FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Creature Collab 2022]

Pretty decent collab! For what it is, this collab does a decent job at making it a bit better than your bog-standard slideshow, as it uses a rather stylish shelf display layout. Other niceties in place are things like being able to click on the artist's name to go to their profile and achievements. There are some little things I'd liked fixing up, like hiding the up/down arrows when there isn't anything to go up/down to, making the arrows react to hover, and fixing the weird glitch where scrolling to the next screen auto-selects the creature in the same position as you previously selected last screen, but it's for the most part put together alright.

I kind of wish it had a bit more to it: when I heard it was a creature collab, I kind of envisioned being able to see the creatures move about and such in a fish tank or ant farm environment, or even see them locked up in test tubes like some SCP lab you can explore, but that's on me for expecting way too much. Having said that, though, I was really surprised to see that hidden easter egg: hiding it after a few shelves of empty space, the glitchy name with the secret youtube link, what a cool little treat! Bit of a bummer that I feel that most might not make it that far to see it, but on the other side, it does take some chutzpah to create such a cool thing that not everything might end up seeing, so kudos on that!

Thetageist responds:

That’s what I thought was going to happen for the final version too (it would’ve been so cool!) But I know OneDude had some trouble trying to find a programmer and, after the first guy couldn’t do it anymore, finding another one. So I’m happy it still made it to the final product after all!

[KINSPLANT]

Hmm, it's a bit confusing and I dunno if I had the best experience (my character died on a zone transition so I couldn't see their corpse and such and I found the camping and objectives confusing), but from what I gathered, it's a bit of a constant loop of hide n' seek where you go into a world and you see the footprints of someone's previous session where they found someone else's corpse and where they planted the artifact and you do the same things following their trail, inevitably passing it onto someone else to find your corpse and artifact. If that's right, it's certainly an interesting concept and a clever take on multiplayer similar to something like Dark Souls, and apart from that it has some interesting presentation and a somber atmosphere, accented by some cool effects like the time/shadow system.

At the end of the day, however, this felt like more like a prototype for proving the concept of this chain letter-esque footprint/artifact/corpse loop: impressive in terms of multiplayer functionality, but unfortunately not really fun as a game as-is. The world just felt too small, the hide n' seek was very simple and boring, the token combat felt pointless, the transitions to camping felt sudden and jarring: real style over substance type stuff. While the lack of explicit instructions could be seen as a negative, I did think it added a sense of mystery and intrigue to it all. It's a good concept at heart, and I would love to see this concept grown into something bigger, similar to a game like Journey or what-not!

[MemMento]

Hah, not too shabby! It's definitely a bit shallow in terms of gameplay, of course, but accepting it for what it is, it's a funny enough experience with some goofy presentation and moments that I enjoyed. Reminds me a lot of @plufmot style games. I also am probably not the intended audience as I haven't seen Memento before, but I at least knew enough about the premise to gather the broad strokes: I wonder if I can consider myself as having watched it after this?

adriendittrick responds:

Thanks for playing, I always enjoy your reviews :)
I'll have to check plufmot then!
And yup, you've definitely understood and remembered everything about the original movie :p

[Cosmic Quadruple-Dutch]

Wow, this really blew me away! All in all felt very well constructed in all aspects: love the comic book intro and lighthearted nature, love the fancy title screen and menus, love the tutorial and the simple yet deep controls, and I absolutely love the fusion of boss fights with rhythm-based attacks to create a spectacular show! The strategic balance of having to juggle firing with the movement speed debuff it brings and using appropriate dodges all while aiming for the boss as it moves and so on: really addictive and challenging stuff that's easy to grasp yet hard to master, and I immediately found myself wanting to replay levels to go for no death, no hit and overkill medals. Reminds me a lot of games like NOISZ or Everhood or Cuphead and all that: really nice stuff!

Only complaints I had was that sometimes I felt like the hitboxes were a little wonky or bigger than I expected, and that I wish the game had a bit more story to it, like a brief intro comic/cutscene for each boss, to give an even greater sense of progression. Other than that, though, well done!

