FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[UVSU]

Nice little puzzler! It's a little short and the quality of the puzzles varies and doesn't quite satisfy as much as I'd like, but it's understandable for a quick game jam game and nevertheless, I think it does an overall good job at exploring this interesting concept of back-and-forth thwarting and de-thwarting of plans between angel and devils!

As said, the various ways the levels were constructed were pretty interesting. I expected most of the levels to be like "Overwhelmed" and "Double Trouble" where your final route has you dodging through multiple demons all trying to thwart you and you weave through all the bullets fired at your past selves.

But then there were a bunch of other levels where you need to counterintuitively help your demon get a route to kill you before thwarting it afterwards, essentially cooperating with them in a weird way: for the most part I think this was a cool mind-bending idea! But it could be a bit frustrating at times. Sometimes it led to a lot of 'gotcha' moments that are difficult to forsee since you usually don't need to care about the demon side, leading to trial and error and frequent restarts. And other times like "Prisoner" just feels awkward: you have to free the demon to kill you, but then you can leave him locked in for your final escape, making it feel moot, like an unfair deescalation when you should always have a progressively more tricky escape.

In addition, while the game is nice, it does have a bit of a balancing issue at times where it can be a bit too easy to 'cheese' certain levels and make them much easier than I think were intended. Then again, on the other side you've got some levels which are way too strict with only tight corridors and low time limits, which feels like it's pressuring you too hard to play it one way only.

The most annoying part for me was the fact that I thought that there was no way to go back to the previous iteration as only full restarts were available through the R key, making it very tedious to redo everything if you only mess up near the end. Only after I beat the entire game did I realize there was an option for this in the ESC menu: why'd you hide this away from me!

I'm unsure how the game is going to evolve for the full steam release: I do think it's a nice concept and this does prove that it can go some interesting ways, but unlike something like Toodee and Topdee, this game doesn't really have a visual identity, charm or story to go with it yet, being largely a greybox prototype with programmer art. So I think it'd need a lot more than just new rooms and such: would be interested to see how it goes!

[Space Order Mine]

Quite the interesting fusion of the FTL and Minesweeper we got here! It's a little rough around the edges in some aspects, doesn't quite have a proper story and isn't balanced properly, but I still had a lot of fun and got quite addicted to this, so I think you've got a solid core concept and decent execution at play here which is the best case for an early build! Was quite impressed that it was already doing a good job at increasing the complexity of combat in interesting ways with a variety of equipment, ships, items, and new tile obstacles like ice and lava: really makes me interested to see how it grows.

In terms of feedback:

Would love if the game had something like a combat log that you see in CRPGs which keeps tracks of various actions: a lot of the time I've got my eyes focusing below on minesweeper and suddenly a whole bunch of simultaneous actions can happen up-top that I miss and find difficult to figure out what exactly happened, especially when you've got drones and all sorts of stuff doing their things.

The info pop-ups can be a bit hard to read at times, what with their both tiny and pixelated text and my old man eyes finding it difficult to focus.

Could stand to have a bit more pizazz added to the game, stuff like explosions, special effects, music and the like, though I totally understand why it isn't there as an early build needs to focus on the core gameplay before juicing it up.

There would be some times where I thought the minesweeper was cheating me by not surrounding the energy tile properly with number indicators, but I realized later on that this was because there were initial gaps in the rock where indicators would be: they just become difficult to see/remember once the rock has been mined around that area since everything's so dark.

FluffyLotus responds:

Thanks for the feedback! I never tought of a log, which could be usefull.

For the "initial gaps" problem, it's something I'm struggling a bit on finding a good solution :(

[LightStrike82]

Hmmm, I certainly like the concept behind this as I feel like it could be a great hi-score arena-shooter akin to stuff like KILLBUG or Devil Daggers, except with a color-matching gimmick. But right now I feel like the game is painfully underbaked, feeling more like a grey-box prototype than a full-fledged game.

While the game does show some effort in designing various enemies and such, the game feels very lackluster and unsatisfying to play: no music, no impact/feedback, no special effects, and when the game does actually have effects, they are either painfully bland or awkward and annoying like the weird 'oof' and buzzing sounds.

Even if we were to set-aside the lack of juice, the game is also painful on my hands as it has no auto-fire (and no locked rate-of-fire, meaning it is unbalanced to people with auto-clickers), and the game camera also constantly spazzes out on me, jerking my view around at random times violently.

I certainly think the game could be something neat, especially if it adds more interesting mechanics and complexities to the color mechanic, but it needs more time in the oven to make it an exciting experience.

