FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Gappy 3]

Wow, great little game!

Not much to say about it, it's just some good ol' classic Gappy fun but in a GameBoy flavor and I had a good time playing it without any major complaints. Presentation was charming, music was cool, levels were fun and challenging, love the way the mechanics were varied in each world, jumping felt good and I didn't have any botched jumps due to bad inputs or anything like that, and so on: it's all that and a bag of chips!

If I had to search myself for some sort of complaint, it'd probably just be that the difficulty curve can be a little awkward: I definitely felt like the space gravity world should be switched with the circus world in terms of order, and some levels here-and-there were serious spikes in challenge. I also wish there was a save/load: I know it can be a short game technically but still, a continue is always a nice thing to have. Oh, I also felt like the special effects were lacking in some departments: for example I was surprised there was no water splash when you fell into water. Also thought it was kinda weird that you don't jump with space considering the game gives such credence to it, but eh, it was easy to figure out.

Anyway, overall well done!

LeviRamirez responds:

Thank you!

I usually always just give a passing reaction to your reviews as I just expect to see them every month but I just wanna say thank you, if my memory serves me right I believe you reviewed every game in the Gappy NG trilogy and it's crazy to think a game I made in 8th grade, remade 2 times, and uploaded in highschool would follow me all the way up to a junior in college. It's just mind-blowing, and you do an amazing work with all of these, always look forward to monthly reviews and I no I'm not the only one!

Anyways yup, that's the end of the Gappy NG Trilogy, notice I said trilogy and not series... Cause Gappy's got something just on the horizon and I hope to see you there :-)

[Faces Of 2022 Collab]

Wow, definitely a really cool idea for an art collab! Man, I was really hoping I would do well on this game but I really sucked: didn't expect the questions to be so hard as I thought it would just be matching faces to names, and that's hard enough as it is with the faces being done in a different art style! Still, I had to appreciate the cool trivia and enjoyed picking up whatever points I could gather.

Unfortunately, while I do think it is pretty cool, I did find myself having a lot of issues and minor complaints:

*The cursor is just an absolute pain to work with. Maybe it's built for mobile or something and it works there, but playing this with a regular mouse, I don't understand why I can't just move the screen around and click on things normally with the mouse cursor instead of the weird crosshair and the way it makes things awkwardly slide around like it's on ice. Please make it recognize that I'm using the mouse and change the controls to an appropriate scheme accordingly.

*Bummed out that there is no ability to click on people and have their Newgrounds profile pop-up: would love to be able to quickly compare the faces to their real faces, or be able to see their works and follow them.

*I would've loved if, when you get something wrong (or right), if it would display the person that was correct, and maybe even allow you to click on them to see more about them before continuing with the game. For example, if I get a question about someone's famous movie or whatever and I guess wrong, I would've loved if it would tell me who it was and link to them so I could see their famous movie. Instead, I just need to live with my error and never figure out who it was or see their art.

*It can get really tiring having to go through all of the faces for every single question: even if I was a wizard and knew everyone perfectly, it's still so much busy work to look for them (especially with the annoying controls as mentioned before). Would love if maybe each question chose a random assortment of, I dunno, 15 people or something, just enough to fit on the screen without needing to scroll, and you pick from them. Feels like that would keep the pace up much better. You know, still have everyone in a big gallery in study mode, but game mode, limit the potential answers.

Still, nice work putting this together, and wonderful work from all of the artists that took part!

Bountyspecialtist responds:

Longest comment I have seen on newgrounds lol.

[TROUBLE JUICE Demo]

Hmm, this unfortunately felt pretty rough to me, which hurts me to say since it looks like a lot of effort was put in.

I think the game is pretty professionally put-together: everything felt very intuitive and polished and, pardon the pun, juicy. Clearly a lot of effort was put into this and it shows in spades, even in the more subtle aspects, such as there being a lot of really cool effects like blood coming off of enemies and dripping down onto the ground below. Overall the game has a lot of charm to it with its goofy characters and wacky world.

But at the end of the day, style can only get you so far, and this really felt like a style over substance situation here. The gameplay just felt incredibly generic and something that has been seen so many times before, but worse: the arenas were so cramped, autoaim did all the work for me, the enemies were lacking variety, and the powerups and abilities were generally boring or confusing. I just didn't have a satisfying time shooting anything despite it being so juicy: just felt like there was no incentive system to the combat, no room to manuever or style, no anything except just blast the same brainless mob over and over. The game also had this annoying blur/chromatic abberation/whatever filter that kinda hurt my old man eyes, haha. But most importantly it was lacking the most important aspect of a demo: a hook or a concept or any sort of unique or special mechanic to sell you on it.

I certainly think that this has a lot of potential as seen from the effort put into its construction, so I'm looking forward to see what it becomes, but as it is now, I see nothing that really makes this gameplay stick out or hook me. Just feels like the wrong aspect was polished first: like instead of making a cool fun gameplay system in a graybox to start off and then polish it off with the cool visuals you have, you instead just worked on building fancy effects and assets with no cool gameplay to build around.

[Conflagrator]

Hmmm, this unfortunately felt pretty rough for me: feels like an incredibly early prototype or alpha and certainly not anything ready for public release.

