FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[The Hunt]

Initial impressions of the game weren't that great. While it does have a rather eye-catching and stylish presentation to it with its black-and-red palette reminiscent of a Virtual Boy game, I found the gameplay mechanics to be very bog-standard and clunky with all sorts of weird and buggy physics (like if you jump while running into a wall, your jump will be cut short for some reason, and you can get caught on edge pixels which awkwardly stop your jump where other games would smooth them out). Furthermore, the levels were tedious as well with tons of boring backtracking through already cleared areas to collect another blood mark all the way on the other side of a level (why not just have a blood mark teleport you back to the center instead of having to walk back, or maybe make new enemies pop up to make the trip back interesting?)

So overall, I found myself getting quite bored and feeling like the game was something like a student's first project: commendable for a first start but nothing great for public consumption. I will give the game credit, however, that it did seem to do a pretty good job with level design: every new level seemed to introduce some new crazy layout filled with unique geometry, obstacles, traps, enemies and objectives. I also did like some of the small touches made to the game, like the way enemies explode with gibs (though the gibs did also glitch out in weird ways here and there, like spawning in a different spot than where the enemy was). Certainly some good effort and potential on display: if the game just had a bit polishing and more interesting mechanics, I think it could be pretty decent!

[XOXO Puzzle]

Not too shabby! It's a little simple and barebones, so I was really surprised by how very addicted I got to this game, though that's all due to the bonus par score challenges pushing me to understand the optimal techniques better, and how it kept things fresh by mixing things up with new rules for placement of symbols, which were very intuitive to understand thanks to the great asterisk that previews your move. A nice short and sweet puzzler with a good amount of cleverly designed content!

[Dashmo]

Hmmm, this one's a bit of an odd duck! I really want to like it and I do think it is pretty cool for the most part, what with its crazy frenetic energy and unique strange yet appealing style, but I did have a lot of annoyances with it as well that brought down the experience considerably.

When the game is working, it delivers some great fast-paced fun like a Warioware minigame gone bananas. Keeping track of your character and making lightning quick decisions to deal with all the sudden obstacles can get you in this crazy trance, propelled by the eclectic visual style and crazy music. Or at least, it should get you in a trance state, but...

But overall, playing the game felt like constantly stubbing my toe, where I kept running into issue after issue that impacted my fun and made it just feel too confusing and unfair.

The placement of collisions/hitboxes felt very awkward, especially due to the tilted perspective: so many times I'd think I hit something but didn't and vice versa, like I'd think I'm standing right in the path of the bullet but actually I'm a little in front of it.

Adding to this was the difficulty in seeing where the character's shadow was: it was so faded and barely visible, especially when contrasting against the dark ground and so many other visual flairs competing for attention like the reflection that I could never tell where my exact position was.

Controls just felt really inconsistent and wild at times: sometimes I could dash over a red pit and other times I'd take damage, sometimes my character would be difficult to turn or ignore my inputs in random ways before going back to normal, and so on.

The game just felt super unfair at times, sometimes spawning you into a room where you take immediate damage from a rotating pit spinning unavoidably quickly, or perhaps spawning you into a room and you can't even tell where you are until you realize you're right under the floating chaser enemy blocking your vision or you just generally get lost in the sea of overly loud and garish graphics and can't pick yourself out.

I could go on, but basically, it might be a game that's a bit style-over-substance: a good concept for a game that delivers some decent fun but is a bit too overly-stylized that it hurts readability and brings it down.

[Genokids DEMO]

Wow, wonderful to see this game on Newgrounds! Been following it for a long time and I'm glad to see that the game played as well as it looked on twitter and other such places. In general the game feels great in practically all aspects: not only is it very charming and stylish from a presentation and construction side of things, but it gets a lot of the sweet science of character-action/beat-em-ups/hack-and-slashes/whatever you wanna call it, like that wonderfully subtle but generous usage of auto-correction magnetism that ensures that your combos fluidily connect from many different avenues of attack (even when not using lock-on), input buffering and such that ensured no awkward input drops, and the wonderful use of hit-freeze and sparks for great impact to attacks.

Now, I'm going to deliver a whole bunch of feedback that is going to severely dwarf the amount of praise I just gave, but please realize that I am still incredibly positive on the game: I'm just a bit crazy for these types of games and just want to give as much thoughts that I can offer to help you think about your game and hopefully make it even better in future! Ok, here goes:

*I found the default controls a bit odd: most important, I'd expect the light attack button and the dodge button to be swapped as that would more closely match common setups, and it created a very awkward first impression where I struggled to get used to it. I know, I know, it's probably rebindable and there are some games out there that do match this setup so it's just a preference thing, but I still think it's worth pointing out since it can make a really weird first impression and some people just don't have much patience and might leave without giving it a shot. Even with rebinds being available, I'm typically wanting to follow the default controls since I trust that the developer did it for a good reason and don't want to screw myself from changing it (for example, I like how you setup the flow moves to consistently match the regular moves, like how the flow move you do with the launcher button is set to a launcher-esque move), but I just wasn't sure if there was a good reason in this case.

