FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[BULLET WELL]

Hmm, I feel pretty mixed about this one!

From a presentation and story standpoint, I do find the game quite charming and goofy and it was quite amusing to listen to the dialogue and see what weird places the plot went to (though I'll admit it was a pain that there was no ability to skip/fast-forward text).

The gameplay itself, however, felt incredibly boring and lackluster. The levels were incredibly shallow and devoid of any sort of interesting combat, the upgrades were pointless as you just get all of them in the end, and the game ends right when it was getting at least slightly good with the boss fight. To add insult to injury, it was also completely compromised by buggy design: you can shoot through walls while enemies can't which makes it incredibly easy to clear out rooms without even having to leave your starting position, and the enemies pathfinding abilities are so dumb that they can easily get stuck on walls.

To me, it felt like this was a game that, due to game jam constraints, was both unable to create a compelling hook and was cut incredibly short, and therefore tried to make up for it with goofy humor. Certainly shows some promise, especially with the music, and I can sympathize, but I feel it doesn't have any actual core fun to it.

[Bando's Comic Wizard]

Quite the nice little application you've got here! Certainly nice to have something to help people display their comics in a simple and intuitive page flip format, and I had no problem following the instructions from cute widdle Bando to do a sample upload (though some of the instructions could stand to be spaced out a bit more so it's not just a big wall of text, such as putting the instruction to unzip the file for personal webpage uploads in a separate paragraph so users don't get confused as they should keep it as a zip for newgrounds uploads).

If I were to have some feedback, I'd say that the viewer is a bit too minimalist for its own good and while it'd be nice to have the option to view just the image with no clutter as it does now, I'd love if there were some additions such as:

It'd be nice if, when you hover over the right side of the page, a right arrow would pop-up to indicate that you'll flip to the next page if you click, and vice versa for the left side: it would make it less confusing as to what action is about to happen.

I feel like you should allow someone to press anywhere on the side of the screen to flip the page, instead of being constrained to only clicking directly on the sides of the image itself.

Would love if there were more utilities for viewing the page, such as being able to click on a magnifying glass to zoom in/out, or being able to choose whether to view pages through a fit width, fit height, original size, and so on.

Would love if there were more options for viewing pages, like maybe a gallery view where you can see all the pages as thumbnails to click on, or a dropdown where you can select a number page to go to, and so on.

I could go on with other additions that'd be great for different formats such as when you want the option for double-spreads or vertical comics, but I'll cut it off there since I could go on and on. Essentially the viewer is nice, but it is incredibly barebones and while that's nice for a minimalist impression and perfectly fine, it does make it a bit lackluster. It's still a nice gizmo though that I hope helps some people publish their comics in nice ways!

As a side note, I just wanted to say that I found the credits on the bottom page very amusing: reminded me of those hacked in rom credits you can see around, haha!

KittyhawkMontrose responds:

Thanks for the detailed feedback FuturecopLGF! It's super awesome to know that you found using the app as simple as we had hoped (formatting issues aside, which we will fix).

This first version we were concentrating on getting an "end to end" experience that worked well with NG (ie, streams images etc), but your suggestions for features are right on. The plan is to collect feedback like yours, see how we can best complement the new art portal when it comes out, and iterate towards something more in line with existing stand alone readers.

Also, super happy you picked up the "keygen vibes" we were putting down. :)

[Handle With Care]

Wow, this one really surprised me! It's very complicated and overwhelming to learn what you're even doing, let alone all the crazy ins-and-outs of construction, but after sticking with it, I felt like a genius once I built a little vehicle that could take that egg all the way to the finish for a 3-star delivery!

It's certainly an interesting little game, like some twisted combination of Kerbal Space Program, Trials Fusion, Tears of the Kingdom, and those high school egg drop/racecar derby contests. Yes, it's a little clunky and confusing and unwieldly (could maybe stand to have more builder tools through maybe mouse usage to increase the pace and the ability to snap to certain angles for consistency) so it can be frustrating, but in terms of a game jam game, I feel like this is a great success since it is very memorable and makes my brain explode with anticipation for how a fully fledged version of this prototype would turn out. Would love to see more of this!

Frogrammer responds:

hey thank you! means a lot coming from you haha

[Underboard: Omen]

Wow, solid game you got here! I was a bit worried at the start that it would be way too confusing and opaque due to the 'help' menu that is just a wall of boring text with no visual examples or such, but I was glad to see that the 'help' was just essentially a bonus glossary you can reference for more in-depth technical parts of the game, while Meno does a great job at walking you through the essentials.

Indeed, while the game might seem overwhelming to start, not only does it have a solid step-by-step tutorial through Meno, but the game is also very friendly with having every element of the HUD be hoverable to get tooltips. Due to this impressive design achievement, it didn't take long for me to get comfortable with all of the systems as any question I could possibly have could be answered by simply hovering over it! Want to know what unit another unit will target? Hover over it and see what gets highlighted red! Want to know the range of a unit? Hover over them and see what tiles get bordered! Want to know what the spell or item does? Hover over it! And so on and so forth.

