FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Goblin Cobble]

Oof, this unfortunately felt like an unfinished rough draft of a prototype that probably shouldn't have been put up for public consumption, at least until significant post-game-jam work was done on it. There are glimpses of an interesting concept here and some nice little touches like the building animations, but it's just too buggy, confusing and unwieldly in its current state.

I really have no idea what I'm supposed to be accomplishing in the game and what the stars at the end of the level signify. For example, am I just supposed to kill the heroes as fast as possible, or am I supposed to let them have a long run and feel good before they get struck down? Could've used some more instructions and story cinematics between levels to explain goals.

The controls are very awkward to deal with. I don't know why rooms are drag and drop, yet the assets like treasure chests and goblins are click to select and then click to place: shouldn't they work the same? The hitboxes for picking assets also was weird to target at times as well.

Game was also very buggy: for example, if you place assets down in a room but then re-construct the room, you lose the assets within and can get in an unwinnable situation if it was the way that contained the stairs!

There's a lot more to comment out but I'll save my breath. Feels like an unfortunate case of overambition and game jam time limits clashing: tale as old as time and nothing to be ashamed about as it happens to every indie dev!

[Bullet Happy]

Not too shabby of a little game! The concept is a decent reversal and makes for some fun fast-paced gameplay, and overall the game has a decent amount of polish and nice special effects to make it exciting. Had a good little time with it.

In terms of feedback:

The whole mechanic of nullifying enemies blue which opens them up for a glory kill felt a little unnecessary in its current state. Yes, it is satisfying to finish them off in such a manner, but because they aren't able to recover from their nullified state over time, there is no reason or incentive to finish them off quickly, making the sword slashing feel like just a victory lap: at a functional level, they're already dead and the enemies may as well just self-destruct immediately without needing to be slashed. If they did recover over time, however, that might've added some more interesting combat where you need to split priorities.

The difficulty curve is a bit out of whack in both directions: it takes several levels way too long at the start of the game to get to an acceptable level of challenge which makes restarts painful, and then near the end it gets way too hard that it was as well be impossible (unless I'm missing something). Got extremes on both ends!

The decision to make the boundaries where missed bullets will hurt the player not match the bounadries of the player's walkable area creates an annoying, hopeless situation where when a bullet passes the walkable area, all you can do is watch the bullet fly, unable to stop it until you take damage or die. Hurts way worse to have that moment of hopelessness with no recovery rather than just taking damage immediately. Maybe the area between the two boundaries should be walkable and have the bullets turn red as a warning, or maybe even slow down, to make recovery possible and create more excitement.

[No Time 2 Slime!]

Hoo boy, this one was a really rough one for me, as it really felt like the most 'style-over-substance' game I've ever experienced in my reviewing career.

Expectations were so high based on initial impressions, and can you blame me? The game looks and sounds absolutely gorgeous, looking like it would feel right at home on the SNES next to my copy of Spike McFang. And hey, it's not even just the presentation, but the gameplay itself felt smooth too, and I liked the interesting Pac-man concept of gathering up power as a weakling until you turn the tables and become the aggressor: not only is the game reversing roles by having you play as a lowly slime, but you also reverse roles with your transformation gameplay, that's worth double points for meeting the game jam theme!

But after only a few minutes of playtime, my expectations plummeted and I've never felt so let down. It's really just the one room, summoning the same one type of goblin that you can easily dodge and beat, over and over? No evolution to the enemy types? No new rooms to move onto? I felt like that Zuko scroll gif, saying "that can't be it...where's the rest of it?" I kept playing more and more hoping that I'd somehow unlock new content or someone would show up to tell me the code to continue...but nobody came.

Now I do understand it was a game jam game, so don't get me wrong in that I didn't expect a very long game, but goodness, I think it's reasonable to expect a game that lasts more than a single minute! When it comes to game jams, I think the focus should be put on implementing a fun and unique concept, and to this end I would much rather prefer a big fun game with programmer art of colorless squares than this beautiful ga...well, can you even call it a game? Yes, it does show some promise, at least in the asset creation department, but I have absolutely no idea what type of concept or gameplay this is trying to prototype and how it would evolve into a full game from how little is to be played here.

Look, obviously you got a really talented team, and it's rough to make a game in game jam time limits and all that jazz, but I gotta review based on what I got, and what I got was a huge disappointment that didn't live up to initial impressions nor your historic pedigree. Take it as a compliment that you got me so built up initially. Best of luck in future!

[twenty, in total]

Cute little adventure! Made me think of those time-loop-gather-info-till-final-speedrun games like Majora's Mask, Deathloop, or most precisely Minit, but in a much shorter form: perhaps it should be called Secint? After all, I'm not even sure what the title was referring to.

