FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Jetpack Kiwi]

This shows some good promise, especially with its initial first impression, but unfortunately the gameplay wore thin for me rather quickly and left me feeling rather let-down. Feels like a case where the game's meagre content has been stretched out to artificially increase playtime, making it paced awkwardly, going on for too long and becoming repetitive.

As said, it all seemed pretty good at the beginning. Pretty cool intro scene that reminded me of Contra 3, a very nice controls menu where you can both see the controls and preview them in a little simulation box. Moving onto the gameplay, there's some decent classic shooting action with all sorts of power-ups and upgrades, and new enemies being introduced to spice things up, alongside bosses, as you press on. Not too shabby at first glance!

However, as said, the game just feels incredibly repetitive and boring as I got into it. Levels just feel endless due to a) the enemies showing up randomly instead of in interesting formations or waves and b) there are no interesting obstacles or events to contend with, like maybe blocks/walls you have to shoot through or mountains to weave out of the way of.

Furthermore, it doesn't really feel exciting to shoot enemies as they feel a bit too spongy and don't provide satisfying damage/kill feedback, and power-ups feel awkward in that it just feels random in what you get instead of being controllable in some way, such as Twinbee's bell juggling system.

In summary, it feels like way more exciting events happen in the first level of Galaga than this game does over its entire playtime. In this, you just hold down the trigger and try not to fall asleep.

I feel like the first step to helping this game would be to condense it down: for example, I feel like the first level would be much better paced if you would compress all four sections of the first level into just the first section, that way all of the new enemies would be introduced at a good pace and it'd end with the boss fight in good time before it gets too repetitive. But more so than that, I feel like this game needs more craftsmanship to its levels to give them a story, a flow, a rhythm to it, with all sorts of waves and formations and events and such, instead of just a load of trash you shoot at for way too long. Look at other shmups and see how their levels are elegantly constructed.

[Prepare to be a Maze]

Wow, quite the interesting puzzler you got here! I found the whole tutorial process very memorable: thinking it would be a simple matter of just rotating the maze and moving it over, only to realize there was something in the way and I'd need to thread it through was wild! Seeing how the game expanded upon that with multiple pegs and needing to rotate and all that was challenging and required some mind-bending to get used to it, but eventually I got in the groove and made it through. All in all, a very short and sweet game that, while it might not have the fanciest graphics or sounds, did just enough to make it intuitive by highlighting pegs that are getting in the way and fun by playing little fanfares when you beat the level. The only complaint I could see having is that I wish it had even more to it, and also that I wish it had some sort of level select or save/load system.

[The Adventures of Bluke Bifton DEMO]

Quite the interesting point-n-click adventure you got here! For the most part, the construction of it feels very impressive and professionally polished, with voice-acting and graphics/animations in particular being well-done (though one could argue that maybe some things, like the idle animations, are TOO animated, haha). The concept of a world without violence was also a neat story hook: gave me some Invention of Lying vibes with how silly it could be.

A particular thing that I enjoy with a point-n-click adventure is interacting with all sorts of objects in the environment to get fun flavor text and jokes, and I was glad to see that was the case here in spades: a nice touch was the object itself reacting in small ways to your examination, like the lightbulb getting pushed or the bed shifting! There were plenty of other nice touches that really get you immersed like how when you walk over the broken window space, you'll hear glass and wood cracking under your feet.

Unfortunately, I do have to admit that for a demo, it didn't have quite enough meat on its bones to really get me hungry for the full game, as I'm not quite sure what the full game is going to be. Oh, I can make some general guesses that it will be something akin to Monkey Island point-n-click adventures with some minigames here and there, but I really don't know anything for sure as it never really lets you off the leash (heck, I don't even know enough if it ever does eventually let you off the leash as for all I know it might stay just as linear and guided for the entire game!)

While the demo is a bit unsatisfying, I still overall feel like this shows a lot of promise and craftmanship, so kudos to putting this together and I hope it goes well!

[Goblin Cobble]

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

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

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

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

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

[Bullet Happy]

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

In terms of feedback:

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

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

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

[No Time 2 Slime!]

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

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

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

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

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

[twenty, in total]

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

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

BNTFryingPan responds:

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

[Switch.tv]

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

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

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

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

[Re-Heart]

Hmm, this was a bit of a rough one for me!

On one hand, I thought the mechanics in this game, in particular the 'pillar summon' were pretty unique and interesting, and overall it provided some decent endless runner gameplay that keeps things exciting by constantly escalating the stakes with new obstacles. Despite the frustration I was dealing with, the fast-paced nature of the game and the insta-respawns made retrying actually rather addictive! But speaking of frustration...

As alluded to, the game was a very frustrating, and more importantly, unfair feeling experience. Instead of trying to get good at the levels, it felt more like I was trying to get good at controlling the character at a basic level: so many random dropped inputs and wonkiness made me feel utterly confused and not knowing what the hell the game wanted out of me. To add insult to injury, even when I did somehow master the controls, the levels came down more to trial-and-error memorization as the obstacles just come way too fast due to a combination of the camera not seeing far ahead enough and the base speed being very high that there's no way to react on your first time.

It certainly could be a rather nice endless runner, and the difficulty could be considered as intentional to create a 'rage game', but I feel like challenging precision platformers or rage games only work if the controls are polished enough so that a player's failures feel like their own fault, and with this, that unfortunately wasn't the case. Perhaps if it wasn't constrained to a game jam time limit, this could've had a bit more polish to make everything work! Would like to see a better version of this as that pillar summon was rather memorable!

ChalTheChalk responds:

THANK YOUUUUU!!! I do plan on making a revamp of this soon once im finished with a big nutty project i have in mind so yea, THANK YOU FOR YOUR AWESOME FEEDBACK!!! I hope you play more of my games soon in the future