FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Snaklipse]

As usual for a Kultisti game, it has a very charming aesthetic to it and a professional sense of polish: everything felt quite intuitive and smooth and juicy, and it made for a fun little arcade score-attack game. Love the little touches like how the game starts with the lid popping open and it teaches the controls if it detects inactivity, and the design of juggling collecting stars to keep your candle going while avoiding moon beams and yourself was thrilling. Impressed that it also properly allows you to go under a jump trail you've left behind (though it does incorrectly allow you to jump into your jump trail and not crash, but I guess it's just being nice, haha)

I'm not sure if it's just me, though, but there does seem to be something going on with the controls for the snake, like a weird delay or missed inputs that caused me to have some confusion and frustration. There were a few times I swear I was just doing a quick 180 turn and it turned into a 270 and crashed into myself: very odd!

While the game is decent, its appeal didn't last long for me as all it had to offer was colors to unlock, and it didn't seem to be elevating the obstacles it threw at you much more as scores increased. Would've loved if there was something more substantial to strive for long-term, such as more story cutscenes to unlock at certain thresholds, perhaps, to continue what was established in the intro and menu screen!

[Slasher Click]

Hmm, this was a bit of mixed bag! On first glance, it's easy to get an impression of this game feeling unfinished due to the lackluster presentation and simplistic, repetitive gameplay that just plops you into the world with no story or goal or anything, and indeed, I do think it would be understandable for a lot of people to not even give this game a chance.

The game's design can be a bit odd at times: instead of the world feeling curated to provide progressively stronger challenges that are custom-built like a story, the fact that enemies can randomly change makes it feel like it's just up to dumb luck. For example, there was one narrow path early on with tough monsters guarding it that overlapped each other that I felt was too hard and intended to be done by going back and getting the sandstorm ability to blind one of them to force a one-on-one. Imagine my surprise when I came back and suddenly the monsters were weaker and no longer overlapping: I felt really let-down that all my smart planning was pointless and that the game was just going to be arbitrary! There were plenty of other slight annoyances too like how the stats aren't quite well explained: yes, it does say that strength increases critical chance, for example, but by how much? Without numbers, I don't know whether I'm getting big returns for my investment or if it's just barely anything (and speaking of numbers, what's up with stat points adding +2 for most stats except endurance is your health instead of the stat and so on, weird inconsistency).

In spite of all of that, however, the game does have a rather addictive old-school RPG appeal to it, where you go out, grind some monsters for exp and gold, go back to buy some new equipment and new moves, and so on, getting deeper and deeper as you go. There's also a surprisingly deep level of strategy to the game: time only moves when you move, moves have a lot of properties to consider like uses and ranges and time commitment, enemy attacks are modeled as bullets which can be skillfully baited and dodged, status ailments like blind can be used to shrink enemy ranges to let you sneak by or prevent getting double-teamed by overlap, and so on! It rides that fine line of being simple enough that you can kinda zone out, but being active enough to keep you not feeling bored and quitting.

While the game didn't appeal to me enough for a full playthrough, I did think some of the combat design and retro grindy nature of it were quite memorable, so not too shabby! I know it might seem superficial and I do think that the game engine is more important to get solid first and foremost in development (so kudos on doing so), but some graphical improvements and special effects would've been much appreciated to sell it better!

Kwing responds:

Thanks for the really thorough review!

I was really on the fence about how much of a story I wanted to give this game. I didn't want to over-scope, but I didn't want to flesh out a premise that was shallow and cliche, either, so I basically didn't explain anything beyond the villagers complaining about whatever boss monster was the next objective. Still, it's no excuse to not have some kind of intro.

The enemies spawning was intentional. I liked the idea that the player might make different decisions based on the luck of the draw. For instance, if an area makes the player choose between two easy enemies and one hard enemy, that choice might be a bit different if by luck an easier or harder monster spawns in, or if you encounter a rare enemy color that you haven't collected yet. On the other hand, scenarios like what you describe with Sandstorm are also possible, and I see how that could be frustrating.

The stats couldn't be simpler. Your strength is the percent chance of a critical hit. 50 strength equals a 50% chance to crit. Endurance is your maximum health. This was an intentional decision as I find complicated damage formulas can often alienate the player and dissuade them from understanding the mechanics, and I wanted something that made immediate and intuitive sense.

