FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Chroma Wheel]

Decent little arcade game! It's simple, but thanks to some moderately juicy feedback and intuitive design, the gameplay is rather addictive and fun: had a good time trying to be efficient at matching the color patterns as time went on and the game got faster and faster. I like that the game only has balls come from the left or right, as if they came from above or the bottom it would feel very unfair given the screen ratio and how far you can look ahead.

The bonus mode was ok, but a bit questionable since all it does is award you a bunch of points all at once, and it's not like you even need to keep a chain/combo up to get it as it just happens inevitably. It's like, mathematically, you could just make every ball give you two points instead of one and just get rid of the bonus mode and it would all equal out. Just feels a bit pointless: I'd like it much better if you need to do something special like a chain/combo to get the bonus mode, and it'd be nice if it gave you health pip as a reward instead of points, perhaps.

It's ok that the game is simple, but it really felt like you see everything it has to offer in no time flat. Was a bit disappointed at the difficulty levels since all they seem to do is change up the amount of health you have: would much prefer if hard mode started you off faster than the other modes, or maybe has more interesting events happen as the game goes on, like balls that have more unique trajectories like spinning around to hit the opposite side (similar to Undyne boss fight).

[FRIDAY NIGHT FUNKIN' REIMAGINED]

Hmm, bit of a mixed bag here! There's definitely a lot of cool stuff in here, but at the same time there's a lot of clunkiness that either hasn't been addressed from the original or has been introduced in this version.

In terms of the good:

*I really liked the cutscenes added to the start and end of each level, along with the little dialogue bubbles on the bottom bar during gameplay: all of it added a great deal of story and character to the experience compared to the original. With this, I think the game is much close to its original Parappa inspirations.

*Overall the story was a pretty cool and inventive cross-over with a nice progression and ending, albeit a bit overly fanfic-y.

*I liked the left-over ghost arrows since they serve as a new feedback to let you know how accurate you were in your note presses.

*I liked the introduction of this whole new mechanic in the third act of having to dodge attacks while still dealing with the usual music gameplay: really adds a whole new level of challenge as you have to split your attention in a wild way.

*It did a decent job at recreating the FnF gameplay and style, for the most part: kinda laggy and a little rough, but mostly there.

And in terms of the bad:

*When I first played the game, since the story was all about Isaac and they're the one in the spotlight, I actually thought I was supposed to be playing as them. Took me awhile to realize I was supposed to be playing as Boyfriend, but can you blame me?

*I really wish the game would show the combo meter and the note grading feedback front-and-center on the note chart instead of putting them across the screen where it's hard to see them while playing: makes it really difficult to determine whether you're hitting the notes and keeping your combo going when you need to lose focus of the note chart just to take a peek.

*I liked the idea of putting dialogue on the bottom bar, but it was very difficult to read it when they were talking during gameplay, particularly on the harder courses where you're too busy paying attention to the notes. They should only talk during a slow period of the song, or you should have voice overs instead, perhaps.

*The third act dodging mechanic was incredibly awkward and confusing: not only does the game only display the tutorial message for barely any time and in a faded opacity so I didn't know what was happening for a longest time, but even when I knew what to do it was difficult to tell when you're getting hit or whether you've dodged and what were the obstacles and so on.

*It feels like the algorithm used for note accuracy detection was off and malfunctioning: not only did I have a lot of notes I felt like I should've hit perfectly get counted as missed, and vice versa, I was also able to get through the third act by just randomly mashing.

*I didn't like how when you miss notes, Boyfriend still continues to sing as if nothing happened when he should stop singing or painfully grunt. By losing this feature, you lose a critical sense of connection and feedback to the character that the original had.

*Boyfriend doesn't talk! He speaks in beeps and boops! You can't just give him normal dialogue bubbles like that: it's illegal!

[CLox in Da Hood 6: Bin Laden Strikes Back]

This was actually quite the pleasant surprise, but I should've known from the start to not doubt Chdonga in the first place, creator of Ritz on a Roll!

