FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Tidying Up]

Quite the cute little game! Not only does the game have a wonderfully cute aesthetic to it all and tons of wonderful juicy touches like cool transitions, but the gameplay itself did a great job at escalating the difficulty bit-by-bit while also introducing new mechanics to keep me hooked, all while also having a nice story to further keep me intrigued at where it is going. Loved that it also had a save/load system which meant I could continue my game after taking a break, and that it had movement where you could hold down the key, meaning I didn't need to tap for every step! Very impressive to that it even had a level editor and such: I can't see myself using it but kudos for going the extra mile!

While I'm overall very positive on the game, there were a lot of odd design decisions and weird stuff that I encountered to give feedback on:

Despite the game having an option to have the text move forward on player input instead of automatically and having that option on by default, the cold open introduction doesn't respect this and not only moves forward with the text automatically, but at a ridiculous speed! Even if you have to have the text move automatically, you should try and pace it as if the dialogue was being spoken (and then add a few seconds of padding)! Bizarre since the outro does wait for player input, too!

I wish the game had some more sounds to it to make it feel a bit more exciting. Vacumming up all of the trash like Pac-man would've felt a bit better if we had some sounds like that as well.

I wish that the game made it a bit clearer who you are controlling. Yes, it does take some steps to address this in that it makes the character you pick sparkle initially, but that only lasts a brief moment. I'd love if it'd do something like darkening/brightening the sprite for who is inactive/active respectively, or perhaps have different sprite states, like one with them standing up and another with them sleeping or sitting down.

It's silly, but I found the game actually a bit spooky in some aspects despite being overall very cute? For example, the whole glitchy transition was quite odd and feels like something you'd see in a horror game (I'd expect the game to do something like a heart wipe and a confetti shower when you beat a level, perhaps), and I don't know why some of the conversations were done in the darkness zone when it felt like all of them could've just been done within the game HUD, where most of them take place.

I found it a bit odd that not only does the game not automatically move onto the next level once you hover up all the trash and head to the door, you can actually end the level prematurely by just making it to the door and clicking next level even if you haven't picked up all the trash??? Shouldn't cleaning up everything be a requirement? Sometimes it seems like bonus dialogue happens on all the trash being cleaned up, so is it just meant as a bonus objective (despite the fact it should be a main objective?)

There were also a few other odd bugs I experienced, like how I couldn't get the music/sound to work anymore when I let the game go idle briefly. Only happened once though and I couldn't recreate it afterwards? Probably just a dumb browser thing and not your prob.

Most of the puzzles do seem to fall on the way-too-easy side: most of them start out interesting with the two separated and having to cooperate, but what could be some cool sliding puzzles where you really gotta plan your moves usually end up just being able to be 'cheated' by eventually breaking down the boundaries and just getting Capy to go into the puzzle and stand anywhere to let you reroute anyway you want.

The story doesn't quite evolve as much as I'd like: there is some intrigue and information you learn over time, but several levels just loop very similar themes of them cracking jokes and encouraging each other. Look, it's nice that it's happy and all, but it just feels like it isn't going anywhere. Stories usually involve some sort of growth and challenges, you know, and while it is technically doing that, it kinda feels superficial at times, just self-help platitude after platitude. I just felt like I wasn't really buying what it was selling. Furthermore it'd be nicer if the gameplay was more tied to the story: maybe it'd be nice if we had a better hook, like some sort of item we're looking for like buried treasure, or talk about some interesting things we find in the trash as we go that bring back memories of past relationships or whatever.

I'm not quite sure how the switches work? I just flip 'em until I get what I want, which works I guess.

Overall feels like the game is very well polished and delivers a short and sweet adventure that doesn't overstay its welcome: well done!

Bleak-Creep responds:

I wanna say this is the longest write up I've seen from you yet? Lots of good notes in here, and I know we've already got a few on our list as things we wanna fix in future updates like making it easier to tell which character you're using or adding a few more elements to make new puzzles a little more difficult.

I could probably modify the opening scene to be manually controlled too. That's not a bad idea. I just quickly animated that part in a day pretty late into development, so I wanted to make sure it was easy for Intrapath to incorporate.

As for the story itself, I thought about revealing a bit more about what happened with James, but sometimes it was tricky finding the right balance to the amount of dialogue per level. In the end, I decided to just leave it mostly ambiguous and keep dialogue short and concise for the sake of pacing. It became less about the details of Capy's past, and more about making Roombella and Capy's friendship feel authentic.

