FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Minimum Mage Effort]

Wow, this one really surprised me! Glad I came across it as I'm surprised it didn't get into Best of the Month - thank god for the Halloween tag!

It definitely had a bit of a rough start for me. While the game definitely does sport some adorable art and charm, the tutorial is an ugly, overly verbose wall of text that takes way too long to explain what is essentially a very simple game: could definitely stand for more pictures or maybe a guided day one. Next, the game is pretty tough! Don't get me wrong, I like a challenge, but some of the difficulty does come from some really unfair-feeling aspects like how you have to get right in a customer's grill to serve them (heaven forbid you try to serve them across the table) and it's so easy to get bogged down on regular tables slowing you down, let alone the ghosts and rats that end up appearing later. It can feel really crushing as well when you make a single mistake: customers are so impatient, you have to get the order in the exact stack order, going to the bin to reset takes so much time that it feels pointless, argh, it all adds up and makes it difficult to recover!

But again, despite that whole screed of negatives up there, once I got going with the game, I ended up getting really addicted to it! The tutorial being an issue didn't last long due in part to the game having intuitive design with clear visual signals/symbols and logical feedback: I practically didn't pay attention to any of the tutorial text and still found everything easy to pick up. While I did have a rough time and those missed customers or occasional dropped orders did hurt, I found that as long as I put the pedal to the metal, I was clearing even the last days without much issue, and it felt oh so satisfying! And again, the game was just so cute and charming with great feedback and goofy sounds.

This game is a real toughie, no doubt, and some of that challenge I think could be more forgiving or elegantly designed, but I was glad I was able to rise to the challenge and get to the end: well done with this one!

Just-a-ng-dummy responds:

Wow didn't expect ya to cover this game haha! I think the reason why this didn't get into Best of the Month was due to it didn't get frontpaged in October

For the tutorial, I overcomplicated it because I was afraid someone was gonna not know a crucial mechanic, fail horrendously, and quit the game with a sulky impression, I will try to make a simplified tutorial soon though

"Order in the exact stack order"
Ack! That's the problem!! You don't! The bottom part of your serving must match at least one of the customer's orders! Hopefully I can explain it clearly in a simplified tutorial!

The bin has been a concern for me, maybe I'll give a positive to outway the difficult recovery time like faster movement speed

Thanks a lot for complimenting the visual feedback for the game! I will try to decrease some of the difficulty sooner or later, thx for playing Futurecop!

[Benny's Museum 2022]

Nice little gallery! I'm usually pretty harsh on art galleries since they typically just do a bog-standard slideshow, so I was very happy to see this take a creative approach in designing a whole 3D space with a lot of bells-and-whistles, such as music and even hidden areas: I also appreciated that you could interact with artwork to see the authors behind them or the associated web page or what-have-you. It can be a little clunky in some respects, like how the subtitles are not outlined so they can be difficult to read when you're hovering over a white-ish artwork, and some of the artwork is perhaps stretched a bit too much for viewing. Furthermore, the game is not incredibly big in terms of content or special add-ons, and is also obviously a very personal project, so it might be limited in appeal. Still, it was a nice trip down memory lane and helps me catch-up on cool projects, and it was nice to keep in touch with how you're doing: best of luck on future projects!

[Night Watch]

Huh, cute little game! Reminds me a lot of a Tiger handheld game what with the fixed positions and stiff controls, but luckily unlike a Tiger game, I found this to be rather fun, juicy and addictive.

Overall the game is pretty nice: love the various enemy types with different rhythms and strategies to handle them, love the boss fights with great juicy and explosive wins, and I love the overall charming aesthetic and almost rhythmic and musical combat. There are some slight frustrating bits as the controls can be a bit stiff, but it can be considered part of the challenge to be efficient and commit to moves instead of mashing.

I do feel like the game escalates a bit too quickly however: while the first level felt nice, the second level suddenly increased not only the spawn rate, but the enemy variety to an incredibly amount. Don't get me wrong, I appreciated seeing the large variety of enemies, but it was just so much so soon that everything gets lost in a monster mash instead of me getting used to their patterns one-by-one.

Furthermore, while the game does a good job at having very rhythmic enemies at the start, letting you practically play to the beat, all of the latter enemy patterns and sheer amount of numbers break that musical rhythm: as much as I appreciate the escalation of difficulty, it felt sad to lose that unique musicality about bonking heads.

