FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[The Spin Slasher]

Hrmm, it shows some promise, but unfortunately due to its nature it begs comparison to games like Vampire Survivors and its many contemporaries, and in that respect it falls incredibly short for me, essentially feeling like some sort of bootleg Vampire Survivors clone that is bugged to never let you get another weapon to add to your arsenal.

As said, it does show some promise. In general, the concept/theme is interesting and the graphics and special effects are decently charming. The best part that stands out from other survivors-likes is that this has a nice variety of monsters with different attacks and properties, like the bats who stop-and-go, the slimes who split and leave behind puddles that slow you, the zombies who can crawl after sawing their legs off, and so on. In theory I think it could have some nice strategic combat.

The game, however, ends up feeling very bland and repetitive both from a moment-to-moment and a long-term progression viewpoint. The upgrades are incredibly unexciting as they never evolve your gameplay options in any way, being just bland statistical increments that are practically unnoticable. You don't necessarily have to be like other survivors-like where you have multiple weapons going off simultaneously, but the single weapon this game has, the chainsaw, is very boring and begs a more interesting control scheme, like being able to swing it around all physics-y like a ball-n-chain. Apart from the enemies changing, late gameplay felt practically the same as early gameplay making it feel so pointless.

Perhaps with a bit more of an interesting combat mechanic (like more control over the chainsaw) and more interesting progression/upgrades, this could be pretty cool, but for me, it currently feels a bit underbaked and doesn't have a nice hook yet.

[Train Journey]

Wow, quite surprised with this one!

I have to admit that my first impression of the game wasn't great. While the game had a rather professional feel for its presentation in terms of graphics and sound, the game seemed to be a rather unchallenging and standard platformer that felt rather directionless and confusing from the way it just plops you into the world. Even accepting it for what it is, I found myself constantly having my jump inputs ignored when I tried to jump from the edge of platforms, frustrating me to no end since falling is instant death, not just damage, and lots of progress was lost. The graphics, as nice as they were, could also be a bit overly busy to the point of confusion: there was a pitfall that was practically invisible between seats on the train in the section with the first heart upgrade you can get after the forest world, for example. The only thing keeping me going was the rather mysterious and intriguing feel the game had to it with its story (or lack thereof), but as I made my way through the forest picking through all these text logs and letters for unrelated stuff, I was worried it was just gonna be some sad artsy-fartsy crap, haha.

However, as I made it through the forest which slowly got more challenging and puzzle-like, had a rather impressive boss fight against a bear, marveled at how much the world was recontextualized with the pogo stick upgrade, and made my way through the bonus zone for a collectible, I was hooked and wanted to play more and more! It was a slow, rough start but I could finally see a glimpse of the gameplay loop and wanted to see what new worlds the train would take me too!

That said, the issue with not being able to leave the game and come back to a checkpoint, only the start of the level from a train, was incredibly annoying when it first happened to me as I Iost a lot of progress to the point of considering quitting the game altogether since it seemed incredibly illogical and annoying, no matter the excuse.

I haven't beaten it yet, but I'm looking forward to coming back and seeing what else the game as to offer: I just need to find a good amount of time to set aside for this due to the whole save point issue!

EDIT: I've now made it through the temple level and got the shooty and all that. It was definitely another grand adventure, but I will admit it was quite exhausting and stressful and not in the best way. Through a combination of cramped corridors, limited space, spongy enemies, and so on, the game just seemed to be overly forcing you to deal with these encounters and traps with no wiggle room, and it made it very tedious. Many times a pack of slimes would be in my way and the only safe way to engage would be to tediously lead them back several paces until you could kill them: this tedium led to me just wanting to push back them and take the damage just so I could keep the pace up, for example. Not only that, there were a lot of traps like with the rotating turrets that didn't even seem possible to get through without taking damage, and it almost seemed like the game just gives you health items around the trap as an inelegant apology for recognizing that it just couldn't be designed well enough to let you not take damage at all. I'll still try and continue, but like I said, these design choices are really weighing me down and making me lose the will to go on.

Meivuu responds:

Thanks for the review! I'm not terribly good at optimizing pico-8 (it limits how much content you can actually implement, akin to retro consoles) so many of your gripes stem from that :)

If this was another engine I would absolutely be able to make the quality of life changes that fix the things you complained about, but at this point those things are deeply baked into the game and I don't have enough space in the game to change that (some of them were choices intentionally made so that the game could have more content). If you're wondering why I chose such a limited engine, it's because I was already fairly familiar with it and the limitations helped me actually finish the project and prevented it from getting too out of hand.

