FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Tricolor]

Not bad! It's a pretty decent little arcade game that has a solid easy-to-grasp-but-difficult-to-master color-matching mechanic: it's quite addictive and I had a nice time seeing how far I could get.

Now, not every game needs to have hundreds of hours of lasting appeal: it's fine for a simple game like this to exist for a few minutes of hi-score fun. But I couldn't help but feel like this game just didn't provide enough to whet my appetite, as not only does the game cap out its speed fairly early on and then just becomes a test of patience before you get bored, but the game doesn't evolve by introducing new mechanics or levels or modes of play, as usually these type of games do. It'd be great if maybe the colors coming down the stream can switch colors so you need to react, or maybe the game suddenly has you managing two streams of colors coming at your device, or even managing two devices with their own streams at the same time! You could even have two color machines that overlap each other and you need to make color combinations that match a stream of all sorts of colors to really test your color theory chops! Hopefully you can take this as a compliment to how ingenious your game concept was and how it really built up my expectations for more!

[Dogfights in SLZ]

Hmm, this game is a bit of an odd duck.

On the one hand, it does seem to be pretty well-made and has a lot of juice and polish to the gameplay: overall feels very fun to jet around and blast enemies in a way similar to Luftrausers.

But then on the other hand, every compliment I can give to the game is only because it's pretty much just a straight up Luftrausers clone: in a way, I'm not complimenting you, I'm complimenting the developers of Luftrausers. This game just feels creatively bankrupt and has no actual soul or contribution it brings to the table, so it brings into question what am I supposed to commend you for?

Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with following examples from games we love and even copying certain techniques or gameplay concepts, and recreating/remaking things can be a good way to practice or appreciate art. But in terms of a game that you want to consider yours and sell for actual money, I feel like we need some sort of evolution or addition in your version that changes it up, as when all this game is just a worse version of Luftrausers since it doesn't contain any of its cool music or variety of enemies or progression and so on and so forth, why would I ever play or even purchase this over the original? Heck, even some of the additions the game does have like the powerups, I found very annoying to gather, so it doesn't really get a point in that regard either.

There also look to be some performance issues at play where the game seems to slowdown over time, and unfortunately not in that cool nostalgic way where the slowdown is almost helpful to get through heavy action sequences as the slowdown persists after the action is done.

I suppose you could make the argument that the actual product being sold is a bundle and this is just one of those within, so perhaps you can get more bang for your buck, but this doesn't exactly give me confidence in the rest of the games in the bundle.

I think this, if viewed as a practice piece or a student project of recreating the techniques used in games like Luftrausers, it's ok. But in terms of a game that expresses anything new or is worth money, I don't think it's there. Best of luck in future developments though as, in a way, this does demonstrate some programming chops in being able to somewhat recreate the good gamefeel of Luftrausers.

[The Mysterious Cat Tower - Chapter I]

Pretty decent RPG you got going here! Always get a bit worried about these as they are usually a dime-a-dozen and an indie dev's bane as the amount of development needed for them can lead to burnout/unfinished products, but this left a pretty good first impression with its cute and quirky world and characters and decently polished and interesting combat system.

My favorite part of the game is definitely how quickly the combat starts to get strategic. After the brainless first fight against that scorpion-serpent boss thing, I was really worried that the game was just gonna be yet another RPG where you spam attack over and over. Luckily, it didn't take long for the game to start introducing enemies with certain strengths and weaknesses that you need to strategize for, like how the gunner crabs are tanky when they have allies around so you should kill them last, or how certain enemies are weak against magic, and you have to think about your turn economy and so on. Very glad to see it!

In a similar vein to above, though I haven't been able to fully test it, I was glad to see interesting skills and talents that go beyond just boring statistical increases, but actually open up new methods of play and build expression. The customization from the sheer amount of moves was crazy involved with so much variety it practically felt to the point where I could change people's jobs to all sorts of things which is neat (though I worry that perhaps it might be too much customization that hurts their original character archetype, like while I could make the character not a blood mage, perhaps I shouldn't).