Whenever I encounter a game like this that looks like a shitty low-effort hack job, but actually has some high-effort game feel and solid design to it, I'm always happy! Don't get me wrong as I'd still prefer something a bit better constructed than this, but if you look past the silly graphics, there are plenty of good facets like juicy explosive feedback, a decent variety of enemies, fun powerups, actual boss fights with interesting patterns, and a goofy story with all sorts of wacky scenes! I particularly liked a lot of the arcade-y touches, like the way bosses pulse red faster and faster as they get closer to death.

That being said, it is still quite the rough and janky game, intentional or not, so in terms of feedback:

*While I loved the boss fights, I only particularly liked the first one, with the second and third being pretty bad:

The first one was alright in how you need to take care of the minions before being able to take a shot at them: nothing crazy, but decent and you feel in-control.

The second one, however, is the exact opposite where all you can do is play the waiting game and shoot them when they finally decide to come down: felt very boring and was disappointed that they didn't have a more dramatic and cooler second phase besides speeding up, especially considering how important they are in the plot.

Third boss was a similar downer as it makes you wait a lot, and its attacks were very janky and glitchy and hard to work out how to avoid them. I enjoyed it shaking things up by giving you a melee weapon, but it was more an annoyance as you constantly take contact damage from getting too close and it's too difficult to tell whether you're actually hitting him with your swings.

*Found the boss arenas really confusing with the way you can walk past where it looks like you'd be limited to walk and go into the sky. I know, it's probably done that way intentionally as a funny joke, but still, really weird and unintuitive.

So yeah, bit of a mixed bag: I do appreciate that, despite trying to make it very shitpost-y to fit the clock crew theme, you still put some actual hidden effort in there to make a goofy actually-somewhat-enjoyable adventure. However, at the end of the day, it ain't no Cruelty Squad or anything like that unfortunately, as it is still unavoidably quite janky and shitpost-y. Had a better time than I thought I would, but I'd love to see an arcade game from you in the future where you just go all-out in designing it!

Chdonga responds:

Thanks for the review. Also thanks for mentioning the janky final boss. It played fine in Windows mode which is how I playtested the game 9 times outta 10. Sometimes a bug pops up in HTML5 mode that doesn't appear in Windows so I completely missed it.

[OneBit Adventure]

Pretty neat little game! It's very simple in a lot of respects, but it's got a very addictive and juicy appeal to it despite that, similar to an old-school Y's game, where it's very fun to just keep clobbering enemies, leveling up, and getting loot and other upgrades, over and over. While it is generally quite mindless, I was pleasantly surprised to see that there were some bosses and elite enemies that have special attacks and patterns to contend with! The game was no slouch in terms of quality of life either: it had a nice tutorial, everything felt quite intuitive with good feedback, and there were plenty of nice touches like being able to categorize your inventory, the game warning you if you try to sell items you are equipped with, low mana warnings, and so on!

While it was some good simple fun, it wasn't without some frustrations:

*While I can understand wanting the game to be intentionally simple, the game did start to feel quite repetitive and bore me after awhile. Felt like it could stand to have more major events or shake-ups happen more frequently to make you feel like you're progressing, like boss fights and dungeons and music/world changes. Abilities would be nice to have as well: I can see from the screenshots that you do eventually get them, but I was playing for quite some time and saw nothing new. Call me impatient if you want, haha!

*Similar to above, the loot was pretty boring since it was all just the same name stuff but with different numbers (which made it difficult to commit to upgrading a piece since you could get the same piece but better base stats later on), and the skills from leveling up were boring as well since it was just really lame stat increases instead of cool active skills or more unique synergistic passives, you know, stuff that would change up your gameplay in new fresh ways. World upgrades were kinda lame as well since again, they were just lame passive increases: would love something more unique, and it would be cool if they actually changed the world to be more challenging or have interesting modifiers as a bit of yin-yang risk-reward.

