FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[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!

[I HATE circles]

Huh, not too shabby! It's not the deepest or longest-lasting game or anything, but this seems like a pretty decent score-attack arcade game. It's simple enough, collecting crystals over and over while avoiding circles that bounce around the arena, but there's some hidden depth and strategy to consider: increasing your size to increase your multiplier at the cost of it being harder to dodge, as well as being able to decrease enemy circles size through engaging them with your dodge, are cool and subtle forms of dynamic difficulty and risk-reward interplay. I think the characters add a lot of good variety as well as they can change things significantly in fun ways rather than just being boring cosmetics (though some of them aren't well-balanced, such as how mad is just a straight upgrade from happy with no downsides). Game overall also has an acceptable amount of juice and charm to it. A good game jam result, I'd say!

[Endacopia - Demo]

Pretty neat game! It's certainly a very charming and wacky world to explore with all sorts of strange but interesting logic to it. I love me some point-n-click adventures when they have a lot of interactables and flavor text, and for the most part, I think this game delivered on that decently: for example, I love doing nonsensical actions like attempting to talk with toilets and seeing what sort of gags the game will insert for those. Game also had a very intriguing plot and put effort into its fun moments: loved seeing the extra step of the camera whipping over when the sign said he'd look to see if anyone else was around, for instance.

Having said that though, I did experience a lot of oddities with this game, and with this being a demo, I feel like it would be appropriate to unload:

A lot of the controls seemed rather unorthodox and against standard, intuitive conventions. For example, I don't know why the game went for WASD controls instead of just being able to click on the floor to move somewhere: I mean, when you click on an object, your character will move over there, so why not be able to click anywhere else? It didn't ruin the game for me or anything as it's not important in the grand scheme, but it really confused me initially and took a while to acclimate.

Found it difficult to parse what objects are interactable and what aren't. This lead to a lot of confusion, like how you couldn't interact with the clock or calendar despite them being given significance due to the camera change when you first examine them. Why do you put the labeling for 'Feelings' and 'Items' only when you hover over your character? Shouldn't you have labels pop-up when hovering over everything interactable to be clear and consistent? At the very least, it'd be nice if your cursor would glow when you're over something interactable.

Speaking of that, why do you have inventory accessible by interacting with your character? It makes some logical sense, yet at the same time it's kind of confusing: looking at yourself to see status is fine, but for inventory? For me, this kind of reeks of you doing something so confusing that you have to make it more clear by doing the labeling which makes other things inconsistent: you've created a whole new problem, why not just avoid the issue entirely by doing it more conventionally with, for example, a little suitcase symbol in the corner to click on?

Found interactions annoyingly inconsistent. For the most part, objects consistently responded to all actions: sight, interact, and speech, with proper or funny reactions, but there were some objects that did not respond to one or two of them, like this one door that could only be seen and interacted with, but not talked to. I mean, if you're going to make illogical actions like the toilet responding to speech, why not the door: what makes it so special to be exempt from consistency? I hate losing out on potential flavor text! I also found the clickable objects kinda weird, like clicking on paintings with any action has them animate a little show: maybe that should only happen when you interact with them, but should have other reactions if you look/speak?

Anyway, while I know that may seem like a lot of gripes, I was nevertheless hooked on this game and am very looking forward to its final version!

[SingScar 1]

Huh, can't say I recall the fad this is referencing, but if I were to have my own take on it, it's kinda like an alternative YTMND-generator, but whereas YTMND combined a background picture with text and looping sound/music (and eventually transformed to utilize gifs), this combines a spoken prompt/caption with a youtube clip. It's like Mario Maker but for memes or youtube poops or shitposts or whatever kids call it nowadays, haha.

Certainly an interesting and clever little thing once you get used to it, in a way, but I gotta say that my first impression was that it was incredibly ugly, obtuse, and confusing: for example, the font used for the menus is all grainy and distorted, the overall colors and presentation is garish, there are no good developer-made SingScar examples to draw from and you can end up watching user-made ones that aren't created well which gives you a bad/wrong impression of how SingScars are supposed to be made, and the tutorial isn't voiced and takes way too long. If the presentation and instructions were cleared up for people and made more intuitive, as well as some other features could be added like being able to search for certain SingScars your friends have made or whatever, I think this could actually be quite addictive and fun to share jokes around with!

[Void Scrappers (demo)]

Hmm, I think it's an alright entry into whatever we call this genre nowadays (Survivors-likes? Bullet Heavens?) but unfortunately I feel like this falls quite low on the list compared to its contemporaries. Sorry to compare it to other games like that, but I felt it was appropriate considering this is something that is on steam and is being asked money for.