With all that out of the way, I found the game quite fun to build up a party and get them through the dungeon through a combination of setting up formations, giving them all sorts of items to turn them into some crazy cross-class abomination, finding the right time to cast spells to turn the tide, and all sorts of other strategic elements. Very addictive and fun all-around!

In terms of points that bother me:

While the game is quite informative with all sorts of tooltips and icons and such, it's not always showcased in the best way, such as how many icons are so tiny you can barely see them: for example, I didn't notice the icons for how many exp potions you need to level someone up, or the icon above the reroll button indicating you can use a potion as currency for that action.

I couldn't shake the paranoia and fear that the game would screw me over with RNG at some point, like not giving me good balanced party, and I really don't like the idea of sacrificing experience points to reroll, as interesting as that might seem on paper.

Furthermore, I found it incredibly disappointing that there doesn't look to be any sort of save/load or checkpoint system in play as runs can be pretty long and I don't necessarily always have the time to do it all in one sitting.

To add onto that, it was really annoying to have the game always treat me as if I'm starting for the very first time with all the tutorial messages and such: as cute as Meno is, you'd think those would go away on a second run (or at least offer the option to skip).

Overall great stuff!

chazmuco responds:

Hey dude amazing feedback! We will consider those things for the Steam release, thanks a lot!

[Pico-Cross Collab 2023]

Pretty cool game! Was very impressed at the overall incredibly stylish presentation: loved how everything, particularly the menus and HUD and such, were all intricated sculpted to fit the whole noir detective theme you were going for: the level select being a evidence corkboard and so on. The game just seemed to overflow with charm and was just a treat to witness, and to top it all off, it had some great gallery art and some wonderful picross puzzles to go through as well. Solid craftmanship all-around!

I gotta admit that the picoross gameplay seemed quite compromised because the game automatically confirms whether you've filled a row/column correctly: with this, it's very easy to just brute force a bunch of guesses and get confirmations, instead of having to do some actual deduction that you slowly build up from clues (the irony, considering the game is detective-themed!) Hell, I had plenty of times where I wasn't even trying to cheat the system but the game automatically confirmed another row/column I wasn't even focusing on: it's just too easy to exploit! Maybe it was an intentional design decision to reduce the difficulty and allow people easier access to all of the great content on the board and in the interrogations? It just felt very odd to me.

Other minor complaints was that I found the whole aspect of the filled squares being filled with art pieces to be a bit odd, awkward to view, and visually not very pleasing from a zoomed-out perspective. The art pieces themselves are lovely, of course, but it just feels like the game is trying to be two things at once and I just found it unnecessary, though unique. Speaking of the art, I found it a bit odd that every puzzle just seemed to reuse the same art pieces instead of providing new ones, and I wish that the art pieces would link to the artist's newgrounds profile if you click on them for an easy follow and such.

[Pico's Boss Run!]

Wow, incredible stuff here! I'm a sucker for a good boss rush so I'm probably bias, but I feel like because I love 'em so much I'm very critical on them, and this happily delivers a wonderfully well-crafted experience! Everything about the experience is great: love the graphics and lively animations, love the varied and challenging boss patterns with very fair telegraphs, love how juicy and impactful everything feels, love the strategy of the risk/reward nature of dodging or parrying to build up special, love the scoring system to encourage me to go back for perfects, and I also love some of the wonderful touches the game has, like the way you ragdoll bounce around when you die, and the way the parry has a cooldown so you can't spam it, except when you successfully parry which refreshes the cooldown to allow another instant use. Everything just feels great!

My only major complaints are that the game didn't have a tutorial so it took me a moment to learn some aspects like parrying and specials: you don't necessarily need a tutorial, but I would've loved some more design changes to make things more intuitive, like if the special bar was a bit larger to draw attention, and if you try to use a special without having full bar if it would respond/signal you in some way to let you know it's not ready yet and you need to parry more. Furthermore, with no way to hold down the trigger to fire, this game flares up my carpal tunnel incredibly fast with the way I need to mash bullets: at least for Alucard I could rest in between his invincible states, but with Hanzo forward there's no breaks! Also I don't know why the game has both Pico and Darnell on the board mirroring my movements despite me wanting to play single player: if there was an option to select coop that'd be one thing, but I'm not seeing it, and I find it confusing to try and juggle both of them and I don't know whether it's intentional or a bug. Most of the time I just immediately run left so Darnell is overlapping behind me, making us essentially one character and therefore a non-issue, but why is this happening in the first place?

I'm still only at Hanzo because, as said, this game cramps up my hand too fast, but I'm hoping to come back and get to the end soon after a rest!

