FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[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!

ChalTheChalkyOne 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!

[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.