Minor complaints would be things like the map feeling a bit too linear at first, I didn't even realize there were other talent trees for quite awhile, I think there was a glitch with me being able to overuse my turn points (or the opposite of having them cut short when I still have remaining), I don't like how the stat menu doesn't separate your base stats from your boosted stats from accessories, the arcane crystals being a bit worrisome/stressful in their limited quantity (I imagine you technically get an abundance of this so it's not a problem, but it's common to get worried you might run out, compared to something infinite like getting healed at save points), and that while it is decent, it is a bit generic and, for want of a better word, anime-y and cringe-y, but it's all good for the most part, and I wish you the best of luck with future development!

[They had to be pixels]

Hmm, bit of a mixed bag! Kinda felt like a horror-esque Warioware game collection, or perhaps one of those budget '100 games in 1' CDs or a single-man game-jam where you'd find where it's got some decent little experiences.

I could go on about the details for each games, with some of them being kinda neat, others being a bit tedious, others being a bit confusing, deaths being so punishing, and so on and so forth, but overall feels like a bit of a quantity-over-quality situation where they are just recycling the same scenario and mechanics but making minor cosmetic adjustments in a vain attempt to stretch it out. As usual, there's a good amount of novelty in the presentation and experimentation, and it's not bad (especially given the low development time), but perhaps might've just liked a more solid fleshed-out single experience!

It didn't help that the game barely seemed to be holding itself together at times with glitchy/exploitable pathfinding from enemies making them feel less threatening, mission-critical items randomly spawning within walls making them impossible to pick up, wonky collision detection that can get you stuck in walls, and so on: really made me less inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt.

adriendittrick responds:

Yeah that's true, I barely spent any time on the physics engine, it's literally just a pixel perfect collision script with the background :p and yes, I was going for the quantity aspect in this one.

[Duck Spray]

While I am sympathetic to bad happenstance leaving you with an unfinished game...it does just feel like an unfinished game and might've been better left unreleased. Yes, the game is rather cute in many respects, but so many elements to it just felt bad, repetitive, or confusing, like the economy driven through stealing mail, evading the police only possible through purchasing clothes through grinding, brainless spray painting with no interesting mechanics to it, and it didn't take long for me to get completely lost and end up falling into a bottomless pit. Again, sorry for your loss, but I have to be honest that I didn't have a good time here and while it shows promise, I can only rate the game for what I got, not what it could've been.

[Robot Factory]

Quite the interesting little game! Overall I feel like the game is pretty professionally crafted with nice and polished presentation and gamefeel, and it delivers a nice short and sweet story which is enhanced through the design mechanics. It's a nice little Papers Please-esque game, though I will stay that, for me, it did feel a bit predictable, didn't utilize its systems to the greatest potential, and ended in a bit of a dull blankness, even when considering the intentional depressing story!

In terms of feedback:

*There was a consistent audio bug that would happen around the third level where the audio would start crackling and fizzling out until it was silent. Occasionally the audio would sputter back in momentarily before disappearing once again. Really bummed out as for all I know you might've had some cool audio/musical cues to enhance the story but I wouldn't know, so it really hurt the experience.

*I know it's a short game, but I was really shocked at the boneheaded decision to not implement a save/load system for the game, as you'd think it seems tailor-made to have checkpoints for each work session, no? Not only do I think it's silly to force that I'm expected to do this all in one sitting, but when I got the audio bug mentioned above, I restarted the game to fix it, only to see that I would have to start from the very beginning: not really the greatest feeling to get screwed over by something that's not my fault!

*A minor annoyance, but I was disappointed that there was no way to fast-forward dialogue: usually games allow you to click while text is filling out to instantly fill it to the end, but that wasn't present here. Not a huge issue, but it can be a bit frustrating for speedreaders or replayers.

*I'm not sure how the health/condition stat works? I tried experimenting by intentionally getting my health very high and very low and it didn't seem to do anything, which made all my fretting and planning feel for naught (though really I always had enough money to live comfortably, so the pressure wasn't there anyway). I'd expect low health to maybe cause robots to appear at a slower frequency, or maybe for more subtle/tricky defects to appear, or maybe for foggy/warped vision, but it all seemed the same. My fear is that it might be a bit of a red herring that doesn't actually do anything, which seems like a waste of a good concept.

