinking, and saving up the traps like the car and logs for emergency situations made them fun to deploy.

It could definitely use some polish, but I always find it fascinating when a really rough game can still be quite fun underneath as it shows that its got a decent core to work from for further development. Not too shabby!

[BACKBONE'S RAMPAGE]

Oh man, I love me some beat-em-ups, and for a game jam game, I'd say this does a very impressive job at crafting a nice one! Yes, it is short, yes, it is lacking some juice like having no hit sparks, but it looks great and has a lot of what I consider solid beat-em-up essentials. The sheer joy at being able to combo the enemies in spectacular ways, such as wall-bouncing them and then grabbing them mid-air into a launcher was awesome and fluid, and the charge punch is so satisfying with its hit-freeze impact and smoke trail send-off!

The only problem with the game is that it is the most one-trick-pony of all one-trick-ponies: you only have one way to actually take out enemies being the launcher+charge punch combo, and while it is nice the first few times, it gets incredibly tedious and repetitive to do it for every single damn enemy on the screen, especially since it's not only long but also can be easily interrupted due to the setup. In retrospect it does look like you can technically charge punch anyone who is airborne, so it can be done from wall-bounces instead of strictly the launcher, but its way too difficult to work from, leading me to keep doing it the obvious way.

Ideally I'd like the launcher+charge punch combo to be something you do based on style or fun or efficiency based on enemy health or type, not out of absolute requirement for everything. For example, if you're really set on charge punch being the finisher, you could at least make it so that lower-tier mooks can be eliminated with a charge punch by itself, but more beefier enemies might require the launcher to set it up.

Definitely an interesting game with solid fundamentals and, while the absolute combo requirement chafes me the wrong way with how its set up here, the act of having to finish off enemies in a big way does have merit as I do personally not like to finish off bosses with a weak jab since it doesn't look cool. A lot of potential for a full game can be seen here!