I think the pitfalls and other minor graphics tweaks like that can absolutely be changed though and I'll add that to my list of changes for the next release.

Among other challenges, the turrets are certainly dodgeable, in some cases it's just a little tricky to figure out how to get past them without getting hurt.

[The Wizard Ran: chapter 8]

Wow, what an amazing ending to this series! Feels like it encapsulated all of my favorite parts of this series, being the crazy time-travelling fourth-wall breaking mind-bending adventures, tons of weird secrets and references and callbacks, crazy puzzles and setpieces like getting stuck in the void, multiple endings, and a classic good ol' boss fight against god filled with fantastic spectacle. There's been some ups and some downs on this adventure, and I wasn't as committed as I'd like to get every single secret and ending on our way here in previous chapters, but I feel quite satisfied and found this whole experience incredibly memorable. Well done!

In terms of feedback:

I gotta admit, I was a little disappointed that the whole time-traveling adventures through previous chapters to collect lore for the final plan(s) wasn't done by actually going and playing the previous chapter's respective games, but I appreciate the convenience and momentum by doing it all in this game, so it's all good.

Had a weird softlock for a bit: I was going to do Shade's plan as I had already done the Run plan, but then got stuck in the void. I got out of the Boid, but then whenever I tried to start Shade's plan by refreshing the page to go back to the start, it would just take me back to the void again, where I would get out, try to start Shade's quest by refreshing, and loop back into the void over and over. Eventually I got out: not even quite sure what I did differently to break the loop! I was trying out minor things like reading the lore things, trying to do the Ran ending again, talking to people, and a lot didn't seem to have an effect until it did. Oh well!

Speaking of Shade's plan, it was a bit weird that I was able to initiate the boss fight but I still had a remaining empty pip for the plan? Bit odd, though I did go back and see that getting the remaining pip in the first world (or last world, technically) just tells you its pointless since it's too late and warps you to the fight, so whatev.

Loved all the music remixes! I always forget to shout out music and sound in my reviews, need to get better at doing so, haha.

Speaking of sound, I wonder what's being said when you die in New Mexico you die in real life. The world may never know.

adriendittrick responds:

Thanks as usual for your detailed review :) there are still many bugs in this one but finding them all will take much time and I need to move on to other projects X)
This whole series was a great gamedev experience for me, and I loved all the community interactions I had :)

[Hedgehog Dilemma For Robots]

Great little arcade game you got here!

For the most part, I have no major complaints as I feel like the game is a wonderful fusion of style and substance! For style, it's got a rather charming look and feel to it all with its cartoony graphics and some great juicy feedback and special effects, and for substance, it's got an addictive and exciting risk/reward gameplay loop through its proximity damage system and a great variety of enemies that force you to stay on top of things and improvise. I had a great time and it just feels so good to get in the thick of it with a bunch of enemies and blast them away!

If I were to have any complaints, is that I do find the metaprogression of the game to be a bit odd, in that it'll slowly dole out new abilities like blasting and such, but then eventually you just have everything from the very start and suddenly the game starts off harder: just feels a bit weird that, as a high score game, it's a bit unfair as the progressively different starting conditions and higher power you get make the scoring a bit compromised and unfair? Like whistlers are a big problem initially, but post-tutorial runs are much easier due to your higher firepower. I would almost expect that every run has you collecting the powerups to get more powerful to keep it consistent, though maybe that's not ideal. Oh, and the screen is so vertical that I find it impossible to fit the whole screen on a desktop computer.

Also, as a minor bit of confusion, I have no idea what the purpose of the 'draw' menu is supposed to be about. I guess it's a nice bonus? I was kind of expecting that whatever we draw would be added to the background play area, but it just gets deleted once you're done?

ClayGodLordThing responds:

Hey there! Thank you and I'm glad you like the game! The idea of the progression system is so that people don't have to experience the slower parts of the early game again once they get a bunch of the powerups. The early game can be a bit frustration/boring after a bunch of replaying so that was our solution. The draw room was something I just made for fun, you can share it around by screenshotting whatever you made or got as your score. That draw screen however runs better on the downloadable windows version.

