FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Adventure Kitty: Drill Buster]

Wow, this one really surprised me! I'll admit I didn't have the greatest first impression: yes, the game was charming with its comic book presentation, but I thought the game seemed a bit too overly simple and yet spent way too long explaining mechanics that were already made obvious by the intuitive visual design of the game (yes, I know that's probably just Felicity's character to do so but still). I was also afraid that, by missing a feature to look down farther, than the game would be too hard to plan a route and end up missing a lot of coins and get softlocked unless you restart in an annoying trial/error way. But the more I played, the more I was surprised at how the game kept things interesting and amped up the challenge with all sorts of new obstacles and mechanics that were really fun to contend with! And I never got in a situation where I got screwed over by not being able to see ahead either as the camera always seemed to frame the action far enough ahead when necessary. Put that solid gameplay together with a funny little story and you've got some really addictive and fun stuff here!

There are still some slight annoyances here and there, however: for example, I didn't like how there wasn't an option to fast-forward through a text scroll without outright skipping to the next line. As much as I liked the arrow collectibles since it made it more challenging, I was disappointed that they didn't have satisfying visual/audio feedback like the coins did. I didn't like how it didn't track the coins I've collected past a level and reward me some sort of bonus: I know the bonus is being able to skip some doors if you've stockpiled so I'm being irrational, but it just felt so defeating to see my stockpile deleted and I'd love some sort of medal for beating a level with a lot leftover. And there were a few others than I'm forgetting, but for the most part it's minor nitpicks in an overall fun little game!

[Buns: Bunny survivor]

Not too shabby of a take on Vampire Survivors! Personally, I'd say it actually strays quite far away from Vampire Survivors since combat is more directed instead of being automatic, so it's more in line with offshoots like 20 Minutes Till Dawn, but I digress. Overall the game is quite cute and well put-together: graphics and effects are nice and satisfying, power-ups are interesting especially with the whole balancing act of positives and negatives, and it keeps ramping things up with new enemies and events as time proceeds. Love the cool graphic touches like the hair that changes color and flows behind.

Unfortunately, at the end of the day, I just found it to be quite stiff and frustrating to play. Not a bad game or anything, but just minor things about it rubbed me the wrong way. I didn't like getting penalized for getting power-ups with debuffs, I felt like the player hitbox was too big and led to unfair damage that was difficult to recover from, I hated how I couldn't aim separately from movement and therefore had to keep awkwardly adjusting, I disliked how vague the fire rate was and how it limits your shots based on carrot supply and doesn't buffer inputs, and so on. Maybe it's just an unfortunate consequence of the limitations of the Pico-8 engine (especially with not being able to aim separately from movement) and stronger competitors like 20 Minutes Till Dawn and Holocure overshadowing it. I'd still say its good, but just not something I'd consider over those stronger contemporaries.

[SUPER BATTLE CITY]

Hmmm, this was a rough one for me. Had some interesting stuff going on that surprised me, but it didn't nail the landing.

Definitely was not impressed at the start, as the tank gameplay was incredibly boring. Controls were stiff, AI was brainless, objectives were unclear, feedback was unsatisfying with enemies just disappearing without nary a poof: all came together feeling like an incredibly amateurish 'my first game' project. Construction of the game was very shoddy: I'd sometimes have bullets whizz right through me or through an enemy without hitting, I'd have enemies spawn camp and make it impossible to respawn after dying, and enemies didn't even seem to try and go for the home base at the bottom. I wouldn't blame people for immediately dropping the game and not continuing onwards to see the more interesting stuff. Speaking of...

As said, then the game surprised me with a sudden twist intermission and then it suddenly dumps you in a black void where eventually you find the dripping blood as you proceed. Despite the games initial shoddiness, it had me hooked now as I really love these hidden twists and wanted to see more. And indeed, it made a good showing with the disturbing/cursed imagery and distorted music/sounds that kept me on my toes. Some nice creepypasta vibes going here.

Unfortunately, at the end of the day, all the game was doing was just shallowly guilt tripping me: "oooooo how dare you kill people in a video game about killing people ooooo you bad man, why didn't you just turn the game off ooooo." Maybe this twist was novel years ago but nowadays its been done to death. Not to say it couldn't work but there wasn't sufficient enough build-up to immerse me and make this moral twist work: the short playtime combined with the shallow and broken gameplay made it comical to say the least. Speaking of, then it tries to lampshade the whole thing with "floppa, lol". At least try and say something instead of running away under some shield of irony!

At the end of the day, this game just reminded me of those games that have the audacity to have a sewer level but try to justify it by having the protagonist mug at the camera and say 'lol sewer levels amirite' while winking. It doesn't work because you're still in a shitty sewer level! It's style over substance, trying to disguise a bad game with some intrigue but not combining the two well enough together. Basically I think this was a novel attempt, but it's just too short and shallow and shoddily constructed to get its twist across. Play Duloga instead which did this premise way better in my opinion: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/757605

MoeAnguish responds:

I appreciate your feedback, however, this game is just a shit post with floppa. It wasn't a serious project by any means. So i didn't "try too hard" with it. And the guilt tripping and everything was part of that. This entire thing is one bad joke that i thought was funny, basically.

