FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Maptroid]

Huh, it's certainly an interesting subversion of Metroid games. I can imagine the pitch meeting: "what if we made a Metroid game where the map screen and the game screen are switched?" And well, it was intriguing enough that I stuck around to play for a bit and see what it was like: maybe you really can boil down a Metroid game just to its raw map elements and it would be just as fun.

Unfortunately, it didn't take long for the intrigue to dissipate and I was just left bored. With no sounds or music or juicy effects apart from a few token screenshakes to help the lackluster minimal graphics, the game just felt incredibly dull. Every dead end I encountered just made me dread the absolutely dreadful amount of backtracking I'd eventually have to do considering there was no fun movement or combat or anything to spice up the travel time.

So while it was an interesting experiment, unfortunately this was an experiment that didn't work for me. Graphics aren't everything and sure, if you had a Metroid game on Atari or something lowfi like it this would probably be what the game would be like, but still, I think this proves there's a good reason to have a fun character to control and an interesting world to see. Reminded me of playing Doom from the 2D map view: sure it's possible, but it's definitely not the exciting experience I want!

[Spent Shells]

Feels more like a prototype than an actual game at this moment: it's not bad, but it doesn't really feel that good either? Reminds me of the introductory example of a juiceless game in Game Maker's Toolkit "Secrets of Game Feel and Juice," unfortunately.

It's certainly got all the essential pieces for a top-down shooting roguelike, and it can give you a few minutes of shooting fun. It's got a decent variety of enemies and even includes some nice boss fights to fix things up. Everything seems to run fine and all that hoohum.

But I found the game getting incredibly boring and repetitive very quickly. Not only is it lacking any juice or pizazz to the combat with its lackluster feedback and uninteresting combat mechanics, and not only is it lacking any sense of a goal or progression to it with its repeating levels and bland stat upgrades, but it hasn't done anything to add its own interesting flavor to the genre, making it just feel so redundant, like you were building some sort of engine/toolkit for other devs to use to make an actual game with (maybe that is the case?)

As said before, it's a decent prototype, and I'd hate to see the effort go to waste with just this: hoping this isn't the end and you continue to build upon this to make an actual interesting shooting roguelike game with some sort of unique twist or fun mechanics!

[Tower of the Scorched Sea]

Wow, what a great adventure we got here! Overall great in all aspects I could find. In particular, I never found myself getting bored with this: not only does the game keep introducing new fancy mechanics like the variations on the light beams, and not only does the game do a great job at making so many varied and unique rooms that showcase all sorts of creative combinations of said mechanics, but also the game varies between slow-paced puzzle-solving and fast-paced action platforming through traps which keeps things constantly feeling fresh and exciting! And what a lovely boss fight to finish it all off.

If I were to have any complaints, is that the game might be a bit too easy: never really had a serious head-scratcher of a puzzle and with 3 hearts it felt like the action platforming could be a brute-forced at times. Still, even that simple nature is a positive of the game: despite it being easy, it didn't stop it from feeling fun and addictive and a heck of an adventure!

[The Reboot]

Pretty cool game! Definitely looks like it had a lot of effort put into it: the very fancy intro cinematic as well as the cool HUD with the robo-butler gave a solid first impression, and the way the grid shows where you can place things and the cards all snap into place and give previews and feedback and so on were all very intuitive and satisfying. Love the little touches like how every time you restart, a nuke goes off, giving a very diegetic/in-universe reason for the restart, haha!

I'll admit, I had a real rough time with the game initially: there was a part in the tutorial where you have three lower districts that look like they all need help to get balanced up otherwise you lose, yet you still have a quota for total to meet, so their just didn't seem like anyway to win. I was stuck for a long time there and the confusing lack of feedback it was giving me whenever I failed kept me in a loop until I solved it in a way I didn't think would work but it did??? Beyond that, I also had a tough time with the game as well where I didn't understand why I wasn't able to not build something where I thought I could, and it just felt like a lot of it was up to RNG and such (though maybe that's the point, just nuke it until it works out sometime, but still, this subtle feeling of futility was annoying, though I'll admit I might just be bad).

Overall had a lot of fun trying to get good at optimizing this city with all these crazy goals to meet: certainly an interesting balancing act to pull off!

(By the way, the robot-butler-whatever keeps throwing me off: they have these two lines right beyond their eyes that look like lips, so I feel like that's their mouth, but then they've got a mustache looking thing below that, so those two lines must be the nose and the tiny bit way below must be the mouth, but I just can't accept that and it disgusts me, haha)

MartinJacob responds:

Thank you so much for your detailed comment!

