FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[ERASER]

Pretty neat little arcade game! It's rather simple when you boil it all down, but the concept of having to erase lines while avoiding the ones that are drawing is unique and interesting, and the minimalist yet stylish presentation does a lot to draw my attention. Cleaning up a mess can always be a rather satisfying and addictive activity as seen in games like Splatoon and Powerwash Sim, and this delivers those same vibes!

I will admit, though, that while it's neat, it didn't appeal to me for that long due to only being one short level with no other variations or escalation, feeling somewhat luck-based, and a general lack of motivation due to lack of scoring goals. In retrospect to the last item, the game does have achievements and utilizes the hi-score table, so I'm not saying they aren't there, but I wish those aspects were more integrated into the game front-and-center to draw attention to them: for example, if the game had some sort of bronze/silver/gold/etc grading system with par scores for each being given at the end of each run, I feel like I'd be much more motivated to keep playing to go for the gold.

[Groblin Survivors PLUS]

Hmm, pretty cute game! The combination of tower defense mechanics with a survivors game is pretty novel, and I enjoyed trying to setup my turrets to form some sort of killzone that I would then try to herd enemies into. For the most part, the game had some decent fundamentals along with the neat concept, such as a good variety of enemies to fight and some neat upgrades.

I have to admit, though, that I didn't have much motivation to continue playing this beyond a few attempts. Usually when it comes to survivors games, I'm not only addicted to the primal satisfaction of killing enemies and getting loot, but I'm very motivated to make it to 30 minutes, get past a hard part of a level I failed at like a boss, unlock the next level, upgrade my powers, and so on and so forth, but I didn't have any of those goals in this to strive for. What little upgrades I could get, such as the turrets, were unlocked rather quickly, and the rest felt superfluous. I'm not sure if the 'waves' upgrades are supposed to be the motivation to continue? I thought those were like difficulty upgrades, but I don't really know.

There's also some slightly confusing aspects with the interface, like how it's easy to think that 'LV2' upgrade cards will give you an upgraded turret to plant, not upgrade an existing turret somewhere on the map (which I have no idea how it chooses which one to upgrade). Maybe it'd be more clear if the upgrade cards were a different color or something?

Again, it's a cute game with a neat concept, but whereas before it felt unfinished at the microlevel, now I'd say it needs some work at the macrolevel. Good progress though!

[PAGER (Demo)]

Whoa, quite the interesting game! Reminds me a lot of other weird and trippy first-person adventures such as The Stanley Parable and Superliminal, at least somewhat. The game definitely did its job at getting me immersed and intrigued while always a bit tense as to what the heck is going to happen next, and overall it just felt very polished and eye-catching. I'm not always one for this 'walking sim' kind of games, but it clearly did enough to catch my interest, so this is definitely some very promising stuff!

[First Break - Demo]

Wow, this was a pretty interesting game! The vibes given off by the combination of the immaculate art, music, and story were fantastic and made quite the impression on me: everything just had an air of intoxicating mystique that made me want to play more to figure out what's going on. When it wasn't the atmosphere, it was the puzzles that had my interest as well: the game kept introducing new mechanics at a steady pace, and the way puzzles can get messy which makes you improvise was rather unique. The little touches like rest stops, hidden lore, and other secrets added a lot as well. Really cool stuff!

I have to admit, though, that as cool as the game was, there was something about it that made me not as compelled to keep playing as I thought I would be. Don't get me wrong, I still like it, but I didn't like it as much as I thought I should've based on how good it looked...if that makes any sense. I can think of 2 things that might be contributing to this, but in truth it might be something else altogether I lack the ability to describe. Nonetheless, the two factors I can think of are:

One would be the fact that it's very easy to put this game into the ever-growing pile of other 'artsy' indie games, the ones that are all so moody and depressing and contemplative and mysterious. It's not necessarily fair, but there's just so many of these that one can become dull to it and think that many of them are style-over-substance, that the reward for trying to keep track of all this hidden lore and meaning will not be worth all the hassle. I just don't think that this game has some sort of special quality, some hook, some elevator pitch that makes it stand out amongst the crowd. I know I'm sounding like a pretentious git right now, and I don't think it's necessarily the case with this game, but it's just what happens when you become a jaded old one like me. I dunno, maybe I'm being overly harsh because you're putting it on Steam and I think that means I should be more critical.