I find it interesting that you called the game grindy, as I actually made a conscious choice for the game not to feel that way. Sure, you can always level up and increase your stats, but given that the stats are mostly only percent chances for certain events to occur, you can never just increase your damage output to the point where you can power through enemies, and this was an intentional way to make the underlying strategy remain relevant no matter how much level grinding the player did.

I do think for a sequel I would want the game to feature at least a bit more of a story (bare minimum have the different bosses be related to a common cause,) and perhaps an entire area dedicated to tutorializing the basic gameplay. Thanks again for the review!

[Gooby]

Hmm, it certainly has a very charming goofiness to its overall construction that I like a lot: that weird kind of low-effort look that actually has a lot of subtle and well-crafted high-effort touches to it and all that. Love that bouncy walk cycle for the main character, for instance, and the way the character slowly bulks up with upgrades! For the most part the game runs alright as well too without any major bugs, though there were a few odd visual bugs of sprites not layering properly, the driller enemies commonly bug out by teleporting out-of-bounds or just run in place, and I did spend a lot of time awkwardly at the cliff with bro in the beginning, not sure what to do, until I guess I stood in the one right spot and he finally chucked me off, haha!

The gameplay is where it didn't sell me that strongly, however. Don't get me wrong: it starts out alright with some simple auto-shooter combat that feels good to slowly build up power and engage with more enemy types. But overall the combat feels like it stalls out pretty early on and doesn't pick up from there: the enemies are pretty braindead and can easily be circle-strafed around despite them having so many types, the damage feedback from firing is pretty limp and spongy and unsatisfying, and the upgrades start to feel really shallow as it just more and more basic bullets instead of having any sort of fun build decisions or weapon variety to promote different strategies and synergies. It's as if you were playing a game of Binding of Isaac but had to stick with the basic tears for the entire game: it does give you minions at the end but no way to use them! Where's my final boss fight against bro!? Augh!

Having said all that, I do still think the game is overall a positive experience: yes, the gameplay is shallow and the ending is a downer without a significant pop-off for all the build-up, but it did enough right to keep me hooked instead of feeling dragged out and thus felt like a rather and short and sweet experience.

[Portal Defenders: Fast Break!]

NOTE: this review comes from someone who only played singleplayer, and doesn't fancy sports games that much beyond NBA Jam or NFL Blitz.

Hrmm, this was surprisingly a really, really rough one for me! I want to give this game a lot of props as it does a lot of things right, but there were some pretty severe annoyances with my experience that really soured me on it, making it feel like an unfortunately style-over-substance situation!

As said, I think there's a lot of good things to say about this game. In fact, there's so much right it's almost difficult to even describe as the list would just go on and on and I don't wanna bore you to tears. The entire game itself just feels immaculate and professionally put together in practically every aspect. It just exudes charm, and I'm not even talking about just the superficial things like graphics and music (which are great), as the professional touch even extends to the game feel of playing basketball and navigating the menus and reading inputs and so on and so forth. I also appreciate that the game mixes things up in the levels as you go on, as if it were just the same game of basketball but with new characters, I could imagine it getting boring very quickly.

But I unexpectedly spent a lot of my time playing the game feeling very lost and confused. As much as the game teaches you how to shoot with a nice little tutorial, and it does tell you the buttons you have to work with, it leaves a lot up in the air. For example, I didn't know why I wasn't able to attack people anymore until I eventually noticed it was controlled by a bar: why is this the case and how do I get bar back? Plus, even despite teaching me to shoot, I could never tell if I was doing the timing right or wrong as it just felt random when it decided to go in and I didn't know whether that was on me or RNG or other factors I'm not considering. Same for blocking: I kept trying over and over to block people but nothing would work despite my best efforts (maybe it's because with such small collision between players it's difficult to judge where to stand to be in front of them and, well, block them?) I kinda wish Referee Tom would actually give some actual gameplay hints instead of just talking about their cat: I like a good joke, but I'm lost here and could use some actual help! I know I'm probably just supposed to follow instincts and treat it as a party game and accept that RNG is involved to make the game work, but I had a tough time doing that: I'll accept that part of that might be on me.

