FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Cavern Collapse]

Not too shabby! I don't think it necessarily has enough going for it to appeal for that long, but I think it has some solid fundamentals, in a sort of 'good student project' kind of way.

As said, the gameplay does show some promising aspects to it: I like how you are rewarded with more points for making skilled long-range shots. Similarly, hooking those double-sided gem rocks felt so great with the way they clear the entire board. I especially like the subtle touches such as how your score ticks up when you get points instead of just instantly changing: very satisfying! There's also a nice strategy where you want to hook big ones, but you need to think whether its worth the risk as it might entail letting some rocks go and losing precious bridge real estate. It's a simple game, but its decent!

However, I feel like it didn't take too long for me to get bored. For one, the game is rather dry: while the ticking up of the score was nice in terms of making it juicy, I wish there was more feedback on making more difficult shots, like getting a flash or voice clip or nice sound effect or just increasing the font size when hooking a 100 or even better, a 500 pointer. The game was also a bit confusing despite being so simple: I couldn't figure out why I wasn't being rewarded more points or some sort of bonus for hooking gem rocks, especially when the tutorial gave such importance to them: only the double gem rocks yielded any kind of benefit (and a good benefit indeed, though perhaps too overpowered considering how easily you can get so much of them later on).

As said before, this feels like it was put together for a decent little arcade experience: would've loved to see more complexity and progression from this, more levels and hazards and power-ups and all that, but you got the basics down and that's pretty solid.

Cyranek responds:

Thanks for playing and taking the time to write this all out. Really helps to get good feedback!

The geodes / crystal stones repair the bridge you're standing on when caught. Single gems repair 1 and double gems repair 5 (while also clearing the screen). I could've shown this better in the tutorial screen / telegraphed it better during gameplay.

Would love to come back to this and add a progression system and new game modes. It would definitely add some needed depth to the game. :)

[HELP! NO BRAKE]

Wow, pretty cool game! Love the special effects in play here: the feeling of speed from making turns and boosts and so on felt really satisfying, and I enjoyed myself with this simple to grasp but difficult to master wacky physics-based gameplay. All in all felt quite well constructed and polished, and I got quite addicted to playing.

Unfortunately, I did feel like the levels were really wild and out-of-order in terms of difficulty spikes. There were tons of levels that introduced new concepts way too early and way too difficultly, only for a later level to do it better and smoother. For example, there was an early lilypad-ish level that got introduced when I was still just getting used to driving in a basic manner, let alone now having to handle complicated jumps, and then right after that the difficulty suddenly goes back down to simpler tracks, and then comes a level that could've been used to introduce jumping with way more comfort and room for error. While some levels were great and felt good, it felt like too many of the levels were way too cramped and needing way too precise of inputs: sure you can have those levels, but leave for those later on, at least! It got to the point where I just lost patience and ended up quitting around the 13th level, lilypads (and I consider myself someone who likes a challenge!)

It's definitely a pretty neat game, just perhaps felt like maybe it was too cramped with too few levels: if there were more levels to be used for practicing techniques and if they were arranged better to slowly ramp up the complexity, I think it would've been great, but at the moment, I feel like it had a somewhat botched execution despite the overall great concept.

[Comatoast: Unjammed]

Hmmm, this was an odd one for me, but I could chalk it up to be being an old fuddy-duddy, I suppose, haha.

On one hand, despite the rather seemingly juvenile art and presentation, I felt like the game has a real charm to the way it was constructed and showed a lot of hidden depth and effort. The game is certainly unique with all sorts of weird events and levels coming up to keep things interesting. There are a lot of cool subtle touches like the way you character slowly gets ripped apart with the more times you die and get closer to game over. I definitely loved the weird warp zone bonus levels as well: gave me a real Super Meat Boy 8-Bit levels vibe. Overall, it is certainly quite the unique and weird trip.

The game can definitely be pretty janky though. Hitboxes for spikes felt really unfair and difficult to determine, and movement and physics felt really weird as well, possibly due to the way the graphics (especially the player) kept wiggling around and changing shapes so you could never get a clear read. For example, I actually thought my character kept sliding across the ground like ice, but it was just the weird idle animation and the way it shifts sidewise a bit as it loops. While the levels could be quite interesting at times, a lot of them would sometimes be incredibly boring and having nothing of interest. The combat was also lacking any satisfying feedback or strategy to it. The descriptions for item pick-ups would come and go so fast without me being being able to read them, and there wasn't a way I could click on my inventory items to see what abilities they had as reference either. Just made for a really confusing time.

And this is the tough part for me but, the game just felt super cringe, with the voice acting being the primary culprit. I know, I know, it's supposed to be intentional and all that, with the way the character keeps taking a gasp so he can continue his run-on gabbing and the way everyone is being all goofy, but I was straight into that menu and cranking the voice volume to zero pronto. I wouldn't mind if the voices would appear here and there at notable events, but it was a constant audio onslaught with voices and sound effects and other voices overlapping each other and making everything just a garbled mess and difficult to parse. It can work, but it just needs some construction to it, I feel: less is more.

crow-seeds responds:

Thank you so much for the feedback!

Haha, as a developer it's kinda hard to tell if something feels jank or weird when you've played the game for so long that you've gotten numb to the weirdness. If it's causing you too much trouble, the wiggling doodle effect can be turned off in the main menu settings!

The combat does feel a bit lack luster. Tried to add a combo system where you whack and then click stab to launch an enemy further (or the other way around for a different effect). Wanted to make it simple and easy to use to put more emphasis on the platforming, but I guess it still feels two dimensional. Maybe some more audio and visual feedback is in order? The levels in the beginning chapters are made to be simple to teach the player the mechanics, the later ones are much more interesting I promise!

Anyways, I wanted to say I appreciate long comments like these, I'll try to implement some of these changes in future updates!

Edit: Just realized the slippy moving back and forth and jankiness is due to frame rate and lag! Working on a fix, thanks for letting me know, testing on my lower end devices rn. This was not intentional and the janky hitbox was a result of this. Working on this asap

[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.

Jukestar 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.