*Story was ok, but I felt like it might've advanced a bit too quickly. There were some characters like Ben that got sacked too early when they still could've added more to the story by being a bit of a nail that sticks out: could've had more infighting against him to cause pressure before they feel silly for doing so since the greater threat was automation, for instance.

*The decision to have dialogue occur during gameplay was a bit of a contentious one. On one hand, I think it adds a bit to the experience as you could decide to prioritize work and ignore the small-talk from your fellow employees, or try to split your attention to stay social but at risk of causing blunders in your work. But it did feel a bit unfair as some people are just better at multitasking or speedreading so you don't even feel the intended pressure in that case (like me), while the people who aren't get screwed and feel slighted since most games treat talking as a time-freezing free action.

*There were some minor typos or incorrect/weird word choice here and there, like 'gormet' instead of 'gourmet' food, but nothing major.

*Bit disappointed as the gameplay gets quite repetitive with no evolution to it. I was really expecting that, similar to Papers Please, we would get more and more rules and more and more potential defects to keep us on our toes and be fearful of keeping our jobs, but no, everything stayed the same. Hell, even the initial tricks that the game hints at, what with minor dents or colors for antennae/eyes, never one popped up for me! I can understand that maybe the game is trying to hammer in the dullness of the work, but I was struggling to make it through the last levels due to how boring it was getting.

*I'm not sure how the performance reviews work out and whether they even do anything at all? I never had a problem as I was consistently number one so maybe I just missed out, but I wasn't sure whether it ever considered quality or quantity or anything like that. I did make a mistake and approved a robot that should've been rejected, but I never got chewed out or pressured like I expected to be, and my ranking remained the same. Again, feels like a lot of these features that would be good to add pressure like rankings and health and so on are just paper tigers.

*Bit of a downer ending! Don't get me wrong, I wasn't expecting for some sort of feel-good ending where we rebel against the system and save humanity and everything's sunshine and rainbows: yes, I was totally expecting a depressing conclusion and think that's fine. But even with that expectation, it wasn't that this ending was sad, it was just...nothing. Like, "wait, that's it?" I can't tell you what it should've been, and again, I'm not expecting good vibrations and can totally understand if you were intentionally going for bleakness, but I just felt like there could've been more, even if it's just one more epilogue scene at the very least.

*And don't feel like you need to make apologies for making a sad game: it's perfectly fine to do so, and being all apologetic just feels silly, lacks confidence, and hurts the game's reputation. Own it!

Chris responds:

Your point on the saving/checkpoint system for the audio bug is a really good one. I tried a few different things to fix that audio bug but couldn’t for the life of me fix it. I’m thinking in my next game I’ll include a button which creates a suspend save so that you can refresh the page and jump right back in where you left off. That way if the bug sticks around (hopefully it won’t) theres a simple work around for players.

[Pep-Pel]

This was a bit of an odd duck. I think the game has a lot of potential as a cool momentum-based platformer akin to something like Fancy Pants Adventures, but unlike something like Fancy Pants Adventures where everything felt so immediately intuitive and smooth, this one felt incredibly restrictive and frustrating to get used to its movement.

I understand it's all about momentum and going fast and yes, once you're doing that it goes alright, but the game is just so unforgiving as when it comes to making minute adjustments or recovering from slight mistakes or shifting directions as it's either impossible or laborious. The game just has a constant feel like you're simultaneously covered in sticky glue while also sliding on ice, and also feeling like you're weighed down while simultaneously in zero-gravity: it's just bizarre and hard to describe!

Things that should be simple like jumping precisely from platform to platform from a standstill leave you either jumping straight up and not going forward at all, or leave you jumping forward and most likely over/under shooting it, and certain moves like the double jump almost feel like a punishment you want to avoid using because it hits the breaks on your momentum and leaves you floating like a fool.

Now, I don't want to write off the game completely, as what we have here might be a situation like Resident Evil with its tank controls, where while the controls might be frustratingly restrictive, it's all done for a grander purpose and the game is designed around its limitations.

But still, there were a lot of moves that I wanted to pull off that I couldn't figure out if it were possible (for example, I wanted to detach from a rope I'm sliding down on midway, but pressing down and jump has me jump up and off the rope, not let go and go down) and there were a lot of controls that I had difficulty with grasping, such as the way the game handles curved surfaces like half-pipes or loop-de-loops.