[Orange]

Another great little puzzler! As with all of the other color-based puzzlers, this does a solid job of having a wonderful variety of unique, mind-bending puzzles where you not only have fun figuring out the solution, but figuring out the question and rules as well! If I were to be mean and reductive, I'd say it is more of the same, but if more of the same means more of these crazy puzzles, bring it on, I say! Some of the puzzles can be pretty crazy at times (the carrot one for instance) but it was still a delight.

[GIMMIKO DEMO]

Ok, so the game is super cool and has a real neato concept in general, and while I had tons of fun and could go on and on with all sorts of praise for how great it is, I'm going to go straight into feedback as there are unfortunately a lot of things that are holding the game back for me, so I'd like to go over them so they could be reviewed and make the steam release have the best impression possible. Basically it's a great free Newgrounds game, but for a cost-money Steam game, I dunno if I'd be willing in its current state. Anyway, here we go!

*Apart from the various gameplay facets which I discuss below, actually the biggest complaint I'd have about the game is that it just feels like it has no plot or goal or story or anything like that. I know that I can beat up tons of enemies and face cool bosses and see some unique hidden shops with weird NPCs, but I just had no idea what I was striving for, if there was any sort of ending or progression that was awaiting from all my hard work. Without some sort of core story or at least a goal, it kind of felt pointless and killed my motivation to stick around.

*While the main gimmick store and equipment menu does a great job of providing info and help, for some reason other elements like the snack shop and especially the dice shop don't provide easy-to-understand info and instead hide it away. I understand it's part of the mystique and appeal, but I really wish the game would be more straight-forward in providing descriptions and information about various things. I'd like it if the snacks were more descriptive in what they do (I thought they would heal you for just eating them as well) and if the pause menu would let you know what snack buffs are currently active, and I wish the dice info was just written out like the standard gimmick shop does instead of these dumb symbols which you won't remember after the first time the nerd shopkeep tells you.

*Speaking of dice, it felt like they were stuck in the worst of both worlds. For the most part, dice felt pretty much all the same, only differing in minor ways like slots available and STR/INT which never veered off strongly: I was hoping for something like iron dice with super STR but no INT which you just slam into the enemy and other fancy outliers like that. Heck, maybe the minor STR/INT differences were actually more significant than I thought, but I'd have no idea: they all felt the same as precise damage feedback is nonexistent. But then on the other hand, you have the dice which are chained and scared: these were more what I wanted in that they were fancy and unique, but they were just incredibly annoying to handle and had no upsides to make up for it! So dice are somehow both boring and too unique at the same time.

*Overall the game just felt really...random. I know that's obvious and perhaps the appeal, but it didn't really ever feel like I was in control or could get skilled at planning out optimized move combos or any tech like that: instead you just throw the dice and shit happens that is impossible to keep track of. It makes trying to build the dice in certain ways and such feel pointless: at the end of the day you're just doing the same thing from start to finish: throwing dice and hoping stuff dies. It can be fun to watch the spectacle but I dunno, it wears out quickly. I know games like Vampire Survivors and such might seem random, and they are somewhat, but in those games I do feel like I have more control and can tell what attacks I'm doing and plan around them. Maybe if some dice fired off the gimmicks in order instead of randomly, I could build around that in a strategic way?

*Aiming and throwing is very annoying because the dice's origin point for the throw is offset to the side instead of centered on Gimmiko which can cause it to fire at a different angle than expected, potentially missing your target or clashing into environmental objects which get in the way so damn much. I'd love it if perhaps environmental hitboxes were shrunk down a tad, and if when you throw it comes from Gimmiko's center mass (you can still have her carry it at her side before the throw, tho).

*Visual clarity was absolutely chaotic and I would easily lose track of where I am, and I'd be dodging friendlies since I thought they were enemies, and so on. I know the game tries to help somewhat by making friendlies slightly transparent, but it'd help if there was another solution that stuck out strongly. The bold outlines and bright colors over everything really make things mesh together in a big mess unfortunately: wish there were some sort of patterns or consistent outlines designated to separate the player from the dice from the enemies from the friendlies from the background objects.

*Another thing that hurt the visual clarity and added to the confusion was the fact that the game would be 3D-ish for some elements and 2D for others. You can mainly see this happen for bullets, which are rendered like 2D in a 3D-ish world: I think it was done to with best intentions to make it easier to tell when they're about to hit you, but it actually made it more confusing for me since I thought they were to be treated as 3D-ish objects, so I'd think I was dodging them when I wasn't. It was especially confusing when I'd jump up in the air and bullets that were 'behind' me were still layered on top of me like they were in 'front': you'd think I'd be above the bullet, augh, so confusing to determine where things are!