[Madness: Bullet Mayhem [CHECK DESC.]]

Definitely could be really cool, but it's incredibly rough and janky at the moment and needed some serious fixes and polishing.

When it works, which is rarely, it can provide a decent time: blasting dudes away with the guns, particularly the shotgun, can be very satisfying as you watch them explode in a shower of blood and gibs.

There's just so much getting in the way of that potential action. The isometric camera angle makes it difficult to parse the action. The levels are incredibly cramped, boring and difficult to move around in due to the wonky collision. The AI is incredibly dumb and gets stuck jittering in doorways constantly. Shooting for some reason has the bullets come from your chest instead of the gun and there isn't even any muzzle flash or recoil, making it all feel really unnatural. Standing near a wall while shooting can have your bullets disappear instantly as if they collided with something despite clearly aiming away from the wall (and this happens constantly due to the cramped levels). The sound levels are incredibly unbalanced and there is so much distortion and glitchy effects for things like the flamethrower. And so on and so forth.

I want to like this game but it just feels really badly constructed with so much that gets in the way. If this is just a demo that you guys plan to work on further to polish it up, then I think it could have a future since the heart is in the right place.

[Astronite - Landing on Neplea]

It's quite rough in its current state, but very promising!

The biggest issue I had with the game was its performance. My first playthrough of the game actually kept getting more and more laggy over time that it eventually became an unplayable 1 FPS slideshow of a game. My second playthrough thankfully did not suffer that issue, but nevertheless still had some considerable lagginess to certain screens with smoke/rain/explosions/etc that made it frustrating. I'd like to say that the lag added some cinematic slow-mo to scenes like how some old-school bullet-hells work with so many explosions going off, but in this case it just felt really bad and would drop my inputs, among other annoyances.

There still were some other minor issues, like how if you try to shoot a block at point-blank range it won't register any damage, how I feel like blocks took too much damage to break (or rather how slow and weak the gun feels, perhaps), how I couldn't hold down the button to keep firing my gun, and how the graphics were a bit grainy in a weird compressed/resized way. But overall the game did show some promise: the cinematics were nice and impressive, the movement abilities were fun to use, the story setup and taking away of the abilities was interesting, and the boss fight was cool. It is retreading old territory and not doing anything particularly impressive or eye-catching, and it definitely has those performance issues which need to be taken care of, but it feels like it shows some good promise and could definitely be great if its gets fixed up!

[Weird Wally's Warzone]

Haha, it's certainly clunky and undercooked in its current state, but I do think the concept has a lot of merit!

There's definitely a lot missing here that makes the gameplay very confusing and unsatisfying, such as the lack of feedback for attacks which makes it difficult to comprehend how much damage they do and why some attacks don't work on certain units. Furthermore, the controls can be frustrating: I kept trying to aim the red line attacks with the mouse but they are unfortunately stuck going in whatever direction the player is facing.

However, the whole concept of having this huge assortment of moves with all sorts of strengths, weaknesses and utility functions associated to them could definitely be used to create some really chaotic and fun improvisational gameplay! I love the idea of scrambling to find a move that isn't on cooldown that can work with whatever threat you're facing, as it looks like what you might have going here is that some moves are only effective on certain age groups. Certainly some creative moves besides standard damage attacks as well, like the boof pass to debuff an enemies movement and the hypnotize to freeze a group.

Unfortunately at the moment it can be a bit difficult to deduce the logic behind what attacks works and what doesn't against certain units, and furthermore some moves are too overly effective while having such small cooldowns that it doesn't force you to explore the rest of your options when you can keep cycling through that small group of moves. Still, with some tweaks here and there I could see this concept getting some serious mileage! Reminds me of some other game jam games that randomize your guns every few seconds and such to make it very chaotic, but in a fresh new way with this crazy piano keyboard assortment of moves. I bet it'd be a big hit with the old-school MMO crowd, haha!

[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.