As always, thanks for the detailed review! :)

[CypherGrid]

Pretty well constructed and interesting game, but man did I get lost once it came to the priority stuff and ended up quitting in confusion.

Before I get to that, I do want to give the game a lot of props. I love that the tutorial isn't just a wall of text but is actually very visual, has extended details you can view on hover-over, and gives you great examples to work through to cement the various rules. Furthermore, I love that there are options to skip (to allow you to get to the game quickly on replays) and repeat (if you don't understand). Finally, I mean in general the presentation and construction of the game is really solid: graphics are very nice, menus are great and reactive, and so on. All of this gives a great first impression and made me really want to love the game!

Unfortunately, now I gotta get back to where I left off, in that I couldn't even get through the tutorial! Everything was going pretty well until it came to learning the priority system: while I think I do somewhat understand how priority works in terms of the row and column close, I'm still very unclear on why it is important and how we are supposed to utilize it. Like, it teaches you to calculate priority, but why do we need to use priority and what are we supposed to go for? It just felt so confusing: it seemed like it was trying to do a good job at teaching it but left out some crucial details. I think I eventually got it? Maybe? The second priority puzzle seemed to do a better job at teaching priority but I just got confused at why some matches didn't work. I never had a full grasp on it and I wouldn't blame a lot of people for quitting. There's got to be a better way to rephrase the instructions to be more concise and intuitive, like perhaps saying that you can't fill a square when a row/column already has a filled square within it, and display that priority field that showcases you need to look for matches starting in the top left and work to the bottom right? Maybe the way it tried to explain was just overcomplicating things. But then the grouped numbers happen and auuuughh!

There are also some other complaints like how the life system tries to prevent brute-forcing, but ultimately it is still possible to just brute-force it as the puzzles do have a set solution and aren't changed up on retry, so while it might be tedious to keep clicking the tiles over and over from the start as the puzzle resets over and over, it's still possible to learn it that way, so it might be a bit pointless and not the best solution?

Again, seems like an interesting game, and it's doing its best to teach it so I want to give it the benefit of the doubt, but despite all that I still found myself floundering! I'll give my brain a break and try to process it later on.

EDIT: Ok, once I actually figured out how the rules worked and all that after some sleep and experimentation, I actually had a lot of fun with this game! I really liked how, despite just doing the same puzzles essentially, it kept things feeling fresh by contextualizing all of the puzzles into the spy aesthetic to give them an air of importance and style. I was also super pumped with the last section where we needed to do the puzzles under pressure and with distractions: what a great final test of skill! Would've loved even more levels. Raising my score for this game since I gotta give it credit that I felt like, while the tutorial didn't work out, it nevertheless made me want to keep giving the game another go since the game seemed to try its hardest and put a lot of effort into it to make me want to love and understand it.

Veinom responds:

Thank you for the detailed review. I currently rework on the tutorial, and I will try to finish it and update the game as soon as I can. Your feedback helped me greatly, and I think I know how to make the tutorial more clear.

[LUMbA: HANGOVER DEMO]

Feels like it's trying to be a Hotline Miami clone, but it spent all of its budget and effort on the superficial stuff like trippy visuals and a grim, pretentious story instead of the actual gameplay, making it feel very shoddy in its construction and just not fun to play (and it didn't even pull of the superficial stuff that well either, unfortunately).

First and foremost, the game just seems really buggy and clunkily constructed. Camera keeps jumping around awkwardly, moving into the walls as a player has you strangely slow down and jitter around, you've got enemies spawning outside of the walls or glitching into them, you've got text that's so tiny and awkwardly scaled down that it gets all pixelated and hard to read, and it's just really difficult to parse what the game wants and how it works: for example I have no idea how to win the helicopter boss fight since its bullets don't seem to hurt me until they randomly do, among other things. In general the game feels like it is barely holding itself together: I'd like to say its a cool intentional extension of the story's crazy world infecting you as a player to feel crazy as well, but no, it just feels bad.

Even if we try to move past the buggy and shoddily constructed nature of the game, the actual gameplay isn't anything to write home about in its current state. Levels are incredibly bland and boring corridors with no variance in objectives or layout, enemies are braindead and unsatisfying to kill and have annoying zero-telegraph attacks, and in general the gameplay just devolves into running forward and holding down the fire button: there's no compelling hook or cool fast-paced strategic design to the gameplay!