The biggest issue for me was the flamethrower, it that it doesn't feel like a flamethrower at all. Sure, it lights up the environment all fancy like, but the enemies don't catch fire and don't suffer damage over time and don't panic spread it around to fellow enemies, there's no patches of fire or scorch marks being left over on the ground, and the fire jet is very static and stiff when it should be a cool burning snake of flaming oil that trails/lags behind as you swing it around. For me, it felt more like a lightsaber: you extend it out and swing it around hitting things, and then retract it. Reminded me of spamming the laser shot in NES Contra to make a lightsaber-ish weapon.

The other issues were that the game felt very bland. All of the menus and title graphics are very blank text with no reactiveness, the enemies are dumb sponges with no exciting variety and no pathfinding so they get stuck and easily exploited, and the game is just a bog-standard horde shooter with no events, goal, or interesting upgrades/progression beyond just number statistics.

It certainly could be pretty cool: I'm always down to roast some aliens, especially with a flamethrower, and the whole system of one item being ammo, health and upgrade points all-in-one so you need to balance it, could be quite interesting. But I feel like it needs a lot of work to get that cool arcade action going. Most likely a jam game so I'm probably being overly harsh, but what can I say, I'm really picky about flamethrowers!

[Madness Genesis]

Pretty neat game! It definitely had a bit of a rough start for me as I had no idea how to pick up weapons and I feel like the game has some crazy difficulty spikes: you do one room with two guys and then suddenly the very next room, second in the entire game, throws a massive horde at you with all sorts of guns and knifes when you barely have anything but your fists! Unfortunately then the difficulty goes the other way where some rooms can be easily beaten by just camping the door and blasting everyone that comes in one-by-one, so it's a game of incredibly contrasts. That being said, I overall found the combat very fun, chaotic and satisfying: the whole three-lane system was pretty simple but fun to use for dodging around and more understandable for aiming than a typical free-roam system, and grabbing whatever weapons are on offer and trying to slice and dice or aim for headshots under pressure was cool. I'd say my biggest complaint with the game was that I felt like it had a ton of potential and it left me hungry for more: I was dying to battle against more enemy types, like maybe some armored units that force you to aim for other parts of their body besides the head or fast ninja enemies or whatever!

[Dream Medicine]

Huh, pretty interesting game! Something about the music, visuals, and theming gave the game this really somber, chill, melancholy feel to it: in particular I found the ending, despite not necessarily understanding it, very reminiscent of some of my favorite moments in other games like Drakengard or Nier with their somber weapon stories or text adventure events. So, I think you succeeded in making a cool "art-y" game here. I do like that it's not all just navel-gazey art-y art but it actually was a pretty interesting game to try and figure out, and was chock full of hidden little events that can pop-up and add a lot of variety, like the phone fixing and shoplifter.

I found the whole ingredient system a bit confusing to decipher, so I never really felt like I could get in the zone, but I imagine that might be the whole point of it, to be mysterious and illogical and have fun(?) experimenting. If I were to guess, I think the system is that everyone needs one certain ingredient to solve their issue, and you can either risk giving them a single ingredient which gives you bonus points for getting it perfectly right, or you can give them a mix of ingredients which lessens the risk since you get points for at least having the right ingredient in the mix, but you'll never get a perfect bonus by doing that. Wonder if that's close at all, but again, might not be the point.

There are some janky aspects to the game here and there. The biggest one I experienced was that if I dragged items a certain way they would suddenly be dropped: this made it so that I needed to drag items in illogical ways just to make them survive the trip.

I'm not quite sure if I fully understand the game, but it has a cool mood to it, gives some food for thought, and kept me wanting to explore it, so it was a nice and nifty little experience.

Jojo responds:

I'm very glad you enjoyed the music. Thank you. Dungeonation's visuals really helped in getting my inspiration for the score.

[Cowabunga Down Under]

Hah, certainly a funny little short and wacky warioware-esque with a unique theme!

Boy howdy did it start off way too bloody fast though! I thought the 54321 countdown was for me to read the objective and get ready, not the amount of time for me to beat the level which has already immediately started! Jeez, I thought that maybe the game was glitching like an old DOS game being played on way too powerful of a computer. I mean, on one hand you could say it's funny to get used to the intense speed, and it's not the longest or most punishing game so you can get used to it quickly, but I really don't think it does the game any favors: jeez, you don't even have any time to catch the references or let the voices lines finish, and that's a bummer since that's part of the humor I want to experience (well, not that I could understand the voice lines anyway, being so unnecessarily garbled up). If I had it my way, I'd make how the game is now an unlockable speedrun mode after the beat the regular mode which should be slowed down considerably. But anyway, I guess I'm Australian now: time to go on a cheeky maccas run.

[Gods of Defense]

Hmmm, seems like it could be pretty cool, but I felt like it was pretty confusing and half-baked currently.

