FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[MimiQuest]

Not too shabby! Certainly made for a fun and challenging little fight: definitely not for the faint of heart as it expects you to already be familiar with a lot of Undertale mechanics and starts off hard, but I like a challenge and stuck with this until I got my genocide ending.

For the most part I had a pretty good time and it felt like the game was pretty well constructed overall. Loved that there was so much to such a short game: lots of fun interactions with amusing flavor text, lots of cool patterns to dodge, lots of neat touches like how the music kicks up a notch past the half-way point, and so on.

I did have a few grumbles as I was playing, with some of it I felt justified and others were just brief annoyances or confusion:

*I took a long time to realize that you just have to not move in the blue water: I thought the whole mechanic for that was to race to the top since it has that gap there (also just used to the blue and orange being used for beams, I guess).

*Speaking of water, I found the orange water to be super annoying since there were plenty of times I kept moving but it treated the brief nanosecond of my shifting directions as enough to be considered idle and make me take damage.

*Speaking of taking damage when I shouldn't, there were a lot of times where I swear that I didn't touch something but I still took damage: just felt like the hitboxes were a bit wonky and larger than they should be, like the hitbox being the bounding box instead of the exact shape of the object. For example, I felt like the water hitbox was a square which made making me hit it even though I'm inbetween a wave on the top which should be a safe pocket, and so on. I dunno, maybe it is being generous but it's just me being bad, haha.

*Some of the patterns were just super frustrating in that you have to memorize the pattern instead of being able to intuitively react to it. I'm primarily speaking of the blue/orange chain sequences where it'll trip you up by having a telegraph for orange, and then a telegraph for blue, but the orange will be super slow while the blue is lightning fast so you technically need to dodge the second one first. Once you know, you know, but until then, ugh!

For now I've just got the one ending for a normal kill: I've been trying to play around to see if I can get anything else but no luck so far as whatever the conditions are, they must be pretty obtuse. We'll see what happens!

EDIT: And there we go, pacifist ending woo!

[DRILLBIT!!]

Pretty neat little game with an interesting concept! As usual from a Jack game, I overall found the game to have a very polished level of construction and juicyness to it all, as well as being a wacky and unique concept, so for the most part the game was pretty neat.

Having said that, though, I did feel kind of awkward in my impression of it. I'm probably thinking too hard about it, but I was a bit confused on how you're supposed to play.

I assume the intent is that you drill down and make some educated guesses on letters until you get close to what the answer is, and then once you know what it is, drill and get the remaining letters you need. But it felt a bit awkward since, as much fun as it is to drill, it felt like the game was better played if you just idle around and think about the solution, which is pretty boring. Later on it kind of forces you to keep drilling with the wave of dirt, which I feel is good pressure to keep you drilling and take risks but it's almost too harsh too fast and just makes it frustrating instead of interesting.

Furthermore, I wasn't sure about scoring, like whether a big depth was a positive or a negative: it seems to think that a big number for depth is good since it has achievements for it, but shouldn't a big depth technically be bad since it would kind of imply that you needed to take so long to finish a word? Though thinking about it, the letters are randomly placed, so its not really up to the player on how deep they might have to dig until they get the right letters, unless the course is seeded in such a way that there's always an optimal solution at a certain depth, and every bit of depth past that would be suboptimal. And if depth is a positive, can't you just cheese it by digging down and down, ignoring letter blocks and the word solving? I dunno, haha!

Apart from that, there were also some minor annoyances like how letter blocks, one that I need and another I don't, would spawn right on top of each other, and I found the drilling a bit too wild and janky to reliably get just the one I want without inevitably getting the other one and being penalized.

For the most part I think it's a neat game: a little shallow (ironically) but certainly juicy and interesting enough to be a nice experience for a time.

[Picayune Dreams - Demo]

Ok, listen. I know it, you know it: the game is pretty darn cool. Super-duper cool. So as much as I'd love to spray you all with a hot load of the same ol' praise you've probably heard a million times, I'll spare you that and get right to the nitty-gritty: feedback.