The other factor is that the game gives off a very puzzle game impression, but due to the action mechanics like tracking enemies and shooting projectiles, the solutions to the puzzles in this game are not easily reproducible: one minor adjustment to the way you move, one degree of difference between how you shoot, and suddenly you've butterfly-effected your attempted puzzle solution into an unrecognizable state and you're lost. Now, one could argue that this is actually a unique merit to the game: indeed, some of the ways that I've improvised myself out of a messy situation live in my mind as noteworthy achievements, more so than a regular solution would. But on the other hand, it can suck when you know what you want to do but you flub the execution in minor ways and lose, especially when there is a lot of pre-setup that you have to re-do which is the case for some levels. The common refrain would be that I've already had the eureka moment and now the game is wasting my time! In addition to this, certain elements like the deadly trails that enemies or bombs give off can be so annoying, especially when again, you try to execute cutting through them right when they're fading but time it wrong.

Anyway, I do believe you have something special here and I look forward to seeing the release on Steam. Best of luck!

[Apple Worm]

Yowza, this is a fantastic little puzzle game! An interesting but mind-bending concept, intuitive controls and level design, great sense of progression/difficulty as the levels go on, fantastic presentation, and I especially love how charming the game is with little touches like how the worm gets so excited as you approach an apple! All-around solid work: the only complaint I could think of is the usage of overplayed Kevin Macleod music, but eh, it happens!

[Ballies]

Hmm, this is a bit of an odd one!

My initial impression of the game was very positive, as the vibes it was giving off were fantastic: so nostalgic, flashy, and polished! The general gameplay was very simple yet satisfying, and I thought the color matching mechanic was pretty neat! It looked like I was in for some great arcade fun!

But once you play it for a few seconds, it feels like you've seen everything it has to offer. I kept playing, hoping for something like a speed or difficulty increase, but nothing came: it just seemed to stall out, and so early on as well. It didn't help either that it was so easy to run out of bombs and then be stuck waiting for properly-colored balls to come by that you could bump into to get a bomb, only to shortly run out afterwards again and be stuck waiting more.

I think it's got a pretty good foundation, but it's a bit style over substance at the moment: with some more mechanics or a greater sense of progression to add depth, I think it could really shine!

[Enter the Dungeon II]

Huh, this is quite the interesting one! In a world where I constantly find style-over-substance games, this might actually be the opposite!

As you can probably guess, the game didn't have the best first impression to me, as the style felt very discordant as if it was jumbled together from a bunch of different asset packs: for example, you've got these background pillars that have been awkwardly resized so the pixel size is all over the place, but meanwhile the general effects and characters are a bunch of super fancy particle systems. It didn't help either that there was no music, the levels all looked pretty much the same, and even when you get past the visuals, the classes felt very unbalanced and the sense of progression wasn't great due to the same-y looking environments as mentioned before. To put it short, the game just seemed rather ugly and bland.

However, in spite of that, I felt like the gameplay was pretty dang solid! The feedback for attacking is very satisfying, and the variety of attacks you can pull off as the various classes were all very unique and interesting to experiment with! The enemy variety was impressive as they all seemed to boast their own unique behaviors and attack patterns with clear telegraphs. I also like the UI with all of the tooltips you can get when you hover over items and abilities. It all comes together to create a very fun and addictive Diablo-esque experience where you have fun turning enemies into paste and collecting all of their loot.

In a way, I feel like this is a good example of a 'grey box' prototype, in that while a lot of the visuals feel like mismatched placeholder art, the fundamental gamefeel shines through!

[SHOOT!]

Hmm, bit mixed on this one!