Don't get me wrong, I think the game is decently constructed and there is some fun to be had here: once the game gets going and you've got a lot of power-ups, you can do some really crazy stuff and just enjoy the chaos. When I played I did enjoy some notable power-up combos like creating explosions on my dash and having my dash rewind me back to my previous position: really changed my dash from defensive to offensive with that in a cool way!

But at the end of the day, the game just felt really bland, boring, and muted to me:

*The collectables were really dull grey objects that didn't feel fun to collect.

*While enemies in these types of games are usually quite dumb and just charge at you, this game's enemies seemed especially dumb and robotic, maybe due to their weird jitteryness or lack of animations or something.

*I dunno if I was unlucky or something, but leveling up never seemed to give me anything cool, in fact it constantly gave me upgrades for things I didn't even have yet which felt silly.

*Weapons felt really disconnected and lackluster. For example, the artillery power-up just made explosions happen on the screen, but they'd just happen, instead of them coming from a rocket firing from my plane to make me feel like it was really me doing it. Orbitals were similar as well, with them not having any sort of visual tether to me. And the bullets fired by the gun were just very boring dots.

*And overall, while the game was juicy, it wasn't to a satisfying extent: like it had explosions and dialogue popping-up and stuff but it was all so muted and unnoticeable. This whole genre lives or dies on how satisfying it is to mow down hordes of enemies, and I feel like this one didn't deliver on that front.

Again, it's not bad, but I just didn't feel any sort of hook from this compared to 20 Minutes Till Dawn, Holocure, Rogue Genesia, Soulstone Survivors, and of course, Vampire Survivors. Maybe I'm just played out with this games nowadays, haha.

[Pizza Kidd in Pizza Time! (Mini Game)]

Hmmm, kinda conflicted on this one. I mean, it's just essentially a recreation of Burger Time, but with a pizza theme: it's purely cosmetic with no significant differences or upgrades from what I can tell. So it's like, am I rating this game or am I technically just rating Burger Time? Do I demerit it for not having any originality or do I just try and rate it on its construction? I mean, it's cute and all, but it's not even a great recreation either: not only did I suffer bugs like ingredients getting stuck and rendering the game unwinnable, it doesn't even recreate Burger Time's fun risk-reward mechanics like being able to weigh down ingredients with enemies to make them fall down multiple floors. I still had some decent fun with this and it was a nice nostalgia trip, but at the end of the day it felt lacking.

[Clocksmith Exorcist]

Oh jeez, I tried really, really hard to play this game, but it was just a very terrible experience all-around, I'm sad to say.

I certainly think it could be a good concept: I've played plenty of other flail-based combat games and I think, if done right, it can be a very satisfying experience. Unfortunately, the way you've coded the sword spinning in this game is the most unintuitive and frustrating thing I've experienced in quite some time: no matter how hard I focused and tried to play by its bizarre physics, it would just not work well. Even disregarding that, however, the game wasn't shining in any other way due to other elements like a lack of good feedback to attacks and an abundance of boring enemies that are just way too spongy.

Don't get me wrong, I know it's a game jam game and you deserve some praise for building something in such a fast time frame, but I just have to be honest with my experience. Maybe my brain just isn't programmed right and everyone else had a wonderful time, haha. Good potential concept that I'd love to see done right if you could polish it up or experiment further with it.

[Culpa]

Hmm, I think the game shows a lot of potential as it has some cool moments and nice graphics and sound design for the most part, but in the end the game just stumbled so much that it felt rather silly to me than scary, unfortunately.

There were just so many awkward and subtle elements missing that kind of piled on and killed my immersion. There was strange phrasing and dialogue that sounds like it might've been badly translated from another language. There was a lack of sound variety for important events like the footsteps outside not changing to be muddy plops instead of wooden taps and the tentacle event being incredibly muted (and again, lacking watery sounds for sludging through the water). Most events were just very telegraphed like the part where you obviously can't outrun the light monster, or silly like dropping your gun and it just hardcrashing back to the start instead of showing a proper ending sequence. Pacing constantly gets destroyed by moments where you just need to mindlessly rummage around until something finally happens. Finally, the story is just overall too short for it to really build up dread and weight.

Again, I think it was a good attempt, especially for a game jam game, and certainly could've been great with some more time to polish up its execution.

Meiallu responds:

English isn't my main language.
But yeah, I probably would have made a better story if I had the time. Thank you for the review!