As said, I'm overly very positive on the game, so most of this is just nitpicks: I didn't find any serious dealbreakers. Forgive my verbosity:

*I found myself surprised at how long levels felt. For example, when I played the second level, it felt like it just kept going on forever as it all devolved into a mish-mash of constant enemies. It was fun, but the fact that I noticed it did make me feel like it was getting a bit repetitive. Might be due to a few things: the game might've introduced too much enemy variety too early and then plateaued, or maybe the game wasn't having enough unique events happen (like those moments where suddenly a big circle of enemies encloses you).

*As cool as the reboot process after a death was the first time, is there a way on subsequent runs we can just press a button to fast-forward through all the heartbeat ponging stuff and just get to the stats and ability to go back to menu?

*The exp pickups being numbers created from damage is novel, but I felt like it was kind of less than ideal. For one, it makes it very difficult to be able to tell the damage your individual weapons are doing, which makes it both confusing to determine how strong they are at first and makes it less apparent and thus less satisfying to see them grow bigger from upgrades. Second, I found myself regularly forgetting to pick them up since they both just blend into the background and aren't very distinguishable from each other in intensity as something like blue/red/yellow gems are, making it unclear what to prioritize to pick up (is there a big number in this sea of numbers that's worth going for or are they just a bunch of worthless 1's made from scratches of my laser? hard to tell with peripheral vision in this chaos).

*Skills points...bit unsure on some of these. For example, some of them feel like they should be weapon pickups instead, like the scream pushing back enemies when you get damaged. In general, I'm also just not sure if they are even necessary as a system: I guess metaprogression can feel nice but sometimes it can be annoying that you feel like you can't actually play a "fair" game until you've spent time and grinded all the unlocks, like why aren't they just part of your base toolkit?

*By default I feel like the game put the sound effects (specifically weapon hit feedback) too soft and the music too loud. Maybe you guys got sick of hearing the weapons drone on and on during dev so you turned it down, and maybe I'll get sick of it eventually and wish I kept it to your settings, but for right now, I feel like its more satisfying to hear the hit feedback in a louder fashion.

*The story is very cool and mysterious, but I almost felt like the game gave too much away in the first memory? Lore is an awesome thing to collect and I was looking forward to playing farther to get more of the mystery unlocked, but I practically feel like I already understand everything from just the first boss memory so my drive is a bit diminished as what else is there to strive for? I could be underestimating the carrots you have left to dangle, however, if you pardon my pun.

*Some boss phases can be a real pain for certain loadouts: for example when the rabbit boss flies to the edge of the screen and is shooting circles at you, I felt like a chump since my loadout was all melee and I couldn't reach him even if I kept moving towards him. Luckily he has a phase after that where melee is good, but just be aware of this going forward in designing. Is it my fault I didn't diversify my loadout, or is it games fault it didn't design the boss or ensure I get provided enough versatile weapons? I think it's fine, but food for thought.

*As both a programmer and a lover of mystique, I should've loved the weapon descriptions done through psuedocode, but in reality I just found myself confused and annoyed. You can eventually learn what the weapons do through experimentation, though having said that I actually still don't know what a lot of stuff does for certain. Maybe a bit more clarity would be nice while still preserving the codey theme?

*You probably already know it, but this is just another Vampire Survivors clone (or maybe Risk of Rain clone, or whatever else if you keep going backwards) so as stylish as it is, it is probably gonna get a lot of flak for being in an incredibly saturated market. I certainly think this is doing a lot better by having a very unique style and having a more powerful story and mystique about it, but still, whatever else you can do to differentiate it, do it.

*I liked the enemies that sleep until you hit them, whereupon then they come running at you, but I think when I had a laser I never saw them asleep again: wonder if the range on the laser is too much and creates off-screen aggro?

*Apologies if you watch my video of me playing: I did way better once I played it off-recording, haha.

Best of luck on your continued development!

(Note: all of this is from playing the Steam demo as you advised)

[Toe II Toe]

The game does certainly impress with its sprite work and animation and gives a good first impression, but I found it very lacking in content and gameplay.