Once it gets going, there is some pretty neat stuff in this game. There's a decent level of juice with nice little explosions and effects that not only look nice but give you feedback for events like getting money or the tower being damaged. There looks like there could be some deep mechanics in there though the ability to designate tower fire prioritization (though it didn't seem to work as I tried to tell my towers to prioritize corruption and they never did). Speaking of corruption, the whole drawing of bad events from corruption and drawing good events from certain wave thresholds is kinda neat and changes things up slightly. In general, the game seemed to have a lot of interesting mechanics that could be cool, like how progress means that the road keeps expanded.

That being said, for most of my playtime I was between being incredibly confused and incredibly bored. Hell, for the longest time I didn't even know how to even start the game! Definitely feel like there needs to be some sort of tutorial or maybe quest/story that guides you along, or at the very least more buttons need tooltips on them to let you know what they do. So many weird unexplained mechanics: like what is the different between clicking on a tower and upgrading it and using the upgrade arrow at the top of the screen? Even looking past that, though, the game just felt very repetitive. Even when the waves did start having new enemy types show up, I never felt like there was some way to counter them: not only did the game not give me a preview of what units I'd be facing so I could prep, all I had was one tower type to choose from, so the only thing to do was just hope to overwhelm them with sheer firepower instead of strategically using different towers to deal with certain types. It didn't also help that the text for menus and such was painfully tiny to read, among other things.

At the end of the day, the game just really didn't seem me on it: just felt like it was incredibly repetitive with my one tower and the roads getting more and more longer but only providing basic boring damage sponge enemies. It did start to pick up later on, but for me it was too little too late. It does show some promise though so hopefully this feedback can help make it better!

[Alpine Alpaca]

Hmm, bit of a mixed bag, this one!

On one hand, I think the game is presented beautifully: everything just feels very professionally put-together. It's not just that the game looks slick and well-animated, it's that the way it presents itself makes the mechanics of the game very intuitive, such as with things like previewing your route with understandable symbols, having a blip on the edge to show your next destination, animating the cards being drawn, and so on. The concept is also quite the interesting take on combining skiing with a card game: taking a usually fast-paced game and slowing it down to allow turn-based strategy.

That said, while I did have a fun time at first, the more I played seemed to make the design more confusing. I expected that I would need to try and hit every gate unless I get penalized, which would promote very exciting, risk-taking optimal play, but in retrospect, it seems like you can skip gates with no penalty (apart from not getting points, of course). I could be wrong, but I felt like this might be because the game is too random with its generation of obstacles and dealing cards to ever always have an ideal path to puzzle out, and thus needs to give you an out by allowing you to skip gates. Maybe I'm overthinking it or not explaining properly, but in general it just felt frustrating that my score was kind of up to luck, and I never felt like the small concessions it gave, like getting a different deck every few gates, really allowed me to control the odds. Obviously it probably wouldn't be great if there was always an ideal solution since then it would just be a solved game, but then it's like what is any score but just dumb luck...I dunno, haha, definitely overthinking it.

I dunno, at the end of the day, I think I just would've preferred a skiing game where I control the skiing more traditionally, counting on my own skills and reflexes to get me through a tough patch instead of the luck of the draw. Cool experiment, though, and not to say it couldn't work: could just be me not accepting it for what it is, or maybe it could have some slight tweaks to change it up!

[Parallelogram Man Orders Takeout!]

Hey, nice stuff! I love me a boss rush, and this delivers on that quite excellently along with some very goofy presentation and humor that reminds me very much of a @tombdude game. The concept of killing your opponents not by attacking them, but rather by demonstrating how ineffective their attacks are by styling through them to the point of embarrassing them to death is some really creative stuff: love how it promotes diving head-first into danger, similar to games like Doom or Burnout. Some of the bosses are a bit cheeseable here and there and it can be frustrating at times which can be bad since it promotes boring play, but for the most part I felt like they all had very interesting patterns to battle through and I had a blast.

In terms of feedback, there's the obvious one that the tutorial can be a bit confusing in that, while it does technically explain all you need to do, it is still nevertheless confusing and I wouldn't blame some people for dropping it thinking it's just a joke you can't pass (though I imagine I'm wasting my breath since that's probably a badge of honor for you, haha). Similarly there are some typos as well (some that even bizarrely auto-correct themselves as it goes) but I imagine those are intentional as they add to the humor. Other minor complaints are that I wish text and cutscenes and such would move forward at my own pace and be able to be skippable instead of just auto-playing. A larger complaint is that I do wish this game had a save/load feature: it can be a bit of a doozy and it'd be great to not have to do everything over if you run out of gas on the later harder bosses. Oh and it never saved my score despite me finally beating it!

Anyway, great stuff! I almost chopped my keyboard in half facing perfect circle man but eventually I got into the zone and it felt ecstatic to finally put him down. And if that isn't the ideal experience for a boss rush, I dunno what is, so kudos on that!

LeviRamirez responds:

Thanks for the feedback! A lot of the minor stuff could be fixed but I’m kinda just done with this game. It’s whatever it is now and I like it, it’s supposed to be a game you beat once in one go, it’s frustrating I know but it’s no sweat off my back.

I’m glad you liked it though, this game was very experimental for me and I took a huge page out of the @Tombdude and @Plufmot book and made something wild! We’re all buds so I assume we all just rub off on each other :-)

Anyways, thanks!