[Fit Puzzle Blocks]

Decent game, but it might be a bit too chill for its own good for me, haha!

Overall the game does have a chill and relaxing repetitiveness to it with its simple puzzles that can be satisfying and addictive to do for some. For me, however, I felt like the game was too simple to the point of being pointless busywork. Not saying every puzzle needs to have some sort of 'gotcha' to them or complex design, but even after 20 levels I never got stumped despite playing very brainlessly. Hell, practically every puzzle has the puzzle pieces placed very close to where they are supposed to go (so a piece in the lower-left ends up being in the lower-left on the actual puzzle as well). If it does shake things up a bit later on, I wouldn't know since I got too bored to continue.

I would say that, at the very least, the game can be quite zen and addictive despite its simplicity, but there were definitely some wonky control issues getting in the way. The default isometric camera, while fancy-looking, definitely makes the game way more difficult to read and control: much prefer the top-down camera for its intuitiveness. Was disappointed that I couldn't drag and release pieces to control, instead always have to click once to pick them up and click again to place them down: felt unintuitive. Also felt wonky that picking up a piece would have it snap to center it instead of respecting the initial anchor point relative to where I clicked.

Again, could be a case where it's just not for me, but it works for others. But I'd argue even if it is a chill game, it might be helped with a bit more complexity and more satisfying effects for placing down blocks and winning (though what is there isn't too shabby).

[Lina: Witches Of The Moon]

Pretty nice shmup! Certainly had some cute and solid presentation/construction to it overall: loved how satisfying it was to blast away and see the explosive feedback from enemy deaths, and I loved how the game kept things interesting by constantly introducing new enemy types, new bosses, and new hazards and bullets to avoid, all while dangling this intrigue about the moon over you as a bit of story progression.

In terms of feedback: I'm a bit conflicted about the power-ups. It's very exciting to get powered-up and start blasting away huge spreads of bullets along with your cat, yes, but the fact that you can lose all of that by getting hit once really sucks the wind out of my sails: so much work and time invested to lose it all so easily. There's also an issue with difficulty: if you're all powered-up, you can just blast through bosses and waves effortlessly with barely having to dodge, and yet if you don't have any powers, then later waves and bosses can feel ridiculously spongy and a real repetitive slog to wear them down with your basic bullets. Not sure what the ideal solution is here.

Furthermore the gameplay is a bit basic and without any unique mechanics: it's not bad but I can see it getting a little repetitive for some despite the game attempting to keep things spicy with new enemies and such.

Also I really hated how when you kill the last enemy on screen, it just disappears instead of giving a satisfying explosion and point pop-up like it does for all the others: if you could somehow change it so that it doesn't wipe the screen of effects immediately, that'd be great. Currently the only way to see the last explosion is to leave a power-up on screen so it delays the effects clean-up.

[MarshMallow Madness: THE GAME]

It's a nice funny little gag, certainly, but if I were to rank it as a game I'd say that it is very awkwardly constructed and feels like it is barely held together. Collisions were really wonky and have you warping over and jittering all over the place, and the placement of the invisible walls were bizarre as well (why have these weird walls around the sign post pillars?) It's also an incredibly short game that doesn't provide any actual gameplay: you'd think it might be some sort of challenge to adjust the angle/power of your cannon so you get launched into the marshmallow accurately, but no, it's just a foregone conclusion that you hit it. Again, though, it is a nice novelty to play something which was once just a movie, and it did have some nice interactions like handing over the nickel which it made very cinematic and intense for such a simple action.

[Blob Omelette]

Wow, really surprised by this one! This game might look simple at first glance what with its simple moveset and lack of direct control over movement, and it can be a bit confusing to understand your abilities at first due to some wonky animations (though the tutorial does a good job at getting you there eventually), but I seriously got addicted to this! Every level kept me hooked by ramping up the challenge with introducing new obstacles, new mechanics, new subtle ways to use my abilities like being able to cling to conveyors and such: I just didn't want to put it down! I'm also such a sucker for hidden objectives like strawberries in Celeste that I was happy to collect the challenging hidden eggs and keys here (though it did suck when I missed an egg and couldn't go back for it except to restart the whole level). I hope people don't sleep on this one due to its simple graphics and controls: think you did a great job at keeping the pace up as once it gets its hooks in you its hard to stop playing!

[The Bunny Graveyard DEMO [Web Version]]

Pretty cool game! While the whole "it may look cute but its actually super scary" is a bit cliche nowadays, the game nevertheless had a lot of layers of interesting design to it where you go from PC interface to retro game to this weird hand-world and so on, and overall just had a really professional presentation to it that made me want to keep going to see what happens next. I especially loved some of the tricks like the way the game responds if you keep answering 'no' to the initial question (and boy did it make me dread what might happen if I screwed up the gardening gameplay)!

