FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[JOIN THE SQUAT demo]

Hmm, kind of a mixed impression on this one!

I certainly do find the overall aesthetic and story of the game to be quite mysterious and stylish, so it did compel me to keep playing. Furthermore, I do think the game has a lot of promising aspects like the very intense boss fight with a pretty neat pattern to it: always love me a good boss fight!

But overall I found the game very wonky and not very impressive:

*The beginning platforming section felt really boring and bog-standard with no unique mechanics or satisfying movement to show off.

*Climbing and swimming being just unlocks to your jump limiter without any new movement tech or physics or animations to them felt super lazy and bad.

*Speaking of swimming, it and other aspects felt really dry and lacking of nice effects: for example swimming should have splashes when you enter/exit, at the very least.

*The hitboxes for the boss were very wonky with tons of times where I'd jump on him and hit him, but the game would also say I got hit too at the same time, leading to an unfair feeling death.

*The game also lacked an auto-fire option which, when combined with the large health of blocks, made me click way too much and flare up my carpal tunnel.

*The fire button can technically keep firing at fast as you can press, so its possible to cheese the boss by mashing the fire button at an incredibly speed: I feel like it should be limited to a certain fire rate.

Just feels like it is in a rough state at the moment, which I suppose is to be expected for a demo, but still! Despite my rough time, I do still feel like the game has some promise, so hopefully you can continue work on it! I do appreciate that the game has saving so it continues where I left off instead of making me go through the start again!

omgmac responds:

Thank you for your detailed review FuturecopLGF, I like your suggestions :)

[Maple's Maid Service]

What a cute game! I typically love my games to have a lot of action and guns and challenge and all that jazz, but this game made me really enjoy just wandering around helping all these nice characters.

I was really impressed in general with the game's cute graphics, nice characters and their dialogues, and wholesome premise, but even more so I was impressed at all the little touches that go into making the game feel charming and alive, like being able to bump into trees to make them shake and make leaves fall, being able to kick balls around and even into the water, giving head pats, and just being able to plop down on a tree stump or bench for a little sit whenever you like! In general I love the almost overwhelming sugary-sweetness that this game has: even if you clean your room and go to bed immediately, the game still treats you nicely in the ending screen even though I felt like I didn't deserve it, haha!

The only complaints I can think of at the moment is that it can be a bit confusing getting used to mapping the town at first: I had so much trouble figuring out where the pizza deliveries were supposed to go since they give street address style directions but there are no street signs or house numbers to help (I did like how you can go back and ask for directions though!) It's actually probably because I stumbled upon the pizza quest too early before I could map out the village and there's no way to opt out. Also there are some weird graphical annoyances, like how the broom sweep graphic is kinda lazy and can be layered really awkwardly, like it goes behind a fence you're standing in front of and such. There are some weird audio annoyances as well where music will just cut out or not play and you need to hard reset it by transitioning areas to get it back on track. Oh, and I would've loved even more emotes and character portraits for various emotions!

Overall though it's a lovely little adventure and I look forward to getting a full heart run! Gotta admit though, I wish there was a save/load function since its a lot to do is just one sitting!

EDIT: I spent way too long literally pushing the sheep to the barn without realizing that they were already set to follow me once I pat them.

EDIT 2: Woo, I finished all the tasks! Finally, proof that I'm a good person.

Peti responds:

I've been anxiously waiting for this review to come out, as soon as monthly voting began every notification made me incredibly nervous lol bc I didn't know when you'd finally see this. To hear that you enjoyed the game and was impressed by it means the world to me. Thank you, I can finally rest easy now! 🐇💕

The only thing I can add is that music not looping/not always playing is intentional, so that the player can listen to the ambience sounds. Similar to Stardew Valley or Minecraft.

Congratulations on finishing all the tasks, and thank you sm for the great review service as always! You ARE a good person!! 🙌🐇💕

[Lights Out (NGPD2023 Demo)]

Not a bad little game, but at the moment it is a bit undercooked in my opinion. The game has a cute retro game-n-watchy aesthetic to it, and the puzzle-like gameplay of shutting off all the lights and then racing to the finish through the darkness is pretty cute and has a strategic element of jugging safe spots that eventually must be eliminated. But with so few levels, it feels like the game is over before its barely started, so we don't get to see the full extent of the mechanics, leaving me feeling very unsatisfied. Not only that, but some of the design seems very strange: I had one level with the battery that I had no idea how to interact with it, but I was bizarrely able to still finish the level because the door stayed open once I turned off all the lights despite turning a light back on.

[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 🙂