EDIT: Gotta admit, once I finally got over my stubborn inclination to move and attack on the beat (can you blame me? the music is such a bop!) and played the game on its own terms, I ended up having a blast! The enemy variety and the bosses are super cool, and I love that the bosses even sport advanced remix versions if you start a second loop!

[Citri Plays Noirwood]

Hmmm, this was unfortunately very much a style over substance experience for me, and it left me really disappointed.

I will say that the game did a good job at intriguing me at the start: I wondered how the gameplay would evolve with the introduction of a vtuber context. Maybe I'm playing as chat, where the game plays itself and I need to send chat messages to try and influence the vtuber to play the right way and win (but don't overdo it unless you get banned for backseating!) Maybe I'm playing as the vtuber where I need to juggle playing the game well and picking color commentary so as to keep my viewers happy, lest they all leave bored and the viewer counts goes to zero. I was excited at the prospect!

Unfortunately, it didn't take long for me to be rather disappointed: all the vtuber stuff was purely superficial and doesn't factor into the gameplay in the slightest. At the end of the day, you're just playing an incredibly boring game where you walk around a bland maze collecting relics while being chased by a wendigo that randomly spawns. Sure, the vtuber context is novel at first with the way they provide quips here and there, but it's nothing significant and runs out of variety quickly. The game was also incredibly buggy and frustrating: the game's camera would wonk out a lot and not hide the wendigo when it's supposed to be hidden and could also lead to frustrating deaths where you can't see ahead enough and walk into spikes. Upon dying to an unfair death and having to restart the long collecting process again, it was too much and I quit, which is unfortunate as I was curious if it would redeem itself somehow.

Perhaps it's partly my fault for judging the game on what my imagination thought it would be instead of what it was and it just looks bad because I built it up to big, but I just couldn't help it: it felt like such a waste of potential and a clear case of trying to make a boring game seem exciting through smoke and mirrors.

[PUP]

Cute little game! It's a little rough, what with the crudely drawn and awkwardly stretched graphics, lack of juicy effects, and the incredibly short length, but I thought the game was funny and did a decent enough job of selling its concept and providing some nice levels that build upon the challenge. As always, I like the inclusion of bonus levels, but with a story campaign so short, I almost felt like they should've just been mandatory, haha. Pretty good example of an ideal game jam result, I think: sells a unique concept and leaves you wanting more.

[Coca & Their Shotgun]

Don't get me wrong, I love me some bullet hells, I love me some boss-fight centered games, I love shotguns, and I love it when games put you right in the action quickly. But, uh, maybe I should be careful what I wish for, haha!

The game definitely has a lot going for it. I enjoyed that the boss has multiple phases, each with tons of patterns which were very beautiful in their choreography, and the general presentation is charming in its goofiness. However, this game does kinda just throw you in at the deep end, and as much as I like a challenge, I ended up just quitting after a few attempts.

There's just so much stacked against you. The arena is so cramped and claustrophobic, the additional enemies so annoying and spongy, and the patterns so chaotic that it just became difficult to parse anything. The bullet hitboxes were super whack: when you practice dodging at the beginning you can get hit by bullets that don't intersect your shadow at all, meaning that all you can rely on is spamming the dodge which just didn't feel satisfying or elegant. Finally, the nail in the coffin was the fact that the game doesn't allow you to hold down the fire button to keep firing, instead forcing you to click each time: my old man joints just can't handle this type of control scheme no more, argh!

I still kinda like the game in all its wackiness and jankiness, but I need to put some ice on my hand before I give it another go.

Just-a-ng-dummy responds:

Thx for playing Futurecop! This isn't my best game and more of a dumb shitpost so I didn't really expect much of this. You made some good points and I wanna try and use em for reference later on if I make other bullet hell games. Although I should make a small update for this game just in case haha!

Hope you'll have fun reviewing the other games last October!

[The Last Man]

Not too shabby in an old-school shooter kind of way: certainly makes me think of early Newgrounds flash games and the like, but overall, I'd say it is rather dated and amateurish by modern standards.