*I'm really not on board with this login-bonus-daily-quest-multi-currency-vip-access crap as I really dislike the way it worms in and corrupts facets of the game unfairly. Whatever happened to just earning cool skins by doing cool stuff like getting far into the game and beating a hard boss? Why does everything need to be earned by clocking in every day and checking off a list of menial tasks like a second job? Why does the game need to make upgrades and revives tied to the currency instead of just having you need to use the proper materials and live with your deaths? Call me bias or crazy or whatever, but I just really dislike this stuff.

So yeah, a decent simple-but-fun game, but ultimately feels a bit too simple and repetitive for me long-term, and furthermore I really don't like the whole grindy microtransaction crap since it makes me lose faith in the fairness of its design.

[Clocks of the BBS 2023]

Hmm, a cute little collab, but felt really lackluster not only due to a lack of content, but also a very generic slideshow presentation which felt like the bare minimum you can get away with for these type of things. At least the author's name is delivered in this stylish diagonal layout, I suppose. Also lacks the typical functionality I want from collabs, such as being able to click on user names to go to their Newgrounds profile, as well as a gallery view and zoom function and so on.

Compared to the 2022 entry, and other more creative entries like the BBS Awards which had a unique presentation through a fake Windows OS, this felt like a severe downgrade in effort and creativity: really missing the usual creative layouts and easter eggs/achievos and such that I'd expect from a Little-Rena entry.

I suppose it might be intentional as it's clock crew and they're kind of synonymous with this low-effort schtick, but I dunno: even shitposts, while seemingly lacking effort, only float to the top because they have a hidden charming high-effort to their low-effort facade, if that makes sense.

PachkaNG responds:

Yknow I wish we could’ve gotten more people for this, but it seems the supporter forum is as dead as general so yeah

[001 The Secret Of Clock Island]

Hmm, I feel like it could be a good little point-n-click adventure game akin to something like Monkey Island, and it did certainly have some humorous dialogue and weird events to witness, but I couldn't help but feel annoyed at the constant interruptions and slow dialogue, bored at the very linear/guided progression that allows for no exploration and repetitive void minigames, and confused at the bizarre humor and overall inside jokey feel to it all. That last part can be excused as me just not being in the know and not the target audience, I suppose, but I couldn't help but feel like this might've had the potential to get me despite that if the gameplay was strong enough, but alas.

[Kalikan]

Gawd-DAMN, this felt amazing! As a pretty standard SHMUP, it's not exactly unique or envelope-pushing with some wacky mechanics like Ikaruga's polarity switching, but this just not only felt so smooth and polished, but had some solid combat design as well, that I was totally down for it! Cool bosses with incredible and intricate patterns to weave through, cool levels with all sorts of waves and formations that never make things feel boring, simple but strategic combat due to switching between the fast and slow firing moves, nice variety in selectable player characters with their unique abilities, juicy feedback and explosions and points galore, and the cherry on top was that sick slowdown that happens when there's just so much happening on screen: I love it!

That's not to say it wasn't without some minor complaints:

I was a bit annoyed that, if you want to continuously fire the spread bullets, you have to mash the button, as holding down the button, which would usually do auto-fire, is instead reserved for the secondary special fire. Don't get me wrong, I kind of like the simplicity of the design, but my old man hands just really can't handle mashing, so it was a pain that it was the only option.

It would be nice if the game had a little bit of a tutorial to it, especially if it was one of those authentic arcade-esque tutorials, but I understand that, since it's done in Pico-8, it might have very limited space to work with.

I found it annoying that enemies were not consistent with their abilities. For example, when you first meet the tiny mook ships, they fire orange bullets. Later on, however, they come in from the side and fire at you with tiny red bullets! This felt incredibly unfair and against the rules: if you want an enemy that fires tiny red bullets, you need to have it be a different enemy altogether. How is a player supposed to be able to scan the battlefield and plan their moves and priorities if enemies are so inconsistent in their behavior?

And of course my biggest complaint...is that there's only two levels! C'mon, I want more! MORE!

