FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[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.

[Amazing Monk]

Hmm, in terms of a student project game, it's decent: you kept the feature scope low so as to deliver a full game without falling into the usual trap of being too overambitious and never finishing, and while the gameplay design is simple, it can still provide an adequate amount of fun with its strategic jumping and dodging of obstacles that get progressively more complex. It's a good start with much to learn and create future projects from.

Viewing it without that student project context, however, the game is quite bog-standard and a bit boring, being very similar to thousands of other simple 'Flappy Bird'-esque games of its ilk. It's lacking any sort of hook or mechanic to make it significantly different in an interesting way (for example, the game could maybe provide a more interesting challenge if there were some sort of pressure that pushes you to go up faster, like lava coming up), and the game is a bit clunky and lacking both polish (in that there are elements like grappling onto the wall to slowly grind down that don't work consistently) and pizazz (in that there aren't many special effects to pep things up, and the special effects you do have, like the screen shake for every single jump, are nauseating due to their repetitiveness).

As said, it is quite boring in the grand scheme of things, but it's still an important step on the journey of game creation and perfectly fine for a student project: best of luck on future developments!

[Escape Burger World]

Decent little escape game! Nothing standout or mindblowing but it was a short and sweet little experience, and the art having this old-school flash style is amusing in how nostalgic it is. Not great, but not bad either: plainly ok, haha!

In terms of feedback:

*Found it confusing how they were clickable objects in the environment that didn't give any textual response: some were because they require an item to be used on them (in which case I'd love some hint text to appear if you click without the item on hand) and some weren't used at all for any purpose like the cash register or plaque, which was odd as it made them feel important when they weren't.

*I actually got stuck for a good portion of time because I didn't see the lower-right arrow in the behind-the-counter area to access a whole new area: you can blame this on me for being dumb because the arrow is there and I could've noticed it, but some part of me feels like the background art should allude more to there being an area there in the first place (like a door, or a gap that implies a hallway off to the side).

*The safe code at the end was a weird one to solve: there's a nearby paper which I thought was a hint that alludes to scheduling which made me think the code might be something to do with dates or employee ids or whatever, but instead the code was just on a random unrelated box in storage. Furthermore, the graphic for the safe code input makes it look like it's 5 digits, but you can put up to 8 digits in, and the solution is actually 6 digits, further adding to the confusion.

*Some minor glitches like the mouse hole overlapping the box which you can drag out, and the whole ice cream dispenser machine was some sort of pointless red herring which dispensed ice cream later on for no discernable reason?

[Grave Digger]

Argh, this is a rough one! Shows some solid potential for beat-em-up fun but has way too many rough, unpolished, clunky points to it as of now.

The game does show some solid fundamentals that could be used to build a great action roguelike akin to Curse of the Dead Gods or Cult of the Lamb and so on. For example, I liked how enemies showed lots of variety in their behaviors, displayed fair attack telegraphs, and could be satisfyingly stunned/interrupted with the player's attacks. I liked the weighty feel to the player's attack strings and being able to chop down parts of the environment. I liked how the game incentivizes you to not play cowardly by giving you powers as long you keep your combo up. There's a decent hack-and-slash engine within this!

Unfortunately, there were definitely loads of annoyances that brought this game down though. The incredibly harsh tilted angle of the playing field combined with the barely noticable shadows made perceiving objects very difficult, especially when combined with the very small screen size and zoomed-out camera. Coins were very annoying to pick up without any magnetism or hit box generosity. Damage feedback, especially from the little pink blob guys, could be incredibly confusing with them turning on a dime to hit you or even being able to hit you despite being knocked down. The combo text pop-ups took up way too much of the screen which hurt visibility, and the associated combo power-ups felt too random to be able to actively strategize. The movement of the character felt very clunky where they awkwardly keep moving despite letting go of the controls. And so on and so forth.

As said, while the bad far outweighs the good at the moment, I feel like there is a good engine buried in here and would love to see a post-jam polished version of it.

[Dinner For Mom!]

I definitely like the concept that this game is going for with its whole control-control Pikmin-esque or Tonight We Riot combat, and I do like the charming presentation and gross themes it plays with, but apart from the bare minimum I never quite felt like it introduced a unique hook, making the gameplay feel quite uninteresting.

Thoughout the game the combat just felt a bit brainless and tedious. I can understand that the civilians would be easy to take down, but once cops started to show up, I thought I would have to strategize in some way, like engaging carefully to single them out without alerting the others, micromanaging their movements to avoid taking damage, perhaps splitting them up to crowd-control, and so on, but it never got more complex than just sending all your people to dogpile them and the other cops would just stand around waiting for their beat-down.

The enemies never tried to attack me either so I didn't need to try and dodge while my minions wear them down or anything. The boss made some interesting moves like forcing my lumps to sleep which made me have to get close and engage to bring them back up, but it was too little too late as that was the end of the game and just a token effort of complexity. Other than that, there were the weapons like rocks, but I found it too annoying to have to order them to pick them up after use over and over, and the grenades were just a liability since I'm never sure when the grenade person will get ordered and he'll just blow all of my lumps up anyway.

I also just had a lot of weird bugs, like where a rock was forever un-pickupable because someone I told to pick it up died and he wouldn't give up the rights even after death, and for no reason I just suddenly insta-died at the start of the boss fight (and then felt weird that the game just gave me more lumps than I even had before, making the final tally/score pointless).

Obviously I understand that it's a game jam game so it's not going to be the most polished thing ever, but even with that understanding, I never felt like the minion controlling aspect did anything very unique or was something that felt good to utilize, so I don't feel like it's that intriguing as a prototype unfortunately. Certainly could be something nice with a bit more work: as I said it started to get a bit interesting with the boss fight mechanics, and I'd like to see if it evolves beyond that.

Sulfur-Cretin responds:

completely understandable, the game in general is very messy but due to it being a jam game, making updates can end up breaking the entire game. I do agree that the game only starts to get interesting near the end, but I'm glad that part was fun.

Also just to note about the game giving you a bunch of lumps after dying, when making a jam game you have to look through a very different lens when it comes to difficulty if you want people to see through your entire game. I made it so if you reached a check point early on with a ton of lumps (lets say 12) it will override any amount lower when you get to a check point. This made the game much easier and fair but I can understand if it was a bit strange, it could use some rebalancing.

Even though the game isn't the greatest, I'm still planning on making a content update in the coming weeks because it's had the best reception out of all my games so far, but I don't see it fixing the base mechanics of the game. Thanks for the review, I get REALLY nervous watching you playing all the front-paged games, but I appreciate you giving your honest and critical opinion.