FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Le Chat Fonce: Gnome Cafe]

Decent little scavenger hunt game!

It didn't have the greatest first impression on me: I felt like the tiles/color were too similar everywhere, the camera was too zoomed-in, and without any map, I was positive I was going to get lost or miss a single coin in some corner somewhere and get frustrated.

But truth be told, I didn't end up having that many issues getting to the end, and was surprised at how many 'landmarks' I noted despite not even paying attention that much! Something about the way you built the map must've hit that sweet spot where it isn't too complicated to create too many long-lasting branches, instead sticking with short branches that keep the pace up, so well done!

It's definitely still a bit rough in some aspects: really wish it had coyote time for jumping, for example, but overall I had a better time than I thought despite it's simplicity.

Boy, was I really scared when I had $4.99 and had no idea where the last cent was: luckily I collected all the gnomes, got the red key and made it to what I assume is the secret ending? Or I wonder if it's all a troll and that's the only way to win?

[DreamShock DEMO (2022)]

Hmm, it's really rough at the moment, but it is a demo after all, and I did find the game's goofy and cartoony aesthetic very charming and the music was cool, so I think there is a lot of promise here! Hopefully I can give some good feedback to improve it for a final version:

*Combat was a mixed bag. On one hand, I found the death animations for the player and the enemies pretty cool, especially with how the world goes slow-mo on enemy death. But for everything else, however, it felt incredibly unsatisfying as there was practically zero feedback for hitting someone. When you attack someone, they need to react in some way, like being pushed back, playing a hurt animation, flashing white/red, playing a sound effect, producing a hit spark, anything! Would also love if you do the air attack on someone if the player would bounce off of them.

*I liked the player expressions in the corner of the screen to indicate health, but I wish there was a bit of a health indicator on the player itself as well. Would love if they, when low on health, had a different idle animation like they are clutching their shoulder, or at the very least have them pulse red or play a heartbeat sound or something.

*Lot of controls aren't intuitive: I assumed that my dash was like most games where I just have a normal single forward dash, but was surprised to see way later on that it was a multi-directional double dash. I also found it confusing that when you attack while holding forward you'll go stock still, yet if you move forward and then quickly let go of movement and hit attack simultaneously, you'll attack while sliding forward instead of going still. I would prefer consistency, leaning towards keeping the player's momentum when attacking instead of cutting it.

*I was a bit frustrated that you can't access the long range slash when you're in the air, instead only being able to do the spin attack. I'd prefer if you could do the long range slash in the air if you do a neutral jump, but do the spin if you're moving, or maybe do the spin if you press down+attack or something, I dunno, up to you.

*Navigation of the levels was very confusing: too many blind leaps of faith required and I ended up getting stuck at this gray door with red highlights that would beep and make it snow whenever I touched it.

*Would love if things that you can interact with would have a little interact icon pop-up above them when you're close as sometimes it wasn't clear what was interactable.

[Dinogen Online]

Pretty cool game! Was surprised how easy it was to skip all that registration junk and get in a server and just have some dumb fun shooting dinos with a bunch of guys with all sorts of guns and equipment! For the most part the game feels very professionally put-together: both the menus and gameplay feel very slick, intuitive and exciting and there seems to be a lot going on to really sink my teeth into!

While I'm overall pretty positive on this game, I gotta say, though, and maybe it's just me being old, but I felt like it was a bit tricky to 'read' the game, both in terms of menus and gameplay. For menus and display, I feel like the game uses an overall faded white for lettering and such, when combined with the faded gray boxes it lives in and the small size of the text, makes it very difficult to read. Feels like everything has the opacity turned down way too low and it should be cranked up for higher contrasts that make things pop for better readability. Gameplay has a similar issue where everything is just too small and zoomed-out that I can barely keep track of anything or see any of the animations to give me feedback on what's going on, like reloading or melee or whatever. Furthermore, dinosaurs just move so fast and both bullets from my gun and projectiles from the spitter dinos travel so fast it just feels like there is no strategy, no change to dodge or counterplay, just blast each other mindlessly. I dunno, maybe I'll figure out more of the strategy if I play more: maybe there is some sort of cover system or something but the tutorial didn't give any inkling.

[Magirune 2 - Demo]

Hmm, bit of a mixed bag that's a bit rough at the moment, but that is the point of a demo, so hopefully I can give some feedback to make it better!