That's not to say that everything is bad. I do think the story and visuals are quite interesting and trippy, there is a decent variety in how the levels are staged (but not played), there are some nice touches like the various ways enemies gorily blow up upon death, and while I don't think the execution was great, I was impressed at the very unique design concept for the helicopter fight! Also I thought that the title screen was pretty cool which was surprising considering how shoddy the game felt and how developers usually skimp on such things (though the volume meter on the title screen did not reflect what the volume is actually set to on initial load). Certainly has potential and does make me intrigued to see what a final polished version of this would be.

I just feel that this game didn't take the time to create a solid code/engine foundation or a interesting gameplay loop and instead raced ahead to focus too much on superficial things. I understand you probably got a really cool and deep story in your head with all sorts of crazy events you want the player to experience, but the game is so badly constructed to deliver those effectively as it stands. There is potential in this game, and if you were to polish everything up and make some better designed combat, I think it could be pretty neat. Best of luck!

TeamLumba responds:

Thanks for the giant review! We'll be using this to refine the game for the full release.

[The Whicher]

Heh, quite the amusing little adventure! Love that old-school Flash art style, love the goofy running animation, and in general I laughed at a lot of the jokes, including the subtle ones like the ever-changing name of Syldevin and the game misinterpreting options, like telling the King to run away with the gold when you'd think the option implies that it would be the Whicher running away with it.

The stat requirements always being one point higher than you have is a funny joke as well, though it did have the unfortunate side effect of bumming me out that there was less replay value than I thought! That was probably the biggest disappointment, in that a lot of the choices were 'but thou must' choices with no actual variance, so repeat playthroughs didn't leave much to be discovered. Bit conflicted: I feel not having a choice and not being able to make a difference is part of the humor, but still, it does make it less of a game.

Overall it was a short and sweet adventure that got a chuckle out of me, but couldn't help but feel that I wanted more out of it: take that as a compliment that it hooked me, I suppose! I'm probably taking it a bit too seriously considering it's probably supposed to just be a little joke instead of a full-fledged game.

Joeyag responds:

Thanks a lot! I started making this on mid to late march, and it was supposed to be just a short story, really. The initial idea was something similar to Super PSTW Action RPG - i'm pretty sure you're familiar with xD - with just the one storyline depicting the frustration when we are mislead by a choice in a game. I thought about expanding it with the non frustrating choices, but that would bring me two problems: animating it all would take a lot of time; and if the player picked all the non frustrating choices, they wouldn't get the point of the game. Maybe if i were smart and started making the game when FFJ23 was announced, i would have been able to find better solutions for this, but i opted to make it simpler rather than more complex due to time. All of that are definitely somethings to learn for the future.
Thank you so much for the helpful review!

[Haunted Rooms]

Hmm, while I do think the concept has merit and the later levels showcase some of the interesting puzzles that can be wrought from the mechanics, as it stands right now, the game feels really janky and unrefined.

While it takes a moment to stop babying you, the game does a decent job of escalating the challenge of the game in interesting ways with all sorts of new mechanics and obstacles to contend with. Some of the later levels do get pretty elaborate in really interesting ways. But overall there's just a real clunky construction to it all that not only negatively affects the general feel of the game with its odd and inconsistent collision and boundaries and lackluster special effects, but also effects the puzzles themselves. It can be difficult to parse the solutions due to weird logic from the mechanics, like how you exploit the fact that flashlight users turn instantly with no transition and therefore you can stand in the gap between turn angles to illogically avoid detection, and like how the puzzle don't reset upon death, meaning you can brute force the solutions by just killing yourself to move back to the start instead of having to make your way back yourself (in fact, it seems like some of the solutions intend for you to do this, which is very weird, it's like creating jumps that require you to exploit coyote time: it's just not supposed to be done like that).

Again, I think the concept is pretty decent and does get my imagination going with ways it could be built upon, so in that regard, I think it's a decent game jam result. But as a game to play right now, its execution currently feels quite underbaked and in need of considerable polishing.

[Exit from aldilà]

Hmm, part of me is quite intrigued with the game due to the rather cool art style and mysterious story, but in general the game feels very clunky.

Some of the oddities with the game, such as the way your character has to have a running start to build up enough acceleration to jump a gap, didn't feel that bad to me and actually added a refreshing bit of complexity. Put this together with the interesting ghost platform switching and other obstacles like the moving platforms and puts and the game has the makings of a decent challenging platformer, and as said, the rather unique presentation did make me want to see what was going on story-wise.