On one hand, it's got a lot of potential as a simple but fun arcade game. The game feels pretty nice with some good screenshake to accentuate kills, and the shooting has a bit of strategy to it with the charge mechanic. I was also impressed at some of the wild design decisions, like the pogchamp slow-mo that happens on close call shots, the revive mechanic coming at the cost of a boss fight, and left-over flames from kills detonating when they're shot: when you pair those with that mysterious cutscene that happens after you die, I couldn't help but get really intrigued!

On the other hand, the game is incredibly simplistic due to the lack of any sort of enemy variety or, well, variety at all (weapons, characters, levels, bosses) and didn't really have any sort of deep scoring system, nor does it even save my scores or allow them to compete with others. Because of this, despite the slightly intriguing bits I mentioned earlier, I couldn't get hooked to play more because it felt like I'd seen everything the game has to offer in just a few seconds. It didn't help either that the slow-mo zoom-in was very disorientating, and the noisy background was ugly and damaging to visual clarity, constantly making me lose track of where my character was.

Like I said, it has some potential and shows some creativity with its mechanics, but at the moment the gameplay is just too shallow to keep me interested for long. With some more enemies, a more complex scoring system, and so on, though, I'd love to come back and play more to make the Skullgirls-looking cheerleader happy!

[Gravitorium]

Wow, this was a fantastic little puzzle platformer you got here!

I'm not sure what feedback I can offer as it was generally solid all-around: a simple to pick-up but deeply interesting and intuitive gravity-rotation mechanic, nice bonus objectives for the try-hards like me while allowing the casuals more simple main objectives, great art design and presentation, fantastic sense of progression and difficulty as the game goes on, intuitive level design that teaches you core concepts, and so on and so forth! Well done!

If I were to have any feedback, it'd be that I find the default rotation controls very unintuitive, but luckily there is a swap option, so we're all good there (though I'd still say that maybe it should be the default instead because not everyone has patience to look into the options). It can also be a little annoying when you exit the level by accident before you've collected all the bonus objectives, but I guess that's part of the challenge. Finally, I did have a bug one time where I went through a portal and I started the next level with gravity shifted but not the camera, so yeah, there was a weird desync going on there, but it was just the one time and easily put back in sync once I rotated.

[Party Pooper]

This was a great little adventure game, like a spiritual sequel to that 'Don't Shit Your Pants' game!

Always down for a bit of a 'straw millionaire'-esque puzzle adventure where you collect a series of objects through quests to make trades for more objects and get to the end goal, and this delivered that very well with some very charming presentation, lots of funny characters and dialogue, some great setpieces, and so on. I was worried a bit at first that it was gonna be too overloaded with goofy non-sequitur nonsense, but if anything, I felt like the game was well-paced and balanced for a short and sweet adventure, and in fact, I wouldn't have minded a bit more!

A bit of feedback:

*I feel silly because I now realize you could ask that girl for a Russian dictonary, but I thought the only way to solve the cheesesteak puzzle was to pull out Google Translate camera, hah! Having said that, I wish the solution was a bit more puzzle-y than the text just automatically transforming to english once you get the dictionary: would've loved if, for example, it's just a scrap of a dictionary that shows you simple info like Russian numbers and the name of common food items, and you have to use that to find the keywords within the text while ignoring the rest.

*I wasn't sure how exactly one is supposed to win the video game fight: is it just that once you play long enough they will fumble eventually? If so, then similar to the above, I wish the puzzle was a bit more elegant and complex than that, like maybe you need to time your shots appropriately that you trap him, like firing a crouch shot quickly followed by a standing shot so he jumps into the second bullet or something, otherwise he'll keep perfectly dodging.

*I would say that the voice actors need to get better recording setups, specifically with pop filters and the like, but I suppose the goofy audio quality matches the goofy atmosphere and is thus actually a benefit to the intended experience, so, uh, stay the course!

popperr responds:

Thank you for the kind and thorough feedback, sir! Much love!