You are right about the tutorial part on balancing populations, which was quite hard to bring about (I am still not 100% satisfied with it) as it explains a mechanic that isn't intuitive at all...
About placing buildings, you can always only place them at the "end" of calculations (next to the building that has a number displayed on it), except for the "NEW" buildings which you can place next to any other building. I agree it's another part that would deserve more signaletics

About the RNG, yes it's meant that way, especially when reaching higher scores you sometimes have bad luck... But planning ahead and optimizing your strat will get you a long way

About the Butler, lmao I can't unsee it

[Egg Time Rewind]

Not too shabby! Decent little space shooter game with a cute little twist of previous lifes coming to help you out. The presentation is pretty charming, there's an alright amount of enemies and obstacles to contend with, the power-ups are nice, the charge-up shot added some strategy, and it was surprising how many control schemes it supported. It didn't really blow me away with anything unique or amazing, but I had fun playing.

I will say that I feel like, despite its interesting twist of previous lives coming back to help your future runs, I did find myself not being driven that hard to go for a high score or anything: while the game does intensify as it goes on, I did find it to nevertheless get quite repetitive and sometimes I'd just not have the willpower to go for yet another run through the same stuff once it came to my final life. I guess it's understandable given the small space you were going for since it reduces the space you have to vary things up, but still, it is what it is.

(The bonus game was pretty decent as well, being a little Outrun/Pole Position prototype thingy! To be honest, I might've actually liked that more than the main feature, especially if it was just polished up a bit more!)

KilledByAPixel responds:

Thanks for the review, good points!

[Wacky Emvi Simulator]

Hey, this was a really cute game! I was super impressed at how polished and juicy the game felt: the first impression with the very animated and explosive menu was incredible as developers typically skimp on those, and I'm glad to see you don't! Gameplay was no slouch either: the animation of the character when they jump, the great feedback for dashes and other effects, the fancy power-ups, the fun design of so many of the enemies such as the risk-reward nature of turning that one enemy around to bounce them for more points, and so on: it's all so fun and lively!

It's definitely got some rough edges here and there, such as the layering where enemies can appear in front of something that they technically should be behind, and I was confused on how some of the enemies worked like the DVD logo since I wasn't aware at first it was generating points when it hit the screen edges (otherwise I was like, wait, am I supposed to avoid activating them in the first place?) Additionally, in general the game is a bit short-lived and without any high score tables or some such. But nevertheless I had a good time with it and would love to see more!

[Dark Sword]

Pretty cool game that I quite enjoyed, but unfortunately feels quite unpolished in a lot of areas!

For the most part, I found the game very cool and reminiscent of something like Titan Souls or Shadow of the Colossus: a mysterious and dark world/story, tons of stylish bosses with sensational attack patterns to them, an interesting core combat mechanic of switching between melee and ranged, decent juicy effects, and so on. I also thought it had some great touches like how the gun puffs when you are out of ammo, and how you have black orbs swoosh over to you when you slash an enemy: really illustrates the mechanic to the player in a subtle way. I love me some boss fights and so I had a pretty darn good time here!

I will say that the game is pretty dang janky, though, which kinda holds it back. There were a lot of sloppy graphical effects like the boss bullets spawning at a different location than the spark effect for them being generated, you can take hits so fast with little invincibility time and insta-die, in general it can be difficult to tell when you get hit at times due to vague hitboxes, reflecting bullets with the sword is inconsistent as sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't for no reason I can tell (reflecting bullets also makes things a bit too easy), it feels silly that you can walk around when the game is still fake-loading and hasn't faded in yet after a level transition, and it seems like attacks aren't actually limited in fire-rate so technically people with better non-carpal-tunnel hands (or a macro) could have an unfair advantage, and so on and so forth.

While the game does have a lot of little things that hold it back, the broad strokes are still pretty cool and I enjoyed myself. Bit of a bummer that there is no save/load as I was near the end but just wanted to take a little break, only to see all my progress erased. I'll see if I can revisit it later on, maybe once the final boss area has been developed.

EDIT: I know I already said it before, but damn, some of the bosses in this game are just jank as all hell and don't feel good to fight. They look like they should be great to fight with all the fancy effects and attacks they have, but everything is just so untelegraphed and inelegant and confusing to parse. Eventually quit at the final boss: I kept trying but it was just so ugly as it seemed like the only way to win against him was to spam dodge like hell until he finally finishes his pattern and stands still for a nanosecond to let me get an attack in, and my arms/hands just can't keep up with that amount of button mashing or inelegant design. Again, neat game in concept though.

