FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Pengu Survives Christmas]

Hmm, not too shabby! It's a bit of a shallow game and its appeal doesn't last that long, but it was nevertheless a fun little arcade game that I had a decent time with!

I especially loved the way the various obstacles would telegraph their entrance: made every death feel fair and avoided the cheapness of getting hit when near a wall. The variety of obstacles were nice as well and the way they increased in frequency made the game exciting. I also loved the little touches like the way the score counters spin up at the end screen, and the way Pengu's expression changes to disappointment if you don't get a new high score, haha!

If I were to give any complaints, I'd love if the game would have some sort of ranking/grading system to make me more inclined to play again for a better score: just staring at Pengu's blank face when I worked hard for a good score makes me feel like there's nothing else to go for. Also, there were a few oddities like a time where I heard a fish chomping but didn't see him on-screen (maybe the spawning coordinates put him off-screen?)

[Flanders Killer 8]

Haha, I'm not really a fan of this game, but I gotta say it sure does have that old-school Newgrounds Flash feel to it, so well done on capturing that aesthetic!

While I'm down on the game, I will say it's not all that bad. Some of the levels have a lot of environmental destruction and shootable objects outside of just the Flanders family which can be quite fun to find and blow up: reminds me of those fun kids games where every object reacts to a click. Also, there are a ton of Simpsons references, mini-games and really amusingly bad impressions to see and hear!

Overall, however, the game just does feel very repetitive and amateurish, and I found myself quitting quite quickly. Also c'mon, how you gonna have a shooting game where you don't even have a crosshair cursor? It just ain't the same when you're mouse-clicking a hand icon over someone's head!

Aprime responds:

Yeah, I can't say it was hard to capture that asthetic when the first one was made over a decade ago :D

You're right, it needs the crosshairs, sorry :(

If you want to Beta test: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.aprimegames.flanderskiller

If you love Flanders Killer - please become a fan http://aprime.newgrounds.com/follow :)

[Spider]

Hmm, this one was a bit rough for me. I feel like the game does have a lot of charm to it and can be quite addictive, but overall it felt very repetitive and janky, like it was barely holding itself together.

As said, the game does have a somewhat charming and mysterious aspect to it, what with its goofy graphics, mouthed sound effects and hand-written manual clashing with its overly serious and gross story and concept. It also does have that combination of a clicker game feel where you keep powering up bit by bit, along with an ant farm sim feel where it can be fun to watch your units go to work.

But still, despite all that I think I had an overall bad time with the game due to some really wonky design decisions and bad construction.

First off, without a tutorial and more intuitive language and symbols (for example, every building just being some sort of weird mass of grossness) it was really rough learning how to even proceed in this game. Eventually I felt like I got the gist but even then, it just felt like the game was taking forever and my spiders barely made a dent in the boss, let alone its army, so I still felt like I was misunderstanding something.

The game also just has a lot of annoying waiting in its design. Nighttime was so annoyingly dark that I just never wanted to go out since there was no reward to negate the heavy risk, healing was so annoyingly slow but I didn't want to upgrade it since its technically free and thus a waste of resources that could be better spent elsewhere, it was annoying that I couldn't dump all the corpses in at once and instead needed to wait for it to process food multiple times, it was annoying that I couldn't access the shop menu anywhere I wanted, and so on. The game made it too easy for me to optimize the fun out of it, I suppose.

There were also a ton of weird glitches. I hated how even if you were full up on food, you could pick up more food and waste it. And speaking of food, while typically you think you can only feed one unit per food, you could actually feed multiple at once if you placed the food just right into a tightly-packed crowd.

I could go on but you get the idea: an interesting concept that could work, but constructed and designed very oddly so as to create a very confusing and frustrating experience. Looking into it, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that it was constructed by a bunch of devs who couldn't talk with each other over a very short period: it certainly does give that slapdash feeling, so uh, well done?

[ᴘᴏʟʏ ᴘᴏʟʏ ᴘᴏʟʏ]

Cute little game! I have to admit it's not really my cup of tea since its entire premise is my mortal enemy: slide puzzles (seriously, I almost quit playing Parasite Eve 2 since it had a mandatory slide puzzle for progression). But nevertheless, I think the game does have some good construction and charm to it overall.

The cute little title screen with its animated bouncy logo, talking helper who reacts when you hover over things, the overall slick graphics and satisfying click-clack when you slide tiles are all subtle touches that really elevate this game. I'd love if it had a little bit extra juice to it, such as some visual FX when you slide tiles, buttons that they themselves react on hover, and an animated background, and I also wish the text was more readable (sometimes it gets so tiny and I wish the text box was more darker to make the white text pop) but for the most part it's all quite good and I had a decent time making my way through the easy and medium difficulties.