JalenBrah responds:

Thanks for the review!

The Co op is a controller bug, it slipped through the cracks despite me testing the full game in multiplayer and single player on HTML5 and EXE. The gamepad code is checking the same controller twice for some reason but I'm not sure why. I'll figure it out and patch it up by the next major update though, which should hopefully be soon!

[Pico's Puzzle UFO: Shooting Stars]

Hmmmmm...this ones practically as tricky to judge as solving the puzzles within!

On one hand, I feel like the game is generally very well constructed and has a great level of polish to it: everything looks and feels not just good, but very stylish as well. I love the whole picture book presentation and gameplay graphics as they are very charming, and the puzzles are quite the brain-teasers! I'm so used to puzzle games starting out slow with tons of plodding tutorial-esque levels to get you used to everything, meanwhile this game is almost refreshingly starting off strong with some very elaborate puzzles right at the start! Seriously, some of the first level puzzles were absolutely crazy and unique, even making you go back to past puzzles with future pieces to rearrange them in new ways to progress: this type of design where puzzles spill over into each other is wild! Later levels introduce even more interesting mechanics like the gun and it just keeps going, and I do think the game tries to teach you mechanics well in subtle ways, like how you can see the entire island glow when it gets charged to let you know that any bridge blocks that get placed on the island will also get powered: seriously impressive stuff!

I gotta admit, however, that as much as I like a challenge, I feel like this game overdid it and I could've used a bit more of a slower start and some tutorials/explanations as my peanut brain was struggling to even get past the very first level! Some of the solutions just seemed plain ass-backwards strange at times: I solved the final puzzle in the first world by pushing a battery onto a previous puzzle island, resetting it to delete it from the board, and then with that obstacle removed I had enough room to move around the final pieces to get to the end: I'd like to say it's intentionally clever, but it feels more like I broke/cheated the game and with puzzles this wild, I really have no idea what's the actual case!

Also, as a small petty complaint, I just kinda feel like this game isn't very Pico-ish: feels like you just had a puzzle game being built and just slapped Pico on as a shallow cosmetic skin as an afterthought to make it work for Pico Day, rather than creating an actual Pico game from the very start. I mean, c'mon, light-bridges? Batteries? In what world does this make you think of Pico? But whatever, it's not that big an issue.

As stated, it's very tricky to judge: while I did enjoy the eureka moments I finally had where I figured out some wild solution to the really complicated puzzles in this that refuse to teach you anything, I also found myself quitting several times out of sheer confusion and exhaustion (but again, the game was interesting enough to have me come back a few times to give it another go, so I dunno whether that's good or bad!) In this case, I'll give it the benefit of the doubt with a decent score since I think there's stuff to love here for the smarties in the audience, but woof, I dunno!

[Charge Newgrounds!]

Hmm, I certainly want to like this game as I love me some 2-d running and gunning fun in the vein of Contra or Metal Slug, but unfortunately this just feels like an unfinished prototype that is devoid of any interesting hook or satisfying gameplay. I'm not even sure what to give feedback on: it's in such a rough state that I'm unsure what direction the game would be going for. The good news is that I think you've got all of the necessary engine components to be able to build from to create a nice shooting game: if this game had a greater variety of enemies, more interesting combat scenarios, more abilities/guns, more setpieces, more levels, more feedback and special effects, and so on, it could be real fun to play! The bad news is that none of that is in place here yet, and I gotta judge on what we have so far!

[Rushdown Rivals Reloaded]

Wow, really cool rail shooter you got here! In general I think you guys knocked it out of the park: game was very stylish and felt polished and well-constructed in all aspects, feedback for shooting was very satisfying with great feedback (especially for headshots) and very strategic due to the great assortment of enemies with different attack patterns and good attack telegraphs that you can stun them out of as well as the emergency bomb blast ability that helps in a pinch, I liked the progression of intensity of the game and the way it caps off with a wonderful boss fight that reminded me of the Magician from HOTD2, and I loved the inclusion of a second path for replayability. I was also impressed as some of the subtle touches, like how enemies won't unfairly fire at you if they're behind another enemy like the big purple guys.

I don't really have any major complaints to make! There were a few nitpicks I could make here and there, like how awkward the cooldown icons for the secondary fire are (why isn't it just one icon with a number on it for the charges, instead of being two icons where one disappears if you fire both), and the death screen feeling a bit lackluster with how you're still controlling your character and the crosshair is under the screen, but for the most part it's great. The only real complaint I would make is that I want even more! For example, I would've loved if enemies reacted in even more diverse ways like ragdolls depending on where you shoot them or just having more callouts and grunts of pain and various death animations since it does get a bit repetitive and silent with how it is currently, and I would've loved even more missions to go through, but again, in general you guys made a great feeling game and I'm just being greedy, haha!