[GROBLIN SURVIVORS]

Jeez, I hate to say it, but I had an incredibly rough time with this game. Practically my entire playtime just felt like an absolute mess where I went from utter confusion to boring dissatisfaction. I'd like to think this has potential but it's quite difficult to see it in its current state.

As said, the initial impression was spent in confusion trying to learn the rules of the game and what the heck is going on. So many questions kept being asked:

Why is the only menu that is labeled the upgrade and exit: what do the other menu options do and why aren't they labeled? What is this tutorial trying to teach me? I like that it keeps things simple, but this is a case of being TOO simple! What is this menu that just popped up with a ballista button: is this a level up screen or something? Why do I keep getting goddamn interrupted every two seconds with this selection: I haven't even filled up the scrap gauge yet? Why when I chose a tower that time it wiped the entire map of enemies: you're not even gonna let me get the satisfaction of killing them myself? What's the damn point then? Why does only the starter ballista have this auto-target circle while the other similar ones don't? Am I even killing anything: it all just feels like a disconnected chaotic mess? Wait, why did the game just end with a goblin laughing: did I win? Did I lose? I don't think I got hit, so what happened?

And so on and so forth.

There's almost so much to point out that could be improved that it's difficult to decide what to say or where to start, but I'll try to limit it to a few key points for now:

1) Put more labeling and instructions and tooltips around to help guide players. Don't overdo it with walls of text or anything like that: less is more, but you want more than none, which is all you have currently. For example, put labels over the modes in the main menu, have the level up/upgrade screen be labeled at the top and put some instructions like 'pick a tower to add to your inventory'.

2) Have the level up/upgrade screen grey out the rest of the screen to make it more indicative that it has paused gameplay and is awaiting your selection. Also, have it appear with a bit more fanfare, like some sparkles or a literal fanfare sound effect, to make it feel like a nice event and separate the moment from regular gameplay.

3) Have more satisfying feedback for your towers damaging enemies: you know, sound effects and blood splats and stuff like that. In general the gameplay just felt so weird, like I wasn't feeling the satisfaction you're supposed to get from blasting enemies yourself. It's partly because its the towers killing them, but I think it's also because you can barely see your own bullets or hear/feel them hitting enemies, making it all feel so disconnected. I understand you're trying to make the screen less cluttered by muting your own bullets, but perhaps you could approach it differently, such as with colors/outlines to make things pop, especially since the game overall has a very dark palette.

4) Find a better way to introduce the whole aspect of only being able to aim certain towers in certain directions: the arrows do a pretty good job but it'd be nice if it could go a step further. It'd also be nice if this information was available in the tooltips in the level up/upgrade screen.

While I did have a really bad time, I don't think the concept is without merit: the twist of having to construct towers with certain powers and limitations could be cool as long as the game continues to get built up, I believe, so if you do continue, I'd like to see it in its final state.

FishDev responds:

Thanks for the feedback! I wasn't able to implement it all, but I've done some work and will be uploading a new build soon. From your feedback, I immediately added text to the menu options -- you were definitely right. More feedback on hitting was actually something I'd already been working on, more specifically damage text, though I like your ideas on adding things like bloodsplats and I'll see what I can do (without making the game run even worse on html lol).

As for the tutorial, I'm well aware it's bad and I'm actually working on improving it right now, though I don't think it'll be done for a little bit. I've never done an actual tutorial before so I wanna make sure it's actually, y'know. Good, lol. (EDIT: Done! The tutorial should be up-to-par, it still isn't very great but it should actually succeed at teaching players the ropes)

The fanfare's a good idea, in hindsight that's probably something I should have added even before release.

Your feedback was INCREDIBLY insightful, thank you so much!! Would it be alright if you added me on Discord so I could refer to you for future playtesting? If so, my Discord is @fartfish

[Tangled Slug]

Wow, found myself really getting addicted to this puzzler! The whole element of not being able to cross over yourself, except where you've gone pink, which can both be where you've collected a mushroom at in the past or where a mushroom has just grown, leads to some really mindbending puzzles! Definitely found the concept quite memorable and fun to reprogram my brain to get used to, and kudos to designing the levels and presentation well enough to teach this concept intuitively.