Moving on from that, there were a lot of confusing and annoying design decisions. Whenever I passed to my partner, I would've much preferred if I was able to automatically swap to control my partner: the fact that they remain as a CPU even then felt very awkward and they'd generally do some dumb stuff like just pass it right back to me: made it feel pointless and unable to pull off any strategy through passing. Likewise, it was super frustrating that I couldn't swap to my partner at any time either in general: so many times they'd be closer to where the ball is and I'd be far away and unable to do anything and just feel so helpless. I spoke previously about having difficulty blocking, well, that was only because I was trying to properly block, as once I started goaltending, blocking was a breeze! There's a reason goaltending is illegal and I can't believe this game doesn't prevent that, as it completely breaks the difficulty of the game in half! Speaking of breaking the difficulty, I feel like the 'on fire' buff (which I don't even know how it happens) is way too overpowered as it just seems to last indefinitely and makes every shot 100% guaranteed: there's just no way for the enemy to come back from that! There were also just some weird glitches like the ball teleporting for some reason.

I could go on with other issues, but I'll admit that in spite of it all, the game is still pretty fun, albeit maybe not quite fun enough to make me go through the entire story campaign as while it does make an effort to mix things up every level, it's not quite enough especially considering how simple the gameplay is. I still think the game is something to be proud of and a very impressive endeavor overall: just had a bit of a rocky first impression that left both a powerful positive and negative impression!

As a side note! I loved the feel of attacking players and it gave nice flashbacks to games of the past: maybe make a beat-em-up in future? Haha!

BoMToons responds:

Good review! We've actually made a few beatemups in the past, you should check our profiles! In fact, this is a sequel to a beatemup called "Portal Defenders" from the early 2000s!

Tom's quotes cycle and he does have good hints in there about how "on fire" works and "turbo" usage. But we've heard the feedback from you and many others about the need for a better tutorial, so we're working on that. Stay tuned!

In single player mode, I'll also see how easy it would be to swap control when you pass... should be possible!

Shooting accuracy is actually affected by a few things:
1. The "base" accuracy of your player
2. How close you get to "releasing" your shot at the exact apex of your shot
3. If turbo is being held down while shooting (and you have turbo to use)
4. If you're "on fire" your accuracy goes way up, but it's not "perfect"
5. Your distance from the basket

If you can capture the ball disappearing in a video, please send it over. I thought I had squashed the bugs around that in the latest versions, but there might be more bugs lingering.

[Alister - Monster tamer]

Hoo boy, I'm not even sure where to start with this one as overall it just feels incredibly buggy and unfinished. If I'm not mistaken, I'm assuming we've got a classic newbie indie dev mistake here: getting way too overambitious and trying to make a huge RPG of their dreams but failing to realize just how much work is involved and burning out (and it's made even crazier since the game was for a game jam too!)

Bugs and missing features were everywhere: you've got improperly layered graphics (the player character appears in front of the partner even if behind them), bad/sticky boundary collisions, the game skips the first turtle fight if you lose at it instead of resetting, missing game over screens, the list goes on and on.

Moving on from bugs, we've just got bizarre design decisions and construction: the game just dumps you in the world with no tutorial or sense of direction, random encounters are programmed so badly you can get into another fight after taking one step after a previous fight, the text and menus are rife with typos and missing punctuation and bad layouts, the utility of the moves is questionable and I'm not sure if they work, augh!

I'll give the game credit that some of the stuff does look impressive: for example the battle animations and special effects felt quite impactful, the combat was quite fast-paced, and so on, but they were all very superficial qualities and actually made the game seem even worse with how much they stand out against the terrible construction: the phrase 'lipstick on a pig' comes to mind, though that would imply a malicious intent to dupe the viewer into thinking the game is good when it isn't, but in this case I think it was just terrible management and bad priorities (as in wanting the program the 'cool' stuff before doing all the boring but critical features which were left to rot).

I'm barely even touching all of the problems the game has as they were practically uncountable. I couldn't make it that far into the game before giving up hope: felt like the game was barely holding itself together and I was so confused that I didn't have faith that it even had an ending to get to in the first place. Hopefully this can just be a learning moment and you'll have better luck on their next project, or perhaps you can continue work on this but free of the short game jam time constraints!

Alex303 responds:

thank you for your response!

yeaaa I really was too ambitious with this one, espically with my lack of coding skills. I'll make sure to make something smaller next time around. Im gonna go through and try to fix alot of the bugs you mentioned. Yea I didn't have time to program in a tutorial, but thats no exuse I should have had one. Ill definitly take this as a learning experience thank you again.

[Go, Go, Cupid!]

It's certainly quite a stylish, goofy and funny game in many senses, so I really want to like it and do think it is pretty good, but I found my impression of it very soured due to the confusing, shoddy construction and odd design decisions. Basically the core characters and dialogue are very nice, but the dialogue system, minigames and other aspects are pretty bad/nonsensical and drag the experience down.