MrDoth responds:

Thank you very much for your review and for letting me know all these things, believe me I'm working since a few days ago to release an update that fixes most of these problems, thank you again that you have dedicated so much time to the game, and I had not thought about the save/load, I'll write it down to add some slots :D

[Subpixel]

Huh, quite the interesting experience! I love the way the game progresses bit-by-bit by introducing this crazy gravity mechanic and creating all sorts of obstacles based around it, and the fact that the controls shift along with the gravity actually added a fun little mind-bending challenge to get used to it all. Had me quite hooked!

Unfortunately, I felt like the game had some very strange jumping physics at its core that made it incredibly inconsistent and frustrating: like at times I think I'm doing a tiny jump forward and it sends me blasting forward instead, and vice versa (think it has something to do with whether you are holding a direction when you jump or when you press it afterwards and so on). This, when combined with other strange stuttering physics nonsense, wonky and unclear transition periods between gravity zones, and the later levels which focus a lot on hidden platforms which adds a lot of trial and error, made me quit before reaching the end. Still, I think I had an ok time with it while it lasted: would love to see more like this, if only the main physics mechanics were polished up for consistency.

[Fantasy Madness: Bloodbath]

Pretty neat vampire survivors-esque game! There's a lot of games like this, but I felt like this one did a pretty decent job at differentiating it slightly with its goofy themes and animal-based attacks. For the most part there's an alright level of polish put into the combat with explosive kills and blood being left behind and all that jazz. Had some good fun here!

It could just be because there are so many games like this out there, so competition is fierce, but overall I still had some feeling that this was lacking, despite it technically being quite decent. I'm not sure exactly what it is, but I did have a slight feeling like I was never clearly feeling the feedback from my attacks: felt like everything easily got lost in this chaos and I couldn't tell what was doing anything, where other similar games have you feel like you can still pick out the individual attacks from all the different weapons you have despite it being so chaotic. For example, the game told me my butterflies did the most DPS out of all my weapons, but it never really felt like they were attacking: it felt like they were just flying around me not doing anything. I will say there was a rare exception to this, being the toucan bombers which felt really good whenever they announced their arrival and streaked in for big numbers (though it happens so rarely that it's a bit of a bummer).

Apart from that, there were also some weird bugs and odd design decisions, like how you can exploit the dumb pathfinding of enemies and the fact that they collide with geometry and other enemies to group them up behind a wall and keep them out of your hair practically forever. Also it feels like the color palette and general presentation is a bit too bright and saturated and cartoony, leading to everything kind of blending together and making visual clarity difficult (possibly another symptom of me not being able to see the attack feedback that well).

I also dunno if I agree with the whole equipment system and gold gain: I don't like the feel of sacrificing potentially fun equipment for your current run to use for a later run, just feels like an easy way for me to start optimizing the fun out of the day: "I'll just make this run terrible to make another run better!" Just let me have fun without worrying about all these logistics!

Again, the game certainly provides some good fun, but at the moment, I'd say it falls behind a lot of the other popular games in this genre: doesn't mean it's bad, but comparison is inevitable. Hope you continue to work on the feel of the game and other aspects as it is very promising!

NightSteed responds:

Big thanks for taking your time and sharing a complex and insightful feedback (including the video you made recently)! We also appreciate you including our game in your Top 10 of NG games :)

Regarding the gold/earning system, we recently updated the game and now you gain gold by playing, therefore, selling items should be just an extra (and optional) way of earning some gold and getting upgrades. The amount of gold reward depends on the game mode you play and your performance (how many elites you kill, how long you survive etc.). This is not final ofc, but should give demo players much more opportunities on testing the upgrades, without necessity of “sacrificing” items earned.

Without getting into details, we just wanted to let you know that we are seriously taking all your remarks into account and we will surely implement some improvements in regards to issues mentioned. Mostly in regards to visual and skill readability. We hope you will check on it and share your thoughts again once they are implemented!

[Game]

Huh, I guess it's kind of like a museum for viewing old prototypes that you've made, or something like that? Was certainly an interesting experience, almost like going to an outsider art gallery with all of these weird experimental games presented in this strange world.

Unfortunately, I found myself losing patience with the games quickly: I'll give them credit that they are kind of interesting in how strange they play with the rules, like how objects keep scrolling vertically and you use coins to double-jump and so on, but at the end of the day, they just felt incredibly frustrating, unintuitive, janky and just plain unfun to play in my opinion. Usually when it comes to these weird games, I like figuring them out and enjoy the challenge and awkward experience, but here, I was wanting to quit almost immediately, haha.

Well, hopefully others are able to appreciate it more: guess I'm just not the intended audience!