The game is unfortunately held back by a lot of general bugginess and clunky design, however. For example, ladders felt really awkward to contend with, especially when trying to dismount from them at the top: usually a game will have an invisible platform at the top which allows you to stand up once you reach the top, but here there is no such thing, and when combined with the fact that any horizontal movement detachs you from the ladder and sends you falling, it makes for a really awkward experience where I would climb to the top of the ladder, try to dismount and end up falling all the way down. There were plenty of other weird bugs like my character not jumping when I tell them to, my character not hanging from a ledge despite me trying to do so in what seems like a good spot, weird collision boxes that make me slip off platforms, and also just a lot of tedious waiting for moving platformers to come back and let me on.

The biggest frustration with the movement is in trying to change direction: there were tons of times where suddenly my character would slide like they're on ice and have so much difficulty changing directions, and other times they'd change direction no problem. After some experimentation, I found that if you are holding down one direction, let go, and then press the other direction, you'll change direction in a quick and logical fashion, but if you hold down one direction, press another direction while still holding the other and then let go of the original, you'll do this weird ice slide where you will take a long time to eventually slow down and change direction. I feel the controls for this should be build more robustly to ensure consistency and have this oddity not occur: it's not the players fault here as they are making logical inputs and shouldn't have to force themselves to precisely hit each button to avoid potential overlap.

Definitely feels like it could be a good platformer, but the controls/physics/code for the game needs to be tightened up considerably, I'd say, before being ready for release.

[Pixel Dash 2]

Hmmm, bit of a mixed bag here, I feel! Some of the modes are pretty decent, but some of the other modes feel rather bad and actually contribute to giving a bad first impression, so I would nix them altogether, ideally, and just keep what works.

Classic mode is pretty much the worst of the bunch and contributes to the terrible first impression that I was talking about. Once you've seen one classic mode level, you've pretty much seen them all as there's really no way to significantly scale them up or diversify them in any meaningful way, and the levels reflect that by just changing up the green area size or adding pre-built boxes which is incredibly shallow (how the hell is a level with pre-placed boxes considered a new level? I could make that level by just playing the first level and putting the blocks in myself, and it's pointless anyway because I can just click the boxes away as if I placed them! Was that intentional, or a bug?) The levels in Classic mode aren't tests of skill or wits, they are just tests of patience as it is a foregone conclusion to eventually win by just filling everything in bit-by-bit.

Breakable mode is just Classic mode with a bit of time-pressure: it still suffers the same dilemma as Classic mode where every level is functionally the same and is therefore quite boring, but at least it has something to encourage the player to play quickly and therefore be a bit more engaged. It's a step up, but I would still consider this a mode that should probably be removed.

The Precise and Bad Pixels modes is where the game starts to have some decent ideas. I still don't think it's that fun necessarily, but at the very least there is actually some manner of skill and decision-making required from the player to reach a solution, and the levels actually start to diversify themselves in interesting ways, such as having multiple green zones with their own count requirements. It's here that the game actually has something slightly interesting to it, and I feel that these should be the only two modes the game has: better to showcase the best part of the game than risk the player getting bored from the other modes which are given top billing and could lead to them quitting before the good stuff. At the very most, you could maybe combine these two modes with the breakable rules as well to create the best of all worlds (though the breakable rules might be a bit annoying when having to manage everything else).

Oh, and I do like how you can click and drag to put down multiple blocks in a row: helps avoid flaring up my carpal tunnel from having to click every individual square, so thanks for that!

blit-blat responds:

The pre-placed boxes are intentional. If you're playing on a mobile device (which the game was designed primarily for) the best tactic is to immediately draw a square around the win zone. By having pre-placed blocks you'll actually be removing them if your drag your fingers in too wide an area, thus harming your progress, forcing you to be less erratic and more precise in your swipes. Playing with a mouse offers more precision by default, so this aspect is probably lost on desktop.

Breakable originally wasn't a standalone mode, but a feature of certain levels as per your suggestion. But as you also rightly suggested, this just became frustrating (and not in a fun way!) when combined with other mechanics - especially the multiple win zones - so was moved into it's own category.

Other ideas that were tested an scrapped were being able to place a limited number of bricks, bricks not being removable once placed and "paintable" pixels (you'd have to get bad pixels into a paint zone to turn them good and then into the win zone). These were ultimately rejected for being too annoying or too puzzley.