*I had a lot of trouble with the 'chase' mechanic, most especially with world traversal as the lock-on logic felt very inconsistent. For example, on the very first pole in the game: I chased to it, jumped off of it to gain some air and hit the button to chase to the next pole, only for my character to chase right back to the pole I just jumped off of a few inches behind them! I didn't even have the camera pointed that direction, so how the hell did that happen? There were some weird chase behavior going on with the wall-run to where suddenly I've be running the opposite direction or something weird. Definitely feel that it needs a review: methinks it's currently only working for 'best-case' scenarios and doesn't account for all the little deviations that players can have (for example, me jumping off before chasing to the next thing instead of just chaining-chases).

*I had a lot of difficulty keeping track of resources like flow and health and hype and all that since the bars for them are all crammed in the corner of the screen in a very perhaps too-stylish-and-small-and-therefore-difficult-to-parse ensemble and I'm busy focusing on my character in the center. A lot of times I'd hit the buttons for a flow move I want and nothing would come out, making me feel very silly. Would love if I could get more feedback when I do a move that I don't have resources for, like an error sound and maybe something pop-ups above my character with my current flow and how much is needed, like 2/3 or whatever. In fact, I'd love if maybe we have a little mini-HUD right by our character that displays health and flow and such, or at least maybe we can get signals for important events, like have our character glow or play a sound when flow or hype is full, and maybe have a red health bar appear above their head when low on health, perhaps!

*The world felt a bit barren. I'm not talking about the literal fact that the world is all crumbling and barren and bombed-out and such, it's more the general feel of the world being a bit lifeless. This is going to be a bit tricky since I'm not sure of the exact cause as it's just a subtle feel to it all, but it just felt like the world had a lot of too big and boring open and empty spaces that added a lot of boring travel time between fights and a weird sense of mismatched scale that makes us and the enemies look so tiny and insignificant. As stylish as the world looks, it just felt off and a bit too gamey, like it's one step away from being a gray box dev level what with all the silly placed traps that stood out like a sore thumb. Didn't have much of a sense of progress being made either as I just kept seeing the same type of stuff and not many landmarks or changes. I dunno, I might be being silly as perhaps this level is just a showcase demo level built to show all this stuff and so perhaps it is off since it's cobbled together. At the very least, could stand to have more interesting fighting places, perhaps with a lot of clutter to chop up or throw at enemies (there was an attempt with the bumper car, but that did not offer enough damage or abilities that I ended up ditching it fast since it just slowed down the fun).

*There were a few things I had difficulty accepting, like the inability to be able to recovery from knockback with the jump or dodge button, instead being forced to use the character swap button. There were some other things like how some flow moves would pierce past/through enemies instead of stopping in front of them (though maybe that's on purpose since chase already serves that purpose). It's all something I can get used to but it definitely felt a bit unintuitive at times, but nothing major.

*Little nitpick, but there were some occasions where the camera is showcasing something cinematic but I can still move around instead of being temporarily locked: could lead to bad things like someone running into a pit during the cutscene or just messing around and making goofy noises, haha.

*While it's nice and all and that could certainly be enough, I wasn't fully sold on a unique hook and feel for the combat. For example, I think there could be a strong hook with the character swapping mechanics, but at the moment they didn't have enough defining and differing strengths/weaknesses to make me want to utilize them in a strategic/synergistic way. For example, perhaps one of them could be good at guard-breaking blocking enemies so you'd feel compelled to swap to them for those, but in general the characters all feel generally competent at everything. At the very least, if each character had their own health bar you might want to switch if one gets low, but since it's a shared health bar, there's little incentive to stray away from your favorite. In a similar vein, enemies didn't offer enough resistance or abilities to promote interesting play either and they all just felt like pathetic punching bags at times: fun at first to style on but loses its appeal. This might just be a case of not being deep enough in the game yet as perhaps later enemies and synergies and such will become more apparent, but I wanted to point it out nonetheless. It could also just be a developer preference: some games want to force you into stylish play with big design incentives, and some games are content with stylish play being an optional challenge or a flex that isn't required.

Very happy to see that the Kickstarter worked out: it is very well deserved based off of this demo and I look forward to the future release (and hopefully I'll have helped in some small way!) Stay motivated!

NukefistStudio responds:

That's lengthy!

Some of that feedback can't be done now, other has already been noticed and will be taken into account in the future.