[Days Without]

Hrmm, this is a rough one for me. The game does remind me a lot of cool 2D survival horror games like Lone Survivor, and when this game works, I think it is quite well-designed with some solid art, exploration, combat, and an intriguing story. Was impressed at some of the little touches it did for events, and that it was even going so far to include multiple endings!

It's quite the buggy game though! Here are a few examples:

I had one time where I saved at a dog, fell down a hole, then was sent all the way back to the start when I started the game despite me saving, and that felt really unfair (especially when it let me go back to the save point for other deaths/endings).

The worst issue was that there seems to be a really weird problem the game has with performance where it is constantly stuttering, perhaps due to it forcefully redrawing the inventory HUD over and over when you go past interactables?

Speaking of the inventory HUD, I had it remain on the screen even when I died and went back to the title screen and it was blocking text behind it, so there's definitely something funny going on with that.

There were also a lot of weird interactions where confusing options will be present (why is there an option to pet donut and pet buddy, aren't they the same?) and where you can walk around after petting a dog and after a brief delay you'll be frozen in place for the response (why not just keep us still for the whole interaction so it feels less awkward?)

Apart from bugs, the game is also a bit oddly designed. Felt like it was more of an action game than a survival horror game with the way it kept dumping me in huge loads of ammo, both from pickups found during searching and from killing enemies: would much prefer if the game limited your resources more to push stealth or avoidance as strategies, since being able to easily blow all of the enemies away just makes it too easy to the point of boredom.

It's certainly quite the interesting game and I want to love it, but the bugs, choppy performance, and lack of difficulty really kind of bring it down for me. It's a bummer because I think it could really shine if it just had some more polish to it!

Elv13s responds:

Hi!

Thanks for trying out the game, the game was made within a game jam limit so some bugs and the length were pretty much inevitable, tho Ill try and fix them [already fixed some] in the future when this game is expanded.

The HUD bug is new to me, if you like to elaborate on how and when it happened, ill try and fix this issue, thank u for finding it out, and sorry it happened to u.

the saving dog is different from Job's old dog, Buddy. It kinda implies in the story that he had one before the events of the game occurred.

yeah, the moving while some interactions can be quite the jarring experience, ill keep the player still when those happen. I just figured players may want to skip fights/dialogues for speedrun sake [also as this I a jam game, I wanted people to have to play the game faster as there were many entries to play through]

multiple endings are a last addition, so bugs can occur there, ill go back into this game and fix them. really thanks for the feed back and for playing

[BULLET WELL]

Hmm, I feel pretty mixed about this one!

From a presentation and story standpoint, I do find the game quite charming and goofy and it was quite amusing to listen to the dialogue and see what weird places the plot went to (though I'll admit it was a pain that there was no ability to skip/fast-forward text).

The gameplay itself, however, felt incredibly boring and lackluster. The levels were incredibly shallow and devoid of any sort of interesting combat, the upgrades were pointless as you just get all of them in the end, and the game ends right when it was getting at least slightly good with the boss fight. To add insult to injury, it was also completely compromised by buggy design: you can shoot through walls while enemies can't which makes it incredibly easy to clear out rooms without even having to leave your starting position, and the enemies pathfinding abilities are so dumb that they can easily get stuck on walls.

To me, it felt like this was a game that, due to game jam constraints, was both unable to create a compelling hook and was cut incredibly short, and therefore tried to make up for it with goofy humor. Certainly shows some promise, especially with the music, and I can sympathize, but I feel it doesn't have any actual core fun to it.

[Bando's Comic Wizard]

Quite the nice little application you've got here! Certainly nice to have something to help people display their comics in a simple and intuitive page flip format, and I had no problem following the instructions from cute widdle Bando to do a sample upload (though some of the instructions could stand to be spaced out a bit more so it's not just a big wall of text, such as putting the instruction to unzip the file for personal webpage uploads in a separate paragraph so users don't get confused as they should keep it as a zip for newgrounds uploads).

If I were to have some feedback, I'd say that the viewer is a bit too minimalist for its own good and while it'd be nice to have the option to view just the image with no clutter as it does now, I'd love if there were some additions such as:

It'd be nice if, when you hover over the right side of the page, a right arrow would pop-up to indicate that you'll flip to the next page if you click, and vice versa for the left side: it would make it less confusing as to what action is about to happen.

I feel like you should allow someone to press anywhere on the side of the screen to flip the page, instead of being constrained to only clicking directly on the sides of the image itself.