It's not exactly going to set the world on fire or get me to love slide puzzles, but this is a very nice and well-constructed basic game: it's like a very good first-timer student project vibe I'm getting, so well done in that regard.

DuskyLW responds:

I really appreciate the review! I made this game for the very same reason, I was not good at these puzzles nor am I a puzzle kind of person, but I had the itch to figure them out. Luckily, making this game solved my inept-ness at them haha. I definitely wanted a lot more out of this game but got to a point where I really wanted not get stuck working on it indefinitely, so I eventually cut my losses and picked a deadline. Really wanted to move on from this project and keep growing with other projects. Glad you still had fun with it despite it not being your thing <3

[Floe]

Wow, this one really took me for a ride!

I'll admit, my first impression was mixed: while the game is gorgeous and polished in multiple respects and the core gameplay fun to move around and mess with the grappling hook and all that to the point where I feel like I need to open my wallet, I started to get a little disappointed at how linear, scripted and all-around guided it was. For a game themed about exploration, it pretty much had no actual exploration to do beyond following the one single path. Yes, there are little secret rooms that you can find, but I felt like the game was just playing the same notes over and over: pink blob here, green bomb there, spiky walls there, over and over and over. The only puzzles and combat to be found are incredibly non-challenging and token: thus, engagement was lowering on my end and I was very worried this was a bit of a style over substance situation.

Nevertheless, once you accept the game for the guided cinematic experience it is, it does do a great job in doing so. The dialogue between the characters is amusing and rich, the lore of the game is very mysterious, extensive and chilling, and there are tons of events that keep you hooked and wanting to see more, especially once you get to the deepest part, where you have some great chase sequences and the like. Loved some of the more subtle events as well, like a green bomb puzzle suddenly being subverted by the world shifting and making it no longer exist and leave you holding a hot potato, haha!

It's a bit of a downer ending and I wish there was more to do, both in terms of content and challenge, but it nevertheless was a very impactful and cool experience: well done!

[Fire]

Wow, I'm not much for idlers but this one really grabbed me!

Love the presentation and theming present with it: gives it a real mysterious aesthetic which elevates the experience and immerses you. The sense of progression was very fun and addictive: building up the light bit by bit, getting new structures and visitors, clearing dungeons, balancing your passive income rates, there's just so much to do and unlock that keeps you busy the whole time wanting more and more. Also felt it was quite an intuitive experience to manage thanks to all the helpful popups and tooltips.

It's certainly a little clunky in some respects. There are some weird glitches like a weird 'quest' button appearing in the journey section that is placed weird so as to overlap a bunch of other text, and interactions like clicking on birds on your farms was difficult to tell the effect of since it spawns a bunch of pop-ups that overlap each other. Progression also feels weird in some respects with you swimming in certain resources you feel would be rare while other resources pile up at a snails pace: made it a right absolute slog bottleneck in the later game at times. Similar experience with journey: first it starts out feeling like you gotta babysit them the whole time, stuffing food in their mouths to keep their health up, then just a few pieces of equipment later they effortlessly clear all the dungeons first try.

Furthermore I'm not even sure if it's winnable? I got far enough to complete all the dungeons and build a shrine but absolutely nada happened afterwards that I could tell. Still, it was an interesting adventure while it lasted! (Ah, visited this afterwards and figured out the weird sacrifice/portal mechanic: maybe I'll delve further?)

ErikSwahn responds:

Thank you! Yes some things need work and it is not balanced rn. Feel free to sacrifice a character and try the portal :)

[CAKE QUAKE]

Wow, quite the interesting game here! I love the general presentation and craft on display here, and I find the concept quite unique and fascinating. Reminds me of other destruction puzzlers like Teardown and the like. I found the game very satisfying to play due to the mind-bending puzzle design and all sorts of crazy mechanics I've never seen, like venting explosions, setting up chain reactions, and so on: really works your noodle!

It definitely is a toughie though, and that's both in a good way and a bad way:

I certainly like that it doesn't baby you and starts hitting you with new mechanics and challenging puzzles almost immediately: sometimes it can feel refreshing and more satisfying to learn stuff through experimentation instead of being handheld through guided tutorial-esque puzzles.