I will admit that some of the puzzles were a bit annoying as it felt like it was dependent on a lot of guesswork and assumptions to determine the order in which the mushrooms would bloom. As such, sometimes it felt more like I was not getting good at the puzzles themselves, but more reading the mind of the designer and trying to get in front of whatever trick they were going to pull.

All of this made it feel like you could only really solve the puzzle through trial-and-error, whereas if the game would do something like plainly number the mushrooms in the order of their blooming, you could potentially plan it out and execute on a first try, making it feel more fair. Luckily the ease of undoing, coupled with the bite-size nature of the puzzles and the badge/par system, made such redos feel alright and not much of an issue at all that hurt the game for me.

I'm not sure if I love the game so much to get myself through all of the levels it set up (especially since it doesn't seem to introduce any new mechanics or twists to change things up significantly, at least at a noticeable pace), but I still had a good time while it lasted!

[Hyperlight Survivor]

Despite its rather simple graphical fidelity and basic automated gameplay, this game does a lot to make everything feel exciting with tons of juice and nice touches! Alongside that, the game also did a decent job at having various enemy types each with their own AI patterns (instead of the usual boring survivors-style dummies that just chase you), lots of weapon upgrades, some events that pop up, and different arenas which make you improvise how best to survive. I think there's certainly a lot of potential here and overall the game feels fun.

However, one of my biggest issues with the game was its pacing. It just felt like it was really repetitive and took way too long to get to a decent level of difficulty to make me engaged. On my first playthrough, when it came to around 100 kills and I was still fighting the same boring mooks, I was seriously considering quitting and not looking back. Eventually yes, it does introduce more enemy types and events to makes things more exciting, but they felt like they were spaced out too far and kept recycling before moving on.

It didn't help either that the game felt a bit directionless and pointless. Yes, there is a ranking system and I'm getting points and such, but it just felt like it was doing the same ol' same ol' and didn't really entice me to play again, especially considering I've have to go through that slow start again. I feel like if it had more unique events like the bomb event happen more frequently, and perhaps if it forced you to go to new arenas on a timer instead of on pickup and they got progressively more intense instead of random, and if you faced mini or final bosses and they unlocked higher difficulty modes or checkpoints or whatever, I'd be more inclined to play since it would feel like I can gauge my progression and it would keep things spicy.

There were also some other slight annoyances like how the arenas just feel so bloody claustrophobic and the enemies get so dense that it just feels silly and doesn't allow for much movement or space for player expression. Also the Ultra takes so long to charge up that it makes me want to not use it, and considering how powerful it is, I'm surprised it doesn't treat it with more reverence like having a special gauge that goes all rainbowy when its fully charged or something: having it just be some boring numbers in the corner makes me forget I even have it.

In addition to all the gameplay-related stuff above, I did find it odd that, despite the game being played with the keyboard, the menu navigation is done with the mouse, which isn't use in game. I would expect to be able to do things like hit enter to start the game and use the arrow keys to select ships: feels weird to be forced to use a whole other control scheme and then switch back when the game starts.

I do think the game is pretty solidly put-together and juicy and has good potential, but it's rough because, well, you can't escape the fact that it is inevitably going against so many other Survivors games on the market like Holocure and Halls of Torment and even Picayune Dreams and so on, and this, while nice, just doesn't quite have the amount of variety in its content, addictive sense of progression, or any other special selling point like a story or whatever that those games have to set it apart. Still had a good time with it while it lasted, but I just can't see me sticking with it without a more powerful hook.

WittGames responds:

Hello! Thank you very much for the exhaustive review. I'm going to release very soon the last update for the web version of the game before the final release on Steam. The new update will include a new type of "starter" enemy to make the start of each run less tedious. It will also include a new Event and an entire Card System to upgrade power-ups and weapons. Also, the full version will have more Events, an Upgrade System for spaceships and much more to give the player a better sense of progression. However, thank you so much again for the feedback!