Compared to other simple-yet-deep fighting games like Divekick or Footsies, I felt like this game was only simple, with no hidden depth to speak of. I wanted to employ tactics like ducks and blocks and such but it just never felt like they could lead into anything since attacks come so fast and with no telegraphs or openings being made by defense: for example you'd think a well-timed duck would make a big right hand from your opponent whiff and leave them open to a counter, but no, they recover in time and I gain no advanage by the time I stand up (or even worse, I get hit by an already thrown punch when I'm in the middle of standing up from a duck). I'd regularly feel like I had better luck winning a fight by just mashing rather than playing in any sort of smart way: felt like the equivalent of rock-em-sock-em robots or something like that.

I'll admit that I only played the single player, so maybe I'm missing out on the ideal two player experience. But still, I feel like this game just doesn't have enough content to it to make it worthy of dragging someone around to huddle around the keyboard and play for a bit. I like the idea of a simple fighting game, but I don't agree with the execution here.

plazatin responds:

Hey man, thank you for playing my game and the honest feedback, appreciate it. Block actually can be timed to block both jab and hook, and it opens up a lot of opportunities to counter once you get hang of it. This is further emphasized when playing against another player. For the duck, however, I must admit, feedback has been the same across even those who loved the game--it can be timed especially against a hook, but isn't worth using because it is too risky and prone to punishment. Admittedly, the game requires further tweaking. Luckily I am getting feedback from you and other people too, so thank you detailing your thoughts instead of saying game sux or leaving one star.

Also, the game was, in fact, meant to be a digitial equivalent of rockem sockem. The initial plan was to to see if a 20 second fighting game (for a game jam) was feasible. I honestly didn't think people would have complicated strategies for a 20 second match other than mash buttons.

Because of the positive feedback, people have opened my eyes to the potential and given me suggestions to improve the game. Some of them are (1) ability to choose time beyond 20 seconds, because people found it too short for player vs player where people are strategizing instead of just spamming buttons (2) tweak the duck and add a counter (3) more characters for an arcade experience, and some more changes. Hopefully after I've applied the improvements, you can give the game another shot.

P.S. although the game fell short, thank you for comparing it to footsies and dive kick!

[Chef Quest]

It's a cute little adventure, but I did feel a bit letdown by it!

I like the setting and the whole idea of cooking up various recipes to solve your patrons various requests, while simultaneously both managing a garden and delving into a dungeon with your various upgrades to discover new ingredients to be able to make these new recipes. The general feel of the game was very amusing as well with all sorts of funny dialogue and characters.

However, at the end of the day it just felt way too short, scripted and unchallenging to be fun. With all of the upgrades being handed to you in an obvious manner to unlock the next ingredient, with no time pressure to resolve a patrons issues (even when they're on fire, for gods sake) and therefore no need to plan out your garden or rush your dungeon delves, I never felt like I had to think. The game just felt like an overly long tutorial and I kept waiting for it to take the training wheels off and it never did and suddenly it was all done.

Would've loved to see this similar to a game like Papers Please or Potionomics or anything, where you go through days and have a big line of patrons with all sorts of randomized problems and you need to find time to dip in the back and choose what to grow and buy time to delve deeper for more rare ingredients and so on. As it is, it's still a fun little story, but I never felt like I was playing a game, more just following a script.

[Blam and Protect]

Cute little game, but unfortunately so shallow that it loses its appeal after a minute or so.

In general the construction of the game is decent with nice graphics, music and feel/feedback: I like seeing the various Newgrounds characters running around, and the core concept of blamming bad entries as P-Bot protecting the portal is quite novel. Certainly could work...

However, the gameplay just consists of holding down the fire button and aiming at the bad guys. It's pretty braindead, and there isn't much variation in enemies to force you to have to tackle them dynamically, like having some teleporter enemies, enemies that attack you, or slow but tough ones and fast but weak ones, or anything. As said, you only need to play for less than a minute to see all the game has to offer you: no interesting events or escalation of difficulty happens.

I really feel like the game missed a trick here: when I started, I initially thought that you were going to be like a sniper, accurately lining up shots to ensure you only take out the bad guys hiding in the line while not hitting any of the good submissions with friendly fire. That would actually breathe some much needed challenge and strategy into the game, since you'd need to carefully adjust and time your shots.