First and foremost, the dialogue was very infuriating to deal with as it was generally lacking typical quality of life designs. I understand that the dialogue is paced in a certain way with pauses to reflect speech pattern and such, but every dialogue-heavy game should offer a way to click and have the line immediately fill out to finish, as without it the game can be incredibly tedious to get through. Even with the option to speed up the dialogue I still found it very frustrating, and furthermore replays were super annoying as there was no skip option or save/load feature.

Second, I found the game took way too long to get to some actual gameplay. In retrospect, the game is a visual novel, so there isn't much gameplay to speak of beyond reading text, but the introduction sequence just takes so damn long to set everything up (especially due to the aforementioned unskippable dialogue) that it doesn't allow even a crumb of interactivity to get a feel of what the game has to offer. Furthermore, when the game does actually introduce some minigames, they feel really shoddy and confusing, both in where they are placed and how they operate. I have no idea why a shooting minigame pops up in random parts with the film geek as they don't seem to correspond to anything happening in their current activities, and the rules for the game don't make sense: I think you need to only shoot bad people, but the logical for it isn't clear as to who is bad (for instance, I felt like it was just saying to avoid shooting women and children, but you can't shoot this one guy, and you can't shoot this woman who is part of the group in that music game so you'd think they'd all be fair game, but you can shoot Stepford and the cops for some reason?) In the end it didn't even matter as no matter whether I won or lost, it didn't even seem to make a difference (or if it did, the game didn't offer clear feedback of it).

Finally, the game also just seemed weirdly designed: you've got these choices to make that affect your romance bar, and I made a few goofs so I didn't have full bar at the end. Despite this, the story seemed to have the two of them absolutely falling over each other, so you'd think I'd get the good end, only for them to suddenly get cold feet outta nowhere and give me a bad ending most likely due to my unfilled bar. Just felt dumb for the story to only have the bar influence it at the very end, and to have it completely derail where the story is going: may as well just get rid of the bar altogether and just give a good ending at this rate since it just felt so dumb!

Also some buttons like the Go Home button just straight up do not work??? And there's just a lot of odd buggy things like the dialogue boxes and time gauges in the minigames go all wonky at times.

Having said all that, I do think the game is pretty cool once you come to grips with it. The graphics are very stylish, you weren't lazy as there are tons of unique expressions and character animations and CGs for all sorts of events, the dialogue is very funny and charming not only due to the words they say, but the more subtle things like how it is paced to reflect speech patterns and has intentional lack of punctuation and such. Despite me having a frustrating time that I don't know if I'm adequately explaining (the gall of me to give you guys complaints when I can't verbalize either, haha) I still found myself going back to retry with the film geek girl and check out the other characters, so it hooked me in the end. Certainly a pretty cool visual novel!

EDIT: oh what the hell i replayed film girl and got full bar this time instead but the ending was still just a weird copout where he left for some reason despite them being madly in love? how does this game work? is there even a good ending? i'm so confused.

DOJIMADOG responds:

woah! first off, thank you for the in depth review! you acknowledge a whole lotta stuff we both kinda knew about when going in and dropping and it some other stuff we might've not've haha

a lot of what you mentioned mostly came down to time limitations for the jam and everyone's schedules on the team being hard to match up with one another; a big thing is the romance bar. The romance bar was one of the bigger ideas we had towards the start that we kinda ended up ignoring towards the end to focus on other aspects (and also time). It's definitely something we wanted to expand upon and lead to more endings and such but ultimately ended up deciding to leave alone in favor of spending more time with art, music, etc. for what we already had. A shame, but it is what it is lol

home button not working is completely on us, we (or i) was totally aware but we were running outta time so we were like, whatever LOL. regarding the shooty minigame the indicative of who to shoot is the red and green outlines on every character, but overall i tried to also make most characters suiting to who'd make sense to shoot and not shoot (bad guys having meaner expressions or weapons, etc.)

SPOILER ALERT: there's only one ending for each route, we definitely did wanna do more with the romance bar, but to save adding loads upon what we already had regarding different aspects of the game we simplified things and hoped having 3 routes was enough to make up for that lack. To keep things fresh, dialogue is also directly affected by your choices most of the time (you might even miss a whole scene or get a whole new scene cuz you chose a certain thing!)

we might update it in the future to fix or expand upon some things, who knows? but thanks for playing, yo!

[Tidying Up + Secrets of the Sewers]

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!