*Jumping on enemies felt like it could be pretty fun, but the previously-mentioned confusing 2D-yet-3D-ish world made it difficult to judge where I'm landing, especially since the game moves so bloody fast. Also found it confusing that you have to press space bar to bounce off of an enemy: I was expecting Mario rules where you naturally bounce off of enemies when you land on them without pressing anything, but hitting the jump button on landing would increase your height or deal damage or something.

*Having your own dice on the ground block a thrown dice felt really annoying, especially since it causes only the thrown dice to trigger its gimmicks: perhaps if hitting your dice with a dice made both fire off their gimmicks, it could actually be an interesting interaction and strategy.

*Wish there was an intuitive way to tell which enemies make dice bounce off of them and which have them pass through them: some enemies which were on the small side had this happen, so size being the way to go didn't work for me.

*There were also just some minor bugs, like where I swear I threw a dice right at an enemy and it bounced off them without hurting them. Oh, and some potential changes like putting arrows under your character that point to the dice, since you can easily lose track of scared dice as they hide in a corner behind foliage. Oh, and why are the buttons so static: the rest of the game is so lively, you'd think the buttons would bounce and shake on hover and click!

Best of luck on the full release!

[Polly The Frog 3: Billy Bullfrog's Decree]

Seems like a pretty cute game in many aspects, and I was impressed at the ambition of creating a big 3D platformer, but unfortunately a lot of the construction and design left me underwhelmed and feeling like it might've gotten a bit too overambitious (a common habit of indie devs, though nothing to be ashamed about).

First and foremost, the number one thing blocking me was the performance of the game. For some reason, I was constantly getting all sorts of stuttering and frame rate drops which was annoying by itself but especially annoying since it would happen during jumps and cause me to miss my target. I feel like I've got a respectable computer especially for such a simple game, leading me to fear the code must be very terribly unoptimized. This happened even when I switched the game to the lowest quality and I'll be honest, I'm not sure if the quality button even works in the first place.

There were also just a lot of annoyances with the controls and presentation. For example, the game says you can use a controller and while it does work in general, if you try to go into, for example, the settings menu, suddenly the controller no longer works and you need to use the mouse to interact with the options. Furthermore, all of the controls are still listed with keyboard controls like space and WASD when you'd think the game would recognize I'm using a controller and instead display controller buttons instead.

There's also some very shoddy design in the gameplay world as well, such as a camera that both can clip into terrain which blocks your vision and not be zoomed out enough which causes you to have to take leaps of faith too often. There are also bland or absent effects for actions like attacks which just have the enemies blip away with no satisfying visuals or audio, and a lack of a ground shadow for the player to help them be able to tell where they are landing from jumps with any precision.

There were also some bugs like the save system which would sometimes completely lose or not save my progress for no reason I could tell.

But even if we sweep aside all of that stuff, assume that all the menus and performance and camera and such can be fixed up, and instead choose to focus on the core gameplay, I still feel like the game would be a bit lacking because the gameplay is so bog-standard. What I played felt like a rather generic platformer without any interesting or unique mechanics, just stuff you'd see in any other platformer but lacking polish or satisfaction. Potentially satisfying movement mechanics like dashes don't add much and are locked behind an annoying forced movement instead of being an accessible button press.

If I view this through the lens as a newbie developer making his first platformer and being a bit overambitious, I'd say it shows potential and could become something big with this as practice, but considering this is the 3rd version, I'm a little let-down as you'd think this would be incredibly polished by now. Still, hopefully you can continue to move onwards and upwards.

EDIT: I did try playing it in Firefox instead of Chrome and I didn't get the performance issues: not sure what weird compatibility issue is going on there!

Brad-Games responds:

Thanks for taking your time to review my game, I appreciate the feedback!

I'm very new to the Unity game engine, so while this is the 3rd version of the game, it's the only one I actually put a lot of effort into, so it feels like more of a first installment on my end.

As for the poor performance, I'm not entirely sure as to what causes that. I've tested the game on many different devices, including a Chromebook with 2GB of RAM and a slow processor, and it runs just fine. It's possible that it's some browser setting that could cause the game to run poorly, or just a Unity WebGL bug of some sort. I'll look into it more.