That said, I did have some issues with this game:

*The initial setting of the shift button to run was broken and didn't work: tried to reassign it in hopes to make it work but it didn't, then tried to reassign to ctrl but it didn't accept that either, until finally I had to reassign to space bar which finally worked (on the plus side, I did like how the game had a whole rebinding and test control area so you can verify this stuff beforehand).

*For a game that heavily revolves around text, I was surprised to see that the game does not allow you to press a button to skip/fast-forward text. Without this, it was really painful when I accidently examined something twice and had to wait for the whole spiel to pointlessly replay, not to mention it made it a huge issue for full replays since there is no save/load.

*Speaking of save/load, I was really hoping I could (I missed the message at the start saying its not possible) and was disappointed to see that when I tried to hit ESC to access a menu it just went to black, killing my game.

*While the game is intriguing and stylish, I don't feel like the game had the best first impression of its gameplay. The tedious maze at the start, the constant handholding and linear design that never wants to let you off the leash and just feels like tutorial after tutorial, and what little glimpses of actual gameplay there were was overly simple exploration and QTEs. Furthermore, the use of hands as a character was very strange to me (why not bunnies?) and I didn't feel like I had any emotional attachment or reason for playing further beyond morbid curiosity. It tells me that I'm looking for "her" or whatever but it felt super shallow and I didn't believe in it.

Basically, at the moment the game does have a bit of a 'style over substance' issue for me, where while the game looks and feels very well constructed, the gameplay itself is quite boring, restrictive and doesn't have a solid story hook for me. Nevertheless, the sheer level of style on display here is still enough to keep me intrigued, so I look forward to more!

[BIMSY'S BOUNTY]

Pretty cool game! It's certainly got that zany tombdude style to it all as usual with great animation and life to everything, and it provides some crazy manic fun as you aim to harvest as soon as possible while having to deal with obstacles like enemies crapping on you and corrupted crops, along with certain phases switching up grow times to keep things interesting and not get too repetitive. I liked the interesting combination of the harvesting action being able to also KO enemies if you aim into them as it offered some great feedback as well as cool decision-making, like if it's worth it to fully-grow a crop to use as ammo or just pluck them early to get the enemies outta your hair. Definitely a lot of depth and novelty to such a simple looking game: made it really quite addictive to go for a higher score!

I gotta say though, while I'm positive on the game now, my first impression of the game was pretty miserable. It sounds silly since the game is pretty simple, but I just didn't understand a lot of the rules on my first go, and I actually still am not sure how some elements work. For example, it wasn't clear to me that I needed to keep harvesting to get points: there was no sort of positive feedback like a ding or a money amount popping up from it and the tutorial put so much importance on hitting enemies with crops that I thought I just needed to sit on my crops to use them as ammo until enemies showed up. I also really wish there was some sort of score table that could tell you the value of each element, like what is the different amount you get for pumpkins vs turnips vs corrupted turnips and so on so I'd know how to prioritize. In a similar fashion, I also wasn't sure if different crops deal different damage when thrown at enemies: I coulda sworn corrupted turnips dealt more but it was unclear in the chaos. It's also annoying when a plant gets corrupted mid-pull: it can be fun to react in time and cancel, but I'd normally assume that whatever state it's in would be frozen during a pull.

[Sun Escapes Me]

An interesting little game! It's a bit shallow and short, but it doesn't overstay its welcome and keeps things interesting and novel by switching up the rules with each wave. There are some frustrating bits like how difficult it is to ricochet shots back at the sun since there's so little room to work with, but for the most part the game is exciting and fun thanks to the explosive feedback/effects and intuitive arcade gameplay.

That said, the design of the game was pretty questionable at times. I expected the rock wave to require you to shoot the rocks down quickly to prevent the sun from absorbing them and gain power: that way you're forced to play effectively and risky to keep all the rocks away. But no, you can just leisurely take your time and shoot the rocks at your own pace, killing any sort of excitement until you reach the required 100 points. It just made it a bit confusing because you'd think the game would always focus on you vs the sun, but when it comes to the rocks...why are you getting points for shooting them? The other waves made more sense since it involved you fighting back. Also, why does the game even have a high score system when getting points is required to reach certain wave progression at 100, 200 and 300: doesn't that just mean everyone who beats the game ends up with the high score in the end, unless perhaps the sun's final phase health bar has some wiggle room?

Overall though, it was quite the memorable experience due to the interesting wave progression that gets you to the final showdown: a nice, short and sweet story!

picochaz responds:

Thanks for providing such comprehensive feedback! You're totally right on all your points here, relying on score for progression was meant to be a temporary thing but I ended up getting distracted by other things in the game jam.

If I am able to prioritize revisiting this game, I'm going to use your comment as a blueprint to dramatically improve the points mentioned. Score should matter more beyond the final phase and things falling into the SUN should add to its gravity. This might even spur levels in the game itself... who knows?

It is most appreciated that you took the time to provide your thoughts like this.