*Overall I found the game to be pretty bland and lifeless in all aspects. The story was pretty drab and unexciting with no real big goal (though walking outside to see how desolate the world is was pretty neat), there was no animations or cutscenes which made events like dad falling down or the mayor running away confusing since they just vanish, there was barely any music or exciting sounds or effects, and the directions were pretty vague with no journal or anything to help keep track (don't get me wrong, I don't want a line or marker to follow as I like exploring, but sometimes it wasn't clear what's going on).

*There were plenty of typos and odd phrasing: felt like the script was badly translated from another language and could use a proof-reading pass.

*Controller controls were pretty bad: I had no idea how to navigate the inventory menu with the control and access other tabs. Felt like I was forced to use the mouse to access things like inventory tabs when everything should be possible with just controller. Perhaps it was because I'm using a Playstation controller: some games aren't built for it.

*I didn't even realize that I was being hurt when engaging in combat because, unlike the enemies which have good feedback to being hit by shaking and the slash mark effect, the player stands stock still and doesn't react. Even disregarding effects, though, combat was pretty boring and devoid of strategy (though it was kinda cool to get flashy kills when you level up enough to one-shot them).

*I felt like the whole way that enemies respawn when you reenter a screen was really annoying and punishing. I felt like the game could have a survival horror aspect to it where you really gotta plan whether fighting is worth it, but plenty of times I was forced to fight without knowing I'd end up going the wrong way, and it felt frustrating to go back and refight everything, especially considering I don't get exp from it. Just feels like it leaves too much up to trial and error and luck.

I certainly think that it has some interesting ideas and could shape up to become a grand adventure, so hopefully my feedback can help somewhat!

FluffyLotus responds:

Thanks, there's some good feedback in there. This will make me focus some of my time in directions that I wasn't thinking to much about.

[Ben Stiller's 3D Tour of Hell]

Bit of a mixed bag for me: felt like it had a lot of potential in some respects, but didn't make the most of it.

For something that looks very low effort, I felt like it has a lot of nice little touches in there, such as being able to fire each gun in the dual wield independently, being able to be noticed for staring at cock, some funny signs and voice samples, and a really clever puzzle level where you need to jump up on Ben Stiller to go out of bounds and find the key. All in all I feel like it could be a fun little adventure with each level having its own theme and puzzle to it.

But that's just it: I felt like there was only one really clever level in there that tried to do something interesting, while a vast majority of the levels were just the same thing but with a different paint job: wander around and click E on everything till you win. There was an attempt at having some variety: finding the android phone in a sea of iphones was a fun modern take on the "needle in a haystack" dilemma, and yes, some of the ways the E interact levels did differ were funny despite it, but it was just really minor stuff with no challenge to it. I actually made the lust level a lot more fun for me by jumping from bed to bed and treating the floor as lava: why couldn't the game do something like that instead of me having to invent my own fun? I was also disappointed that there wasn't more humor in there: just having Ben Stiller be a character isn't a joke, and while you're at it, c'mon, at least throw some voice lines in there, I liked him in Royal Tenebaums! Also how, how could you miss not coding the game to recognize the possibility of shooting Ben Stiller as an easter egg in the gun level, c'mon (yes I played the game twice to verify that)!

Anyway, I do hope that this does serve as a learning process and you can make an FPS in the future like you mention, haha.

[Witchcraft Tower Defence]

Hmm, quite the interesting twist on tower defense! It's a lot to get used to at first with the whole merging system and learning what towers do what and dealing with randomness and the positives/negatives for wave rewards and so on, but there was a certain fun and addictive novelty to seeing all the crazy towers you randomly get and what the next level of merge is going to be and then just blasting away and enjoying the chaos of your various towers wiping through waves!

I gotta say, though, that at the end of the day, I didn't find myself getting that far. I do think the idea is novel and that there is some fun to be had, but I just ended up getting bored quite quickly due to the lack of variety and feeling of not being in control or needing to strategize. Don't get me wrong, I think there is some level of strategy in here that can be done, interesting improvizations and saving up to then pick a 100% spawn wave to do a big merge and such, but it just didn't feel substantial enough compared to a typical tower defense where you have all your tools and there are all sorts of different layouts and enemy units and rule changes you can puzzle it out. I also wish I knew how some of the skills work, like fear and Xx damage (what does fear do, and does Xx damage affect other units or just the unit in question, and so on). I could definitely see other people having a lot of fun with this though, and I still had a good time while it lasted!