While the core gameplay is decent shooting fun with a nice challenge twist of one-hit kills, resource management and navigation through darkness, it's nothing really that special and gets boring rather quickly as you face off against the same enemy over and over in the same looking brown facility. While the game boasts a lot of weapons that could spice things up, they typically aren't worth the trouble since ammo is so lacking for them and you can only carry one, meaning if you use many you'll likely need to backtrack too much to swap back, so why bother.

Furthermore, the game just looks very cheap from a presentation perspective and lacks any sort of flair, personality, or charm: everything seems like it was built from asset packs, the game uses the same font for everything including the title, the knife is really jank in how it animates and doesn't register if you click instead of hold, and there's just so much skimped out on, like how its game over screen is just a dark screen with two buttons. Finally, the camera makes me nauseous with the way it keeps moving around and zooming in and out and so on.

I think it could be decent if it had a bit more charm and personality to its presentation, as well as a sense of more progression by increasing and changing up the enemy variety, level construction, and having some sort of story or objectives to go for. But in its current state, I'm not sold on it.

[Long Shot]

Certainly got a solid elevator pitch: only being able to shoot once every 10 seconds is quite the concept that gets me interested to see what's going on. Unfortunately, at the end of the day, what's going on is a rather simple and bog-standard SHMUP: decent enough in that it feels competently put together, but doesn't really have anything special feeling about it and takes no time at all until it feels repetitive as it keeps cycling through the small number of wave patterns over and over that aren't hard enough to really pressure you into using your gun, rendering the concept moot. I certainly think the idea has merit: if there was some sort of fully-fledged story or level progression to make things get harder and harder, some bosses to fight and other cool stuff, I think it could be really great: perhaps a post-jam version?

[Ophisk]

An interesting little game, but unfortunately I think it was more interesting in terms of concept rather than execution.

Don't get me wrong, there's some fun little stuff in here and I think it plays around with the combination of snake with dungeon crawler in a neat way: navigating a dungeon as a snake, cutting off dashing enemies with your body to kill them, managing your growing body through avoiding collectables or getting counteracting shop upgrades, and so on!

It just didn't take too long until the game started to feel really shallow and I lost interest. Floor after floor was more of the same, no different from the very first floor: practically constructed all the same way, same enemies over and over, keys easily found, no variety in upgrades, so on and so forth. Perhaps there's a boss or change-up eventually, but I didn't have the patience to see it if there was. I also felt confused about the collectibles: was never sure whether I should be collecting them or not, since it feels like they are a risk to collect, and yet surely the usual modus operandi should be to collect, no?

In a way, while I'm down on this, I'd say this is an ideal game jam game in that it explored an interesting concept: it's understandably hard to get a solid execution with just a short time constraint, but it provided some good food for thought for future games that might like to iterate upon it.

[CATS AND COFFEE]

Cute game that I really like the look and concept of, but think it unfortunately flubs in execution for now.

Game definitely has a wonderful art style going for it, and I always like these shop management games as well as multitask juggling games, so it's a good combo for a solid first impression. I also like that the game tries to subtly help by highlighting the current items you can use depending on what step of the coffee making process you're in. Certainly could be a fun little game.

Unfortunately, the game is incredibly unintuitive without any in-game instructions or tutorial: the only instructions being found outside of the game where they can easily be missed or lost over time. Interactions can also be super frustrating with the cats underlapping other interactables so you can, for example, be trying to make a latte only to end up clicking on a cat behind the machine and getting punished since the game thinks you were trying to wrangle a cat while doing coffee.

Game can also be very vague and confusing in terms of feedback: game overs come without warning and without a mistake counter, serving coffee didn't give enough positive feedback, and successfully wrangling a cat rewards you with a hiss which I thought at first meant I did something wrong. Speaking of, I hated how wrangling cats has to be achieved by tirelessly mashing click on them: not only did it hurt my hands, the way it turned them red made me think I was angering them and needed to handle them differently. Game also ultimately feels pointless: no story, no score table, no stats, no ending, nothing, it just crashes to the title whenever you win or lose.

While I'm pretty harsh on the game, I absolutely would love a more polished post-game jam version of this. I think you could have a great store management game in the likes of Cook Serve Delicious or what-have-you: could have a whole career mode where it gets tougher as the days go by, coffee making ramps up with stuff like a foam machine being introduced creating more steps, maybe cats require more specific maintenance to keep them docile like giving cats their favorite toy which you need to memorize, and eventually you build up your shop to be a thriving business!