The defaults may be changed in the future, but for now only the CTRL modifier on this web version has been changed, to avoid more people closing the tab by accident. It's been many people already who found Square and Circle swapped, though there was other people that wanted even more exotic mappings, which means we will have to wait and test more to see what the best default mapping is, understanding that not everyone will like it.

The chase has been improved already (when there's a "next" chase target, the previous one won't be that prioritized, plus it now takes into account where you are looking, like with the enemies. Parkour is less fleshed out than combat right now, it's a difficult thing (well, the whole game is difficult, it's a lot of knobs to tune and a lot of stuff to try and maybe add, or remove).

We are considering having non-intrusive UI close to the center of the screen to show the flow meter, we already have some ideas but they won't land on this demo. It's been a problem with many as it requires a lot of playtime to get used to knowing how much flow specials cost and how much flow you have. At some point you end up getting a ton of flow, but until that point is reached (and even at that point) it could be helpful to have the flow on the UI closed to the center of the screen. We don't think health and hype need to be on the center of the screen, though, as it's not that time sensitive.

World needs more love, yes. It's a difficult feedback, as you say one possible reason is the apparent scale of the world vs the scale of the characters. Ultimately, we will need to spend more time on it figuring out what makes it work the best. The thing we have worked the most on, with difference, is on the combat, so that left the map behind.

We like being able to move while the camera is in cinematic mode. The solution for this will be being invincible instead of removing this "feature". Some people have already taken damage due to this, but again won't be solved in this demo.

About the combat feedback, sadly, I hate to write this but not only because of our gameplay, but also from seeing many others play (after trying the demo many times, none on the first try) it already has a lot to combine, be stylish, and there's reasons to be stylish not explained in the turorial (for example, the highest your rank, the highest the amount of flow you get, plus switching after dealing damage will give flow. There's a lot of hidden mechanics, only hidden because we can't shove more tutorials into the demo, it already feels like there's a lot of them. The full game will have time to explain stuff and in a better way).

You have helped, thank you. The most helpful thing, I think, was pointing out the possible discrepancy in scales. It's not the only problem with the maps (we are limited with how much we can improve them as we are only 2 and time is limited, but we will improve them).

[Shadow Gauntlet]

Hmmm, I really want to like what this game is going for, but I found myself incredibly frustrated and confusing and dropping it early on.

I definitely feel like the idea has merit: moving around the world through grappling is practically always very fun, and utilizing the side-effect recoil of shooting to move yourself backwards was a fun puzzle to work around, especially when combat was also involved. The levels also featured a lot of interesting setups, going from the simple mazes and obstacle courses to the more complex crazy stunt maneuvers where you fling yourself across a field of spikes from a duck. Furthermore, I applaud the effort to try and be fancy and have the controls all be done with a single button.

However, the game just felt very wonky and inconsistent, both due to the physics of the game feeling very strange to tangle with and the controls being very unintuitive. I tried my best to make it through the levels, but I kept experiencing tons of confusion from many elements of the gameplay.

The fact that the controls are done with a single button was a frustrating decision as it just led to a lot of confusion for me from how unintuitive it was. Common interactions like wanting to fire out just a few bullets to adjust myself, or wanting to, stop shooting for a moment while I swing my gauntlet to point the other way while swinging, were not possible due to the bizarre control scheme, and led to things like the grapple coming out instead of the grapple ending when I'm still trying to swing, respectively. Call me dumb, but I kept making these and other mistakes over and over since it just felt like common sense that I should've been able to do it, but the controls just didn't work with it.

I feel like if the game just has some more time in the oven to be polished up, and more data from players could be gathered in order to refine the controls to be more intuitive, this could be something really nice, but at the moment, it's a bit of a rough sell.

[Maerl Bay]

Pretty cool game that's very cute and fun in general, but has some odd design decisions that threw me off.

The game overall has a very good and professional sense of construction and feel to it: everything is so lively and juicy and charming, and the gameplay is solid with a good sense of feedback and steady progression of challenge to it as it introduces more obstacles and logistics/planning to consider for your dive. Some of the later levels were great battles were you need to contend with the darkness making it more difficult to ascertain where coral is and needing to memorize the position of air plants to make your return trip possible: thrilling! For a game made in such a short time frame, it's seriously impressive how reactive and juicy all of the elements feel and how many little touches are in place that you'd think would be cut, like the noises for clicking on fish and the way the pictures cascade into the boat upon collection.

There were definitely some issues I had with the game however:

*While it sure does look cool that you can see pictures of what you just snapped, it's a bit frustrating that it covers up so much of the screen and hurts visibility in an unfair way! There were plenty of times where I was swimming up on the right side of the screen and couldn't see anything because it was blocked by those photos: would be much better I think if they were transparent or disappear after awhile, or occupy a different portion of the screen.