When it came to those curves, it seems like the game is trying to be generous in that you just keep pressing whatever your initial direction was, which was confusing because my natural instinct was to alter the direction I was moving based on where I was in the curve, but this caused me to fall off the curve. Furthermore, the game is also a bit too sticky/attached when it comes to curves: once I reached the top of the curve and wanted to dismount, I'd press a new direction, but my guy would stay attached to the curve and move backwards on it instead. Basically it's the same thing as before: even when I tried my best to get used to what the game wanted me to control like, it still just felt so stifling.

Basically yes, once I spent a considerable amount of time with the game to both get used to the controls and know the levels beforehand, I started to have fun, but before that was an incredibly frustrating learning process. To me, it feels like a case where the levels and controls might work perfectly in the developers mind since they are already familiar with it, but they might not have been constructed enough to teach and adapt to a layman's diverse set of potential impressions and expectations, and could maybe do with either a bit of loosening up to allow for the wiggle room of making mistakes, or have a better tutorial/onboarding process to get us used to its intricacies.

As a side note: I do like the zoomed-out camera since it allows us to see ahead, but I felt bummed out that it's so zoomed out that we can't see our cute character's animations and expressions at all!

[GAPPY & THE RED EYESORE]

Hmm, bit mixed on this one: I think it has a lot of potential and a nice variety in mechanics once you get into the later levels, but I feel like it really gives a bad first impression, doesn't quite reach its full potential and I wouldn't blame a lot of people dropping it very early, even myself (I only stuck around the whole way due to morbid curiosity and due to the Gappy brand).

When talking about bad first impressions, I'm not talking about the obvious bad first impression which is the eponymous 'red eyesore' graphics...though that is still a valid point that the graphics are both painful and quite boring/repetitive at times. I'm not necessarily referring to the bad impression that the controls can be as well, with certain aspects like walljumping being very much broken and frustrating to utilize.

No, when it comes to bad first impressions, I'm more talking about the levels and how long it took for them to get good. I can accept a Gappy game being a more standard platformer instead of an endless runner, but unlike a Gappy game, this did not grab me right from the start, and it took until around world 4-5 to give me any sort of challenge or spark of engagement in my brain, any of that classic 'Gappy' feel.

While all of the worlds introduce their own unique mechanic like rock form or reverse gravity or what-have-you and I do like that variety aspect, they all felt very token and underutilized and many of the early worlds end before doing anything interesting with them, or right when it was finally getting good. For example, the rock form can be used to break hard blocks, but so many of the levels just gave you rock powers right in front of hard rocks, making it feel practically pointless.

Even when you think it'd do something creative like make you go down an alternate path and get through some obstacles to come back with rock form, it just gives you a shortcut back instead of having you go back through the obstacles which now might have to be tackled in a new way due to your added weight from rock form: what a wasted opportunity! There are just so many instances of this where the level design is boring and challenge non-existent: as said, eventually it pulls some interesting tricks, but it takes until the way later worlds to do this instead of starting out strong.

At the end of the day, it was promising but quite clunky, but I guess you can take that as an achievement because, well, it's Gappy...on Virtual Boy! I mean, what else would you expect? It's very on-brand in its knock-off feel, I suppose, haha!

[Mr. Stretch and the Stolen Fortune DEMO]

Hmm, this was a bit of a mixed bag for me! I do feel like the game has a lot of promise and I want to love it: the whole stretching concept is kinda neat and reminds me of some of my classic favorites like Oil's Well, the game's presentation and polish is great and looks pretty cool, and the game did seem to be introducing a lot of new mechanics as the levels went on to keep things fresh.

But despite the game making a great first impression, it kind of fell flat for me, unfortunately, in a few different aspects.

*The controls of the game felt a bit frustrating at times: trying to make particular movements like sharp turns and such required getting used to the slight lag that the game had. The fact that retracting makes you completely lose control during the whole way back was a bit of a bummer too, as I would've loved being able to cancel halfway or something to pull off some slick moves.

*I felt like the retracting was way too slow: I don't mind it for during gameplay as that's part of the strategy, but I wish that retracting when you win a level or when you get hurt and so on would do it much faster: felt very boring to wait in those instances.