[Pixel Dash]

Huh, this felt a little half-baked and lacking in content for me. It reminds me a lot of the game Qix where you keep drawing lines to form squares and in doing so you fill out the board bit-by-bit, with the challenge being that you have to be careful of bouncing balls on the board colliding with the lines while you're drawing. The problem with this is that while there is a challenge and strategy to Qix, this game has none of that. I found that I could easily just place blocks whenever and wherever I wanted: I didn't need to time my placement or anything like that as the bouncing balls avoid getting caught, and even when they do, it's a non-issue to free them with no penalty. Without needing to be careful with how you place blocks, and with a way too generous time limit, winning is a foregone conclusion in this and it just becomes an incredibly repetitive affair of placing blocks as fast as you can to get a pointless high score. It's a bummer for me especially since you need to click on each block instead of being able to hold click and drag, and that easily flares up my carpal tunnel. Even worse is that there's only a single level: I was really hoping that the first level was just a tutorial and it would keep adding new challenges and such, like maybe a level with multiple green zones where you need to catch a certain amount of balls within them, so you need to strategize and time splitting the herd up and such. It certainly could be promising, but this is barely even a prototype in its current state for me.

blit-blat responds:

Sorry to hear about your carpal tunnel man, the click & drag method sounds interesting, though I think that would just make it even easier to be honest! I am working on a follow up with more levels & challenges so watch this space!

[Hop Owl]

Nice little game! It ain't anything crazy, but it's a solid and well-put-together short and sweet experience: the controls are intuitive, the animations are subtle but smooth and bouncy, and the game does a good job at keeping the pace up by introducing more and more mechanics and mixing them up in interesting ways. The game is even generous enough to have a whole new B-side as well! The only nitpick I could think up at all is that sometimes it did feel like a few levels were out-of-order in terms of rising difficulty, there were some minor physics glitches like being able to trigger a dotted-line box without actually going over it but instead bumping into a nearby wall, but really it's very minor and everything feels great!

[Catlike Magic]

Pretty nice game! Was a little bit confusing at the start as well as being overly simplistic, but eventually the game became incredibly addictive and fun in how chaotic it can get with all the various skills and equipment you can get while battling a crazy variety of enemies and bosses! Indeed, despite the combat being a bit too simple in both graphics and complexity which can sometimes make it difficult to parse telegraphs and such, it nevertheless was fun to dance around through enemy fire in slow-mo and watch your abilities go off. Definitely a lot to love here, like the whole world map aspect which was like something out of Commander Keen: gave it a real sense of scale and decision-making to it. Put that chaotic action together with the really wacky story and you've got a nice game!

While I'm rather positive in regards to the game, there is some room for improvement:

*Has no idea what stats were and what effect they had. Most of them seemed obvious, but something like power and will was rather tricky since they seemed to overlap, so I spent a long time confused and hoping I wasn't making bad decisions. Eventually I saw the button in the corner where you could see stat descriptions, but why not just display an info pop-up when you hover over the stat names like you do for other cases (like the buttons in the options menu)?

*Found it weird that stats don't update immediately when you assign a stat point in leveling up, even when doing multiple in succession: wasn't even sure if they were having any effect because of that, especially since some screens display the stats as X (+Y) or X > Y when other screens do just X.

*I didn't even realize that I needed to click on the level up icon to assign stat/skills after leveling up as I thought it would be automatic. Maybe the game should just automatically take you to the level up screen when you get levels and have points to spend?

*Found it odd that, when you're picking a skill, you can click on one and, despite not hitting continue to finalize a choice, you can't actually go back and pick another choice, so what's the point?

*There came a point pretty early on (as early as the second level boss) that I was just able to stand still taking bullet after bullet and barely get hurt at all: I wasn't even trying to make a broken build or anything, so the game balance is probably quite questionable and could use some tinkering.

[Farmula 1 Racing]

Haha, this was a rather cute take on Outrun! Bit bizarre that it just dumps you in with not even a title screen, but whatever! For the most part, I had a lot of fun playing: driving felt smooth and intuitive, the visuals were pleasing in their retro-ness, and I enjoyed being able to explore the multiple routes available.

Don't really have many complaints, though I did feel like some of the visuals were difficult to parse at times: the snow level in particular was really difficult to tell what was happening, and in general sometimes it was difficult to tell the distance of other racers, especially when you're on a hill and it can get a little wonky. I wish checkpoints in tunnels were a bit more obvious with a visual of the banner, and also I wish you could still keep your momentum and trot a bit further once time is out instead of being stopped immediately. It also has some of the small problems that the original games had, such as it being difficult to tell how sharp a turn is exactly: maybe a case of reacting the old style too accurately, haha!