*Found it a bit odd that taking photos isn't limited in some way, like making it use battery if you use it on enemies and not coral. Since it's not limited, you can technically spam click it on every single thing instead of having to be strategic with it, which feels silly, but since it's possible and a safer option, you'd be dumb for not doing it! In general, I found the battery a little confusing at times where I swear it drained faster for going down than going up? I dunno, probably just playing tricks on me!

*It can feel incredibly demoralizing to go all the way down, feel like you took photos of every bit of coral, go all the way back up and realize you missed one. I know it's part of the challenge, but the few times I missed one made me practically feel like quitting the game due to having to backtrack, especially since I don't feel like the game changes the state of the color enough to signal one you haven't collected (maybe instead of just changing the brightness of it, the color itself should change to another to be more significant).

*Speaking of demoralizing, I was gobsmacked when I lost and found that, despite selecting retry, I would have to go all the way back to the first level. It felt like such an unnecessary punishment: here I am having fun with all of the challenging mechanics and now I need to go back to the kiddie pool and wade through so many boring levels to get back to the level of challenge which entertains me. This can be especially annoying when I did plan everything out, but for some reason the air plants didn't respawn on my return trip upwards when they did the last time: got unlucky due to not realizing they needed more time, I guess.

Overall the game left a very nice impression on me, but the harsh punishment and nightmare scenario of missing a coral and having to go back do weigh heavily on it. Still, impressive work!

[Cargo Truck Racer]

I love the concept behind this game, and while I did have a decent amount of fun, the execution of it felt a bit strange and a bit of a missed opportunity.

As said, the concept is so simple yet so brilliant, being an amusing twist to the standard racing game where you drive a very uncommon race car, being a cargo truck, and not only have to make it to the end of the course at a fast pace, but you have to do so without spilling your cargo out! The concept is very comical and a great hook, and in general the feel of driving is fun. Tons of potential here! It's like Initial D meets Death Stranding!

However, there were a bunch of issues that got in the way of the fun:

Crash detection was very weird and way too sensitive: I'd barrel straight into a cone and not have an issue, but if the side of my truck lightly grazes a tree or barrier as I pass by I'd suddenly explode! In reality, I don't think the explosions from object collisions are even necessary, as crashing into something would already punish you by having your cargo pop out naturally, so there's no need to add salt to the wound (though I'll grant you the explosions are amusing in theory).

Movement of the truck felt a bit wonky, and the physics for the cargo in the back felt random and inconsistent: sometimes I'd be driving so carefully and it'd suddenly just spill out for no reason I could tell. Would help if maybe there was more fine control you could impose, or a rework of the physics system, as without it, it could feel very unfair.

I was also getting some performance/stuttering issues and other weird bugs in the later levels.

Finally, the design of the game might like a real missed opportunity:

For a game about deliveries, I found it very odd that there is not a time limit to the courses, or at least a par time to beat. You've got this whole boost mechanic that could be used in conjunction with the time limit to pressure the player to have to take risks and get good at driving quick and dangerously while preserving the cargo. But since there is no time limit, you may as well ignore the boost mechanic since it can only get you into trouble, and instead just drive safely and have a boring risk-free time.

I am befuddled as to why the stars on the course are randomized when the rest of the course remains the same. You'd think that the stars would be placed in a specific way to make the player have to pull off difficult moves that they wouldn't normally do when getting through the course as an extra challenge. Since they're randomly placed, though, it's completely random as to whether you'll have stars placed in a very easy spot or put in a practically impossible spot like right in front of a barrier (which happened to me!) This totally ruins the challenge as its up to luck and not player skill.

Similar to the stars mentioned above, I felt like the game should have some sort of three-tiered reward system based on the objectives of 1) beating the par time 2) preserving all cargo and 3) collecting all stars. It'd be fun if you go from bronze to silver to gold depending on whether you're able to beat the course with all three: newbies could have fun just beating the level, while experts would go back to beat it while accomplishing all three. However, currently it only rewards you for stars collected, which as mentioned above are completely random. Without some sort of reward system like this, I just didn't feel compelled to retry levels or even continue as I could easily exploit the system for easy wins.

I find that if I turn off my brain and just drive while imposing fun challenges upon myself, there's a good time that can be had, but I feel it's a missed opportunity that the game itself doesn't provide these potential fun challenges, as by not doing so, the player can play the game in a very safe and unfun way. This should be the next Crazy Taxi, but without an incentive system, it's unfortunately not.

MrNannings responds:

Thanks for your long review. It's always interesting to read what your thoughts of a game is.

Looing forward to you monthly video reviews!

[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!