FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[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

[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.