Would love to see this game come back in an improved state with more meat on it since, as I said, the idea behind it isn't bad at all. However, as it is now, you know what I'd say (apparently haha): this is like if nickleback was a game!

factzmachine responds:

HE SAW IT! HE SAW THE GAME OVER SCREEN!! ITS LIKE IF NICKELBACK WAS A GAME CONFIRMED!!!!! Fr tho Ty for playing futurecop, Tysm bro!

[SQUID ON ROAD]

Hmmm, bit of a weird love/hate relationship with this game! Ultimately I do think I very much enjoy this game, but boy do I feel like I have a lot of complaints about it, haha!

First, it was quite annoying that, despite using a mouse and keyboard, the game kept insisting I use touch controls and only showcased them in the tutorial. Eventually I discovered that I could hold the A and D to move left and right, and thank god for that because boy lemme tell you it was annoying to keep clicking left and right spots on the screen at first. Can't the game just detect my control scheme and display an appropriate tutorial?

While the boost mechanic in great and satisfying in theory, there were a lot of little things that made it much less so. First, even though the game says that killing enemies fills up the boost bar, I found that it felt like the boost bar filled up at the same agonizingly slow pace whether I killed enemies or not, making me feel silly for pushing myself to play aggressively since I wasn't being rewarded for it. Second, I hated that, no matter how many damage upgrades you get, the collateral damage from a boost always seemed to do 7 damage, which is 1 damage point away from the amount needed to get a kill: this made boosting very unsatisfying since no matter how much I tried to aim to ram as many people as possible and scatter them to the winds, the only target that would die is the main target and everyone else would immediately come back and shoot at me while I wait for the aforementioned slow boost charge.

A lot of the time it felt like dodging bullets felt completely up to luck. Yes, enemies do have telegraphs and the bullets move slow so it is possible to dodge them. But in execution, each enemy is moving to the beat of their own drum, so even if I try to time my attack after one enemy telegraph to avoid their attack, I can't track all of the others in the big crowd and one of them will plug me unavoidably when I'm dashing in. Additionally, even if I try to pull off a great attack move that will weave through bullets, sometimes the curving road will make enemies shift over which changes my trajectory into a bullet I wasn't going to hit at first. Argh, so annoying!

Despite all my gripes, though, I still found myself playing the game over and over: it's just a really fun and goofy concept with juicy, satisfying gameplay at its core. I'm not sure about the long term appeal since it was getting kind of repetitive going through the same events every replay, and the upgrades were a bit boring and samey, and I wasn't sure if there was a goal or ending to strive for, but for the most part, I'd say well done!

jefvel responds:

Thanks!! Great review as always!
I’m currently reworking a bunch of stuff in the game. In my previous games I could determine whether or not it was played using touch when first clicking the screen, but that info isn’t exposed by gamemaker sadly. I’m going to add a setting for it on first launch.

Also rethinking and working the way enemies and attack values work. Once I get in more enemy variation I’ll also make damage numbers go up significantly. Also yeah gotta do something about how bullets and the road curvature works. A goal is to make it work well using touch/keyboard+mouse/controller, which is a bit of a challenge!

Hopefully I’ll have these things figured out in a future version, I’ll do my best! Thanks again 🙂

[Moomoo's Maple Mishap v2 (Second Demo)]

Hey, not too shabby! Apart from the wonderfully goofy intro cinematic, I'll admit it didn't have the best first impression, as the desert level felt a bit barren and boring in terms of the landscape and assets. However, bit by bit the game seemed to improve and, by the end, became a really fast-paced and smooth game to play with all sorts of cool obstacles courses and boss fights that I enjoyed blazing through, quickly reacting to transition between rolling and wall-jumping and such in a satisfying manner. Really liked the boss fight too!

