FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[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!

[Crazy Office Escape Part 1]

Not too shabby! Nothing super special or anything, but it was a decent little escape room point-n-click adventure. The presentation is a little cheap looking and lacks pizzazz, and I wish it had a little more flavor text through extra fun little examine clickables instead of the only clickables being mandatory elements for progress, but I still had an ok time finding objects and solving the puzzles: felt pretty clever figuring out some of them like the capital letters on the search bar.

I got bummed out though because I got pretty far and wanted to take a break, only to come back, try and continue, but end up getting sent wayyy back near the beginning, losing a bunch of progress. Yes, I could probably quickly do it over again and get back where I left off, but I was already starting to get lost and lose steam anyway so it was the final nail in the coffin that killed my motivation, unfortunately. Still, had fun while it lasted!

[Pad of Time]

Oh man, this is a rough one for me: I really want to like it as it seems like it has a lot of heart to it, but there were just so many little problems that added up over time that ruined my experience.

The game certainly has a lot of charm to it that gives a great first impression. For example, I love the multitude of animations for the characters: not only do they look cute in general, but they have all these subtle animations for idling, standing near ledges, running into walls and so on that give them a lot of life. The time travel mechanics were quite novel as well, hoping back and forth through time periods to get through obstacles added a cool puzzle and experimentation element.

But as I played, it seemed to be a classic case of style over substance, and my interest in the game lowered little by little due to so many issues:

The game in general just had so much jankiness to it. The physics/gravity for jumping seemed very unnatural and inconsistent, and the boundaries/colliders for objects were very awkward: there were tons of times I'd get stuck in places at random for no reason, like walking down a flat road to suddenly stop as if I was blocked by a wall despite there being nothing in the way. Just overall the game felt super rough, like as if I was metaphorically always stubbing my toes or catching my shirt on a nail, and it needs to be sanded down and polished for a more smooth platforming experience.

I hated the trial and error that the game had. The levels seemed to have so many spots where I couldn't tell whether it was a drop to the floor below or a death pit, so all I could do was leap of faith. Teleporting through time could screw you over as it not only costs power which gave me such paranoia in using it, but you can end up teleporting into thin air and falling down and down, losing so much progress. Just so much getting lost and being unsure how to proceed.

There were minor issues that gave it a rather unprofessional feel, such as many typos and weird capitalization for dialogue and menu options, a full screen option in the menu that doesn't work if you use a controller instead of a mouse, and many compressed graphics that looked super blurry and terrible compared to the more sharper uncompressed graphics.

While the time traveling mechanic was ok, it was rather annoying to deal with at times due to the very limited places it could be used and the difficulty to tell what would happen. Similarly, the rotation mechanic felt like it was barely being used and when it was used, it wasn't used in an actual physics way where you can move things bit by bit, but rather used to just trigger an object animation. All of this just made the mechanics feel incredibly token and pointless: no freedom to experiment or have fun in interesting, unguided ways.

I could go on, but you get the picture. Again, I do think the game is promising in concept and already has a decent start, so with some considerable polishing and bug-fixing and some minor redesigns to the mechanics, I think it could become a fun little adventure in execution as well. Best of luck!

Markanime responds:

Thanks for your honest review. You can clearly see the strengths and weaknesses of this game. I started developing this game back in 2014 with Unity 4 in my free time with less knowledge than I have now, and sadly this game carries that.

I'm really confident that if I have the chance to publish a new game you will notice a huge improvement.

[Run Run Rudolph]

Pretty fun arcade action! Felt like it made a really good first impression with it's amusing story and dialogue, and I found the general gameplay loop of trying to build up combos with low-tier items to build enough higher tier items to then combo to build higher tier items and so on, all while managing their looming expiration and other stage hazards, quite engaging and addictive, especially due to the satisfying special effects for it all.

However, after a bit of time with the game, it started to lose its luster.

The rooms just started to be the same thing over and over and while it tried to introduce obstacles like enemies, the difficulty/placement was all over the place, which made the sense of progression lack: instead of rooms slowly having more and more hazards and new rules to contend with, they would go back and forth between hard and suddenly easy. The enemies never shook things up in any considerable or fun way either: they'd usually be a non-issue or too annoying.

With the enemies and rooms all being the same, I at least hoped the game would drop some nuggets of funny story and intrigue to keep me engaged, but no, once you rescue your first reindeer, all of the other ones go in silence.

I found the design of the game quite questionable as well. The fact that the room score thresholds were based off of total score over the entire game, instead of score within that room, meant you could cheese them by stockpiling from previous rooms: felt it would work better if each room was its own level with self-contained rules and challenges, like time-limits or objectives. Maybe it's just trying to help but allowing you to have an easier time in future if you SSS-rank previous rooms: I guess that makes sense and maybe I'm just too stiff to accept that design.

I also thought level skips were a very strange power-up. I mean, if the game is so repetitive that even the developer seems to realize that by having room skips as a power-up, I think the solution should be to make rooms more interesting or just make the game shorter instead so it makes the amount of content better, haha! Again, I guess it's trying to help since you get them from SSS-ranking rooms, so again, maybe I'm just looking at it from an unfavorable light, but it's just strange and I wanted to give my first impression.

Having said all these gripes, though, I did still find the game quite fun: perhaps it just might've worked better as a shorter, sweeter adventure, instead of being stretched too thin that the length doesn't match the amount of variation on offer. It is repetitive, and I'm not sure if any amount of rethinking more positively about the whole level skip/scoring will help. but I'll probably give it another go with a fresh mind!

EDIT: I did give it another go and did feel better about it as long as I thought about the level skips like a cool 'nuke' powerup that I got for doing a room so well: funny how just changing the name like that completely recontextualized it for me and made it fun! Brains can be silly sometimes.

[Soulkoban]

A funny little adventure and an interesting combination of two genres! Quite novel to see sokoban puzzles, which are usually just standalone puzzles on a level-basis, all be within this interconnected world where their solutions unlock doors and such. While the puzzles were fun, the real star of the show for me was the characters you can talk with: so many amusing interactions to be had with all these little mini-quests and hidden dialogue/events! Definitely enjoyed my time trying to get as far as possible.

At the end of the day, though, it didn't quite win me over. I got too annoyed and paranoid at the prospect of having to pixel hunt all these tiles for medallions or these weird red-coin-esque hidden tiles that add up to a medallion, I didn't find the sokoban puzzles to be that intriguing or difficult (felt like they started hard and then just got easier and easier), and I eventually got stuck not sure where to go, so I found myself stopping, despite wanting see more dialogue and story since it was the best part.

Still, despite my minor gripes, I had a good time as it lasted and I bet there is some good stuff waiting for people more patient than I!