I do definitely think that the game maybe goes overboard though: as early as level 4 I was getting incredibly stumped due to the rate of new mechanics being introduced and the level of complexity going up way more than I expected. But it was more than just the difficulty going up quickly, it's more that the game is very difficult to experiment to learn all the various facets: for example, every time you wanna blow up a wall or door or whatever to gauge its strength, you then need to restart and watch that lengthy scroll and get all the way back to where you left off, time and time again. Exhausting stuff!

While I did get roughed up, I do nevertheless have a positive impression of this game and want to delve deeper into it to challenge myself (but I wouldn't blame a lot of people being scared off)!

[Coca VS Peter the Ant]

Not bad! Quite the short and sweet experience with an amusing story and a good variety of play: horde survival, boss fight, and bonus minigame to finish it off. Combat was quite fun and satisfying as well, what with the cool blood splatters that are relative to how they get shot, slick shotgun reload, goofy enemies and explosive special effects. I definitely feel like the boss was too spongy: it'd be ok to have that much health if the boss had more attacks and evolutions to contend with to keep things exciting the whole way, but I found the patterns quite limited and easy, so it was kind of repetitive to get him down. For the most part, nice work!

[Freezing Knights]

Oh man, this game definitely makes an excellent first impression! But as it went on, hmm...

The game overall has an incredibly polished and professionally-crafted feel to it. Presentation is great, music is absolutely dynamite, animations are fun and impactful, and the game was all-around a fun 'Super Mario RPG' combat with a good amount of combat situations and strategy to contend with from the sheer variety in enemies, weapons, upgrades, and so on. I was really impressed at the level of complexity put into enemy attacks: every enemy had a lot of variations to contend with which really kept you on your toes, such as the bats and ghosts which could deal fake-out attacks where the best way to dodge is standing still. Would've loved if the combat also provided timed button presses for player attacks as well to help due with the monotonous nature of it, but it's ok. I had a super good time with the game until I started to get around the half-way point...

Fights are pretty good in the early game where you're just facing a few enemies, but as I went on you can end up facing up to 6 enemies at once, and this turns fights into a huge slog as for every turn you get, you need to wait for all of the enemy turns to slowly play out over and over and over. This slog is further compounded by the debuffs and huge damage that enemies can do with a single attack which, when combined with the fact that moves take health from you (with all the cool moves taking lots of health), means you can be stuck in an tiresome loop where every other turn is spent healing and hoping you don't get hit so you can finally do an attack for heavens sake. Basically it's balanced for you perfectly dodging everything with no room for error, even on normal mode, which is crazy. Just felt overly difficult, slow, and stressful: the low amount of money gained making access to more combat options not possible was another element to making the game feel slow and repetitive.

The map also felt quite pointless: typically a map will display symbols over the nodes depicting what events will happen at them, such as battles, bosses, shops, loot, and so on. This doesn't provide any information, so what point is there to providing branching paths when you can't weigh your choice with any information?

Also there are just some silly design choices, like how you can revive the 2nd player by having the 1st player give him a potion and the 2nd player will still get their turn from this, but if the 2nd player revives the 1st player, the 1st player won't get a turn: where's the equality in that?

I definitely think this is a great game in concept and it has a lot of heart and polish put into it, but it definitely stumbles for me later on with some questionable design decisions. If anything, while I might have fallen off this game, I still have much respect for your craft and will anticipate future games from you!

[Gotta hand it to yah!]

Hmm, it's a little janky and unpolished, but I did find myself having some decent fun with the game!

I found the gameplay quite reminiscent of something like Paperboy, where it's all about getting better and better at running your route, which was quite addictive. Even though the game does recycle the map, upgrades allowed you to be able to complete more and more of it over successive runs which gave it an alright sense of progression. I liked how the initial map scroll on load isn't just there to look cool, but rather allow you to memorize the elements on the level so you can plan an optimal route.

That said, the game felt very unfinished and confusing at times. The graphics, while cute, weren't very impressive and animated oddly (when they animate at all), the jump felt very unsatisfying to use due to its weird illogical delay, the cheer pop-ups didn't have a strong magnet attraction which meant you could awkwardly outrun them, the clock-out mechanic felt unclear on what it's purpose was due to no feedback being given from making it in time, the game basically recycles the map over and over with no new additions beyond your own upgrades making it feel very repetitive, and so on.

It's rough in its current state, but I think this is quite a decent proof of concept since the core gameplay was fun, and so I would love to see it get polished up! Would love if it has some more mechanics, like maybe being able to throw presents which could add some risk/reward for accuracy!