Always good to see people taking their time to give constructive criticism instead of getting frustrated and leaving a bad review with not much to say. I'm not sure if I'll make a 4th installment of this series, but if I do I'll definitely take your points into consideration. 😄

[Sandwich Stacker]

Cute little arcade game! It's simple to grasp and fun to stack up the sandwich...at least for a bit. By the time you get to the 2nd or 3rd level, it felt like I had seen everything the game has to offer and there wasn't much point in continuing: all it was gonna do was just the same thing but a bit faster and longer each time. But it was still a decent little time as it lasted!

It's not bad, but the game begs for a bit more complexity to it. There were so many ways I was expecting this game to go but it didn't do any of them. For example, the sandwich tower could've had some physics balancing to it where you gotta try to place ingredients directly on top to avoid the tower leaning, and be careful with your movement so as to not tip it over while running to gather ingredients. Could've also had more interesting objectives, like having to stack ingredients in a specific order of meat / veggie / sauce for bonus points or whatever: that way you don't just grab whatever ingredient you see and you have to think a bit more. But nope, it just loops the same basic gameplay over and over.

It was also strange that the game is so forgiving: because the game doesn't penalize you for letting ingredients drop to the floor, it's very easy to 'lame it out' and play in a boring risk-adverse way where you just sit in the corner and only go out to grab ingredients you're sure of. It's not necessarily bad to make an easy game that lacks punishment, but I feel like this game could've done a bit more to spice things up. For example, while you don't need to make it so that dropping food punishes players, you could at least make it so that if you keep catching food as it falls without missing, you get a combo streak bonus that awards you more points.

Oh, and there was a weird bug where, on my 2nd playthrough, the game was stuck on the leaderboard page without a way to continue (the buttons didn't show up like they did the first time) and I had to refresh the page to play again.

'Course, all of the critique is probably pointless since, judging from the background description, you were just recreating the game, and thus any feedback I give is not a problem necessarily for you to fix, but the original creators. Bit confusing as I'm not sure what to judge then, but hey, food for thought!

ElanMakesGames responds:

Thanks for leaving such comprehensive and constructive feedback!
Towards the end of development, we wanted to finish up the game and move on to other projects, but I do agree that there could have been more gameplay variety and depth.
We appreciate the review!

[Chomper's Dungeon]

Pretty neato game! Overall I found it to be a nice, short and sweet adventure, and in particular I enjoyed the whole strategic aspect of handling the AI's different attack patterns and taking in abilities to create not only a build to be strong enough to defeat the last boss but also improvising it to fit the battles you go through on the way. Nice stuff!

Points of feedback would be:

*The presentation quality can be a bit up-and-down: in general the core gameplay is nice with cute and lively animations for the characters and items, but the levels/world itself is quite bland with no landmarks/decor to spice things up and the game's title screen is so static and silent which didn't make the best first impression.

*As said above, the bland levels can kind of hurt the sense of progression to the game, especially since there is no overt story or goal the game gives to help: if it wasn't for the fact that I saw that the game was only a short 6 levels, I might've dropped off due to the repetitive feeling and lack of long-term motivation.

*Swipe controls were a bit awkward to use on PC: not too bad but it might be nice if there was another solution if it detects you're not on mobile.

*The tooltips for moves and saying that they attack in 'any direction' can be a bit confusing, because that can imply that they could attack in diagonals as well. Maybe should say something like attack in 'any cardinal direction' to be more accurate (though I understand you might've been limited in text space).

*Game had some design elements which felt a bit undercooked, one being the scarcity of MP meaning you can barely ever use your fancy abilities which feels boring, and another being how it can actually become better to just avoid fights since a build can become complete rather early and thus fighting becomes pointless. Maybe a way to solve both would be to have some enemies carry items as an incentive, and to have you get 1 MP back when killing an enemy? I dunno, I'm just spitballing.

*In addition to the above, the game does feel not only rather short, but a little padded as a lot of the later floors feature the same enemies as before with just palette-swap looks and stat increases with no actual new abilities. Kinda feels like you see everything the game has to offer half-way and then it just does more of the same: still fun, but it does give the impression that the game is a bit of a prototype and begs more content and variety. In regards to this, I'd love to see a Chompers Adventure 2 that goes bigger in all aspects!

[Love Me Newgrounds!!! <3 J00 2]

Quite the interesting visual novel you got here! Quite the eclectic bunch of characters and art styles that serves to keep you on your toes and always feel like you're experiencing new things and learning more about Newgrounds. Very impressed at the effort it must've taken to have so much voice acting and character/background art: never felt like I was experiencing those usual visual novel doldrums where you're just staring at the same art so long it gets burned into your screen. Wasn't expecting to see a continuation from the first one, but it's a nice surprise!