Would love if there were more utilities for viewing the page, such as being able to click on a magnifying glass to zoom in/out, or being able to choose whether to view pages through a fit width, fit height, original size, and so on.

Would love if there were more options for viewing pages, like maybe a gallery view where you can see all the pages as thumbnails to click on, or a dropdown where you can select a number page to go to, and so on.

I could go on with other additions that'd be great for different formats such as when you want the option for double-spreads or vertical comics, but I'll cut it off there since I could go on and on. Essentially the viewer is nice, but it is incredibly barebones and while that's nice for a minimalist impression and perfectly fine, it does make it a bit lackluster. It's still a nice gizmo though that I hope helps some people publish their comics in nice ways!

As a side note, I just wanted to say that I found the credits on the bottom page very amusing: reminded me of those hacked in rom credits you can see around, haha!

KittyhawkMontrose responds:

Thanks for the detailed feedback FuturecopLGF! It's super awesome to know that you found using the app as simple as we had hoped (formatting issues aside, which we will fix).

This first version we were concentrating on getting an "end to end" experience that worked well with NG (ie, streams images etc), but your suggestions for features are right on. The plan is to collect feedback like yours, see how we can best complement the new art portal when it comes out, and iterate towards something more in line with existing stand alone readers.

Also, super happy you picked up the "keygen vibes" we were putting down. :)

[Handle With Care]

Wow, this one really surprised me! It's very complicated and overwhelming to learn what you're even doing, let alone all the crazy ins-and-outs of construction, but after sticking with it, I felt like a genius once I built a little vehicle that could take that egg all the way to the finish for a 3-star delivery!

It's certainly an interesting little game, like some twisted combination of Kerbal Space Program, Trials Fusion, Tears of the Kingdom, and those high school egg drop/racecar derby contests. Yes, it's a little clunky and confusing and unwieldly (could maybe stand to have more builder tools through maybe mouse usage to increase the pace and the ability to snap to certain angles for consistency) so it can be frustrating, but in terms of a game jam game, I feel like this is a great success since it is very memorable and makes my brain explode with anticipation for how a fully fledged version of this prototype would turn out. Would love to see more of this!

Frogrammer responds:

hey thank you! means a lot coming from you haha

[Underboard: Omen]

Wow, solid game you got here! I was a bit worried at the start that it would be way too confusing and opaque due to the 'help' menu that is just a wall of boring text with no visual examples or such, but I was glad to see that the 'help' was just essentially a bonus glossary you can reference for more in-depth technical parts of the game, while Meno does a great job at walking you through the essentials.

Indeed, while the game might seem overwhelming to start, not only does it have a solid step-by-step tutorial through Meno, but the game is also very friendly with having every element of the HUD be hoverable to get tooltips. Due to this impressive design achievement, it didn't take long for me to get comfortable with all of the systems as any question I could possibly have could be answered by simply hovering over it! Want to know what unit another unit will target? Hover over it and see what gets highlighted red! Want to know the range of a unit? Hover over them and see what tiles get bordered! Want to know what the spell or item does? Hover over it! And so on and so forth.

With all that out of the way, I found the game quite fun to build up a party and get them through the dungeon through a combination of setting up formations, giving them all sorts of items to turn them into some crazy cross-class abomination, finding the right time to cast spells to turn the tide, and all sorts of other strategic elements. Very addictive and fun all-around!

In terms of points that bother me:

While the game is quite informative with all sorts of tooltips and icons and such, it's not always showcased in the best way, such as how many icons are so tiny you can barely see them: for example, I didn't notice the icons for how many exp potions you need to level someone up, or the icon above the reroll button indicating you can use a potion as currency for that action.

I couldn't shake the paranoia and fear that the game would screw me over with RNG at some point, like not giving me good balanced party, and I really don't like the idea of sacrificing experience points to reroll, as interesting as that might seem on paper.

Furthermore, I found it incredibly disappointing that there doesn't look to be any sort of save/load or checkpoint system in play as runs can be pretty long and I don't necessarily always have the time to do it all in one sitting.

To add onto that, it was really annoying to have the game always treat me as if I'm starting for the very first time with all the tutorial messages and such: as cute as Meno is, you'd think those would go away on a second run (or at least offer the option to skip).

Overall great stuff!

chazmuco responds:

Hey dude amazing feedback! We will consider those things for the Steam release, thanks a lot!