Overall the game was nice: decent bit of variety in the puzzles for each key, cute graphics, polished presentation/gamefeel, nice dev room reward, and so on. Only negative aspects I could think of was that the box-pushing puzzle could be unfairly hard because of the awkward physics, and that, as mentioned before, the game was incredibly short and couldn't help but feel unsatisfied and wish there were even more worlds and puzzles to do! If only the twenty in total was the amount of keys to collect!

BNTFryingPan responds:

The twenty refers to the starting time (17 seconds) plus the number of keys (3)

[Switch.tv]

Not too shabby! Feels like a combination of plufmot's "basically" series combined with a streaming theme all wrapped in some classic Warioware-style gameplay. For a game jam game that was constructed quickly, it's understandably a bit rough in some areas, but it's not a bad concept and can provide some good chuckles on the first go.

However, while it does feel fun and fresh on the first go, subsequent plays of the same minigames become very tedious which is unfortunately very bad for a Warioware-style game since that's supposed to be part of the appeal. For example, you've got the pokemon minigame which has a rather lengthy intro to get to the actual gameplay part, and many of the minigames have very lengthy outros. While the game does provide ways to skip them and tries to shove that option in the face of the user as much as possible so they know about it, I feel like the better way would be to make the game snappy enough to not require a skip option in the first place. Even putting that aside, most of the games don't seem to have a good amount of variation to them to keep you on your toes.

As a side note, I know we're most likely supposed to feel great at screwing them over, but sometimes I honestly feel bad for them! Maybe it just hits a bit too close to home, or take it as a compliment that the acting was effectively and intentionally cringey.

Anyway, in its current state I feel like its a bit too rough, but I think it's a decent prototype that showcases a decent theme/concept for a Warioware-style game in there and could be great with some more polish and content, so in that regard, well done.

[Doodlepup's Missing Wagon]

Not bad! Certainly a cute little point-n-click adventure that had an impressive amount of depth to it with its multiple endings and all sorts of choices, as well as a focus on trying to be nice in this dangerous world. In particular I though the minigame where you have to try very hard to keep yourself cool and say nice things was interesting: I find that way more authentic than typical dialogue in games where its way too easy to take your time and always pick the right answer, and I'd like to see more games take after that!

While it was nice, I did feel like the game, for the most part, was a little bit repetitive with its constant fetch-quests. I know it even mentions this as if to make fun of it, but I would've preferred if you didn't do it in the first place: you're not fooling me! Anyway, I was hoping that there would be a few more puzzle elements to it all that might require some brain power or item combinations or what-have-you. For example, maybe instead of just literally getting ketchup chips and bringing them back which is boring, you could've mayhaps found a bottle of ketchup or even red paint somewhere and a bag of french fries somewhere else, and try to combine them to create ketchup chips: obviously that's not how it works, but perhaps you could've gotten a joke out of this shoddy imitation, like perhaps the guy doesn't even taste the difference when you give them to him?

There was also a bug I encountered where I couldn't interact with Beatrice and her bag of chocolate bars when she first appeared: only once I left the shop and entered back in was she now interactable. Odd!

Finally, and this is a bit of an odd complaint, but I did feel like the game was a bit awkward to play, as it felt like I was reading someone's fanfic that's filled with inside jokes and lore and friend shout-outs that I'm not knowledgeable about. Felt like it wasn't really made for public consumption, but just shared amongst some select friends, in a way. But hey, at the end of the day I was still able to have fun with the game and got the general gist of it all, and heck, what am I talking about, as where else would a Newgrounds fangame be submitted besides Newgrounds?

Loopykins responds:

I was really looking forward to receiving your feedback on the game, and I'm genuinely grateful that you took the time to play and share your thoughts!! Your input means a lot to me, and I'm thrilled that you enjoyed the game and had fun with it, despite some awkward moments. I completely understand your point about the fetch quests being a bit repetitive, and I intentionally acknowledged that while writing the game. I'm still learning and growing with ActionScript, so there's definitely room for improvement, and your feedback helps me identify areas to work on. I'll for sure work on improving those aspects with future projects. I also want to apologize for the bug.

Most of the content I create on Newgrounds is primarily for myself and my close friends, but it's awesome when people beyond that circle also appreciate and enjoy it. That's why I choose to share it around. The story to the game is a giant shitpost. Not supposed to be taken seriously in the slightest, but I had fun with making it.

Although I generally don't respond to reviews - beyond a reaction to show I read it - unless they're from friends or people I'm familiar with, I genuinely value the feedback, including the constructive criticism you've provided. Thank you so much for that!

This game represents a significant step in my journey as a game developer. As time goes on, I plan to dive deeper into coding and explore more ideas with mechanics, storytelling and the likes, which will hopefully lead to even better games in the near future. Your encouragement and input inspire me to continue. Thank you again for your kind words and thoughtful review; it truly motivates me to keep pushing forward!

[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!

ChalTheChalk 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.