For the most part it's a nice adventure, but if I were to offer some feedback:

*Kind of feels like the story and humor in this game trends towards, for lack of a better word, 'purple-monkey-cheese-dishwasher' jokes and what feels like inside jokes between friends, leaving me feeling awkward, like I'm reading something not only outside my age/demographic but more so not meant for public consumption, more for just between friends. It's not bad, of course, and it's likely fully intentional as hey, it's a Newgrounds game on Newgrounds so what better place would you publish this, but still, as someone who isn't part of the forums or art circle, I felt a bit weird, like I'm at a party with people I don't know or reading someone's diary that is not meant for me.

*Due to an overstuffed cast that all has to take their turn saying their bit, the pacing of the game can be a bit slow, particularly at the intro where it takes so long to get to the actual main premise and gameplay: they spend so much time hammering in the same recapped point (though to be fair, MC-kun deserves to have it hammered in). It can feel so pointless as well since some characters can take up so much time with their antics despite not even being plot essential.

*A lot of the characters seem they aren't differentiating themselves in great ways: the initial introduction for all them felt like deja vu where they practically repeated the same amount of being chill and cheering up MC-kun and MC-kun thinking that hey, they could be a cool friend, blah blah blah. Sometimes it feels like they have no states inbetween being super chill peptalkers or batshit nutjobs, haha!

*Script is riddled with a lot of typos and odd phrasings that should've been proof-read out, though I suppose it's not that much of an issue in this case since it somewhat adds to the comical appeal. Also sometimes a person will still be talking but their nametag won't be present anymore above the text: usually happens when they have multiple lines but not always?

*Game can be a bit unfair at times: on the first day I went to the dorms without exhausting all of my options yet and MC-kun went to sleep and advanced time, making me miss out on all the other options. Bizarrely, the very next day it actually does warn you of this very thing if you try to go to sleep before talking to everyone, so it was weird it didn't before. Furthermore, it feels kind of bad that the game seems to immediately railroad you into events for a certain character so early on before you really get to know them: I chose a person in my dreams thinking it would just maybe get a slight inclination to their potential ending, only for that to practically lock me in.

*The fact that voice acting is very inconsistent (in that it can jump back-and-forth, sometimes within the same scene, as to whether someone gets fully voice-lined or just grunts) can create an awkward feeling to the conversations. Grunts as well can be quite repetitive: I recall a scene where Faye is talking to the locker duo where she kept repeating the same grunt over and over and it took me outta the moment.

Still haven't made it to the end yet, but I'll keep you posted!

EDIT: Yay, I'm part of a DDR trio! It's all I ever wanted! Thank youuuu

Bleak-Creep responds:

Most of this seems pretty fair. The scope of this game admittedly got a bit too big for its own good, and in some choices, like the lack of voice acting for certain parts of the game, were made just to finally release it, since we were already so far behind schedule.

As for the initial conversations in the school, you make a good point. We originally required the player to meet each character before going to bed for the first time, but I removed this requirement for the sake of speeding up the pacing after the lengthy intro. In doing so, I forgot to add a “Are you sure?” sort of confirmation, which I’ll have to go back and fix in the next update.

I hope you enjoy the rest of the game too! The routes do lock in early, but since they’re all different, the experience is almost completely new for each playthrough.

[Newgrounds Ms-Paint Collab II]

Pretty dang cool art collab! I always appreciate it when an art collab presents the art in a very interesting and creative way (aka not a slideshow) and this does that in spades with its very cool 3D gallery space which not only presents the art, but has a bunch of hidden easter eggs and all-around cool architecture!

A particular point of pain for me with this gallery, however, was the lack of artist credit/connection: would've loved if there were some way we could click on an artist's name to go directly to their profile (so we could follow them and see their other art pieces) or if we could click on the art itself to go directly to the art piece on newgrounds (so we could vote and comment on it). It's true that some people will make the effort to look up the artist or the piece themselves, but any measures you can take to make it easier will help increase engagement.

There were also some other points of confusion, like how some plaques were missing altogether (perhaps intentionally anonymous), plaques weren't present for some of the art assets like the resident evil items or easter egg trenchcoat agent in the fire, some plaques are too low to the ground to be able to read (perhaps a crouch button should be added), and some plaques just have godawful font choices that hurt readability, haha!

SageIsReal responds:

I aint reading all dat