For the most part I think the game is quite smooth and responsive, but I will say I did have a few problems here and there with the roll, primarily trying to transition out of it: sometimes when I'm rolling and I jump it'll get me out of it, other times it'll treat my jump as a forward boost instead and keep me flat on the ground. Maybe it'd be good if jumping from a roll stops the roll and you need to re-roll: maybe not? Also there were some slight things I'd love changed, such as the 'milk power' mode: felt like it was really unnecessary and without purpose, and didn't have the powers you'd expect from growing big, like maybe being able to crush spikes and such. Speaking of powers, it'd almost be nice to maybe see more cow-themed powers since the theme seems to be going to waste.

For the most part I found it to be a very promising demo: apart from some small kinks with rolling, the movement was nice and smooth and the courses very fun. Looking forward to seeing more development!

[head hunting.]

Wow, I was really surprised by this one: took me on a topsy-turvy ride where I went from initially hating the game to absolutely loving it!

As said, when I first started I found it very difficult to get used to the controls, or even figure out what the heck were the controls in the first place since nothing was explained. Even when I got the general gist, so many aspects like how it was difficult to keep track of where the arm was since it didn't reset after you stop using it but you can't see where you left it, and the physics sometimes behaving very oddly, was quite painful and made me come close to quitting.

However, little by little I got used to swinging around, and what I found was a very short and sweet 'getting over it' experience where the game puts you through a series of increasingly challenging and creative obstacles, like going from a big grabbable canvas to separated ones and less flooring to catch yourself, and eventually going to real wacky ones like a thin rope. I ended up getting really addicted to testing and perfecting my skills with the swinging and all that, and it was so satisfying to get through it all (despite the downer ending, haha)!

I think the key to me sticking with the game was probably that fancy opening cutscene: when you have a strong first impression like thatt, it kinda puts a seed of hope in the back of your mind that makes you give the game a bit more patience, like a "if they put so much effort here, they must've put a lot in everything else as well" kinda deal. Anyway, well done, and we'll see if I go back for the lunch stuff (unfortunately, it's a bit annoying with no save/load and no skippable intro)!

[Franco Fox in Fairyland DEMO]

It ain't bad but...it's not that great either? Basically, the game reminds me very much of those memes where they're like "that game sure was a game" or something akin to that, haha.

Again, it's not a bad game, heck, I'd even say it's a good game. Certainly does make a good impression with its cute intro, and overall the game has a solid sense of craft to it in all respects: graphics, sound, music and retro aesthetic. Couldn't see any major complaints with the movement or anything either, other than it was a little confusing that the bounce you get from an enemy goes higher than the bounce from a box (maybe you shouldn't even bounce that much from a box in the first place, if at all). So yeah, all in all, it was good.

But in general, while it was "good," I just found the game to be very plain and bog-standard, and therefore not very fun. It pretty much just felt like a basic platformer or Mario clone without any unique mechanics or ideas of its own, leading me to questioning why I should even bother playing it. Not only did it not seem to have a hook or anything like that, the game was also in general very unchallenging and thus not very engaging, and any bonuses to strive for that might've engaged such as those big stars were both very simple to get and ultimately pointless as I was unsure what their purpose was.

There are also some slight bugs like how you can fire the weapons as fast as you can press the button: feel like that should be limited to a locked fire rate, otherwise it is an unfair advantage for people with faster fingers to cheese certain parts of the game by absolutely blasting them away.

Might just be a case of the game being a slow burn: the bonus level does showcase some more challenging late game levels that we might see in a full release, but even then the overly simple movement and lack of juicy effects or some sort of unique style made it still feel less than impressive. Furthermore, even if the game is a slow burn, I'd still argue that the game should step up the pace and hook us with something early to keep us interested and all that, but despite my complaints, I am looking forward to seeing the final version of this eventually since it is promising and shows effort, so best of luck!

LuckyDingoStudios responds:

Thank you for your thorough review! I wanted this game to be relatively simple and basic so it would be easy for anyone to pick up and play, but I can see how it being too standard would make it feel like it's nothing special. I don't think I will be changing the core mechanics to be more complex at this point, but I will try to add more unique elements that will hopefully help the game form more of its own identity and to be more engaging to play.

The unlimited fire rate on the weapons was intentional because I thought it would be fun to spam it, but most players seem to think it was an oversight or makes things too easy, so I most likely will limit the fire rate in the full game based on the feedback I have gotten.