This isn't meant to be a puzzle game, it's meant to be frantic and fast paced (hence the dash). It's meant to be a test of speed and reactions, rather than necessarily skill, although I guess this doesn't really come through clearly enough. Perhaps each level should have a star rating, based on time. Although this would require a lot more play testing to find the right balance, and ain't nobody got time for that! :D

[Super Plantoid]

Hmm, quite the short and sweet Metroid-ish adventure with an interesting planting hook! While the game does start out pretty good with a nice little cinematic and overall decent graphics/animation and platforming, it didn't exactly grab me at the start: while the planting was rather unique, it was a bit tedious to have to grow every one of my shots and I was a bit worried at how the game would proceed. However, bit by bit the game introduced new interesting powerups like the bubble plant (with its cool double use through holding it for jump powers or throwing it to create a jump pad) and I loved how it kept looping back to the start and making you realize what new path just opened up with your abilities. In that way the game was very addictive: I always wanted to see what new plant would be nice and what new obstacles and paths would open up with it, and before you know it I made it through to the end!

However, it can be an incredibly frustrating game at times due to its overly punishing nature. Every missed throw with a plant was made all the more worse by the fact that I would need to replant it and wait for the entire animation and growing to take place (you'd think that the plant would remain and regrow the fruit over and over instead of needing to replant the entire thing), and every time I took damage when holding a plant was made doubly worse since it makes me immediately drop the plant (which again necessitates backtracking and waiting for the regrow animation to play out, or if you're in the dark area and you lose your light plant, you may as well just kill yourself, argh!) The game also loved to have a lot of overly difficult jumps that either require pixel-perfect edge jumps or the unintuitive use of a short jump to avoid hitting the ceiling which actually can make your jump travel less. The checkpoints were never too punishing, but when combined with all this other stuff, it sure didn't help that much.

There were also some other frustrations with the game like how unclear the controls are. For example, I had no idea I could jump down thin floors since the game allowed me to use the up arrow to jump, which made me reluctant to jump down since you can't press up+down at the same time: only once I realized that you could jump down by using x+down or space+down did it work. Furthermore I had no idea what those glowy spots were and how to interact with them: would've been nice if the key to press would appear above your head when you're over a glowy spot to let you know what to do, perhaps. There are also weird design choices like how you can get a green seed, die without saving, and when you respawn you'll still have it: forgiving, but kind of kills the point of collecting them, I feel. Oh, and it stinks that the game doesn't have a save/load feature (despite it saving in-game), requiring that you beat it all in one sitting.

There definitely were a lot of little annoyances with the game that made a pretty bad first impression and almost made me quit, but I feel the game did enough right to deliver a short and sweet experience, so well done in that regard! My only big disappointment was that I would've loved if there was one more final area which was a bit more puzzle-y and requiring using all of the plant types: it felt like the levels only used whatever plant was just introduced and completely disregarded all of the other types, and in that way it felt like all of the levels were just tutorials on each plant and it never did a final exam, so to speak!

[Lunar Worm]

Fun goofy little arcade game! For the most part, I really like the goofy energy that this game gives off through a combination of its wacky music, funny little worm character expressions/animations, and juicy special effects. Gameplay is decent in that it's fast-paced fun to zip around and stay alive as long as possible while munching gems, but minding the different terrain that can slow you down, make you fall, or even blow you up. Also thought the design touches like being able to move your worm around slowly as they die were novel (but gruesome when juxtaposed against the generally happy aesthetic).

It makes a pretty solid impression and ain't bad, but I will admit that it got pretty boring quite fast: I didn't feel like the terrain added enough to the strategy of the game, nor did I think the game escalated enough with new obstacles as after bombs are added it seems to peter out with nothing else to add, and the game wasn't really that difficult, meaning I just play until I get bored and kill myself, meaning that a bad impression is inevitably left. Would've loved more obstacles like maybe blocks you can't burrow through, or maybe lava blocks that can flow, and so on. I'd also love some sort of combo meter/score counter so the game is less about just plain ol' survival but trying to pull off cool chains and get big points beyond just depth. Also thought the whole way you can move after death was odd in that you'd think you could recover in some way, similar to a Borderlands Second Chance, but there was nothing to do but die: again, gruesome.

Basically, I like the energy and thought it had potential, but at the moment it's a bit too simple for my time and is thus short-lived. Still, I hope that throwing this game together was a fun experiment and got some ideas flowing in the brain for future!