*Basic UI/Menus/etc were a bit awkward to traverse: it relies too much on buttons with unclear icons (would love if hovering over an icon would tell you what it does in words) and buttons can be placed in bad positions (you'd think the button to go to the next level after beating one would be big and placed in an obvious place like the lower center or lower right, but no, it's on the upper left, the last place I would think to look).

*Journals and tutorials and dialogue were way too wordy, in a tiny font, and filled with unnecessary details that just made my eyes glaze over. Recall the two magic phrases: "brevity is the soul of wit" and "a picture is worth a thousand words". I don't mind some optional lore for fun flavor on the side, but please reduce the words to the bare essentials when communicating mechanics, spread the words out over more pages/boxes to reduce density, and rely more on pictures overall. If you must keep your overindulgent word count, at least bold/highlight the important words so someone can get the gist at a glance.

*Level design and order felt outta whack at times with tons of weird difficulty spikes and difficulty valleys. For example, there was a really simple level with no obstacles after delivering several hard ghost-infested levels: felt really weird. The worst was the level that introduces crumbling blocks, which you'd think would start with a simple level to get you used to the concept of crumbling blocks, but no, it not only gives you crumbling blocks for the first time, but also conflates that with a really complicated layout that is incredibly boring to get through as you constantly need to wait for patrols to slip past, and you can screw yourself over if you crumble too many blocks to ruin your return trip: such a crazy difficulty spike outta nowhere!

*General design felt confused. On one hand, you've got levels that seem to reward you committing to a long stretch to get a high score point combo, and I found that a lot of fun to do while dodging obstacles and avoiding running into myself and such. But on the other hand, other levels don't allow you to stretch out due to an overabundance of ghosts and other obstacles which require you to stop-and-retract constantly, completely ruining any potential of combo scores in the first place. I can understand having some variety, but this just feels like it doesn't have a strong core identity.

Muketronics responds:

This is a demo, and it is the first game that we've made. Its still in it's drafting stages, especially when regarding dialog and journal entries.
We are working on improving controls, but its hard to find out exactly what makes them so difficult to use.

[Asgard's Fall]

Pretty nice little survivors-like! It's early in development, but I'd say you got a pretty solid foundation so far as I found the combat quite satisfying and addictive with how you'd setup the graphics, special effects, and impact/feedback for it, and I found the variety of weapons and enemies to fight to be very fun and interesting as well. Game overall has some pretty solid presentation for aspects like the title screen and menus and death animations too, so I like that attention has been made to aspects like these that are usually glossed over (though it'd be understandable if you left these for later on, but I like that you've done them as they help first impressions).

In terms of where to go from here, my feedback would be:

*While, as mentioned, the feel of combat itself is quite fun and exciting, the feel of progression aspects isn't quite up to snuff. Picking up currency is lacking that addictive 'ding-ding-ding' quality to it due to no sound effects and the currency itself being quite dull (I dunno what they even are, some sort of scrap metal?), and acquiring upgrades is lacking the fanfare that it deserves considering how important of an event it is (would love a more explosive level up effect, and picking an upgrade would be great if it played some sort of associated sound effect, like thunder for picking Thor abilities).

*Combat can get quite messy and chaotic and could use some elements to help visibility, particularly to help enemy ranged units and their bullets stick out more so getting hit by them wouldn't feel so sudden and unfair: perhaps a signal/telegraph for their attacks and outlining the units and their bullets would help them pop-up and have a consistent language to them.

*Could also use some other nice things, like a visible bar or cooldown timer for your dash, and perhaps making the upgrade progression bar bigger so increasing it is easier to see: the later levels come so slowly and it's made even worse but the small bar as it makes it look like you aren't even increasing it at all even more when the increments are so tiny.

*The rune upgrades are a little lame compared to weapon upgrades as they largely seem to be tiny statistical upgrades that are confusing and unexplained (what the heck is ignite chance, for instance?)

SmaexGames responds:

Thank you! That is some solid feedback, really appreciated. For the rune upgrades I'm working on a more simplified but powerful version. For example all the confusing increasement stats (increased ignite damae and so on) are now only available in the skill tree, properly explained. Also I think about adding icons for faster recognition. So you have simpler stats like flat damage, piercing chance, more projectiles and stuff like that.