FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Gappy's Adventure : Coinkeeper's Cantrip (DEMO)]

Aw yeah, it's Gappy time! What can I say: the game looks good, feels good, is good, and is a huge improvement on the previous setup which you wouldn't think possible since it was already good, so great work on this! Just moving the character around is a delight, so I'm sure Shiggy would be proud.

But you know it and I know it, so let's not waste time flattering you. I'm here to be the fly in the ointment, the monkey in the wrench, the pain in the ass, and give you annoying nitpicky feedback that could hopefully improve the game even further:

*I was really surprised that the game has no coyote time in it! I know that some developers are against coddling the player, and sometimes they can be too generous with coyote time to the point that it leads to exploits, but I just had so many times I swear I jumped from right before the edge and ended up using my double jump instead of regular jump.

*Game has a real issue with jumping when next to walls. In fact, if you run up against a wall on the ground, you'll start glitching out like crazy once you make contact, and then if you try to jump when moving towards the wall, you'll immediately cling and kill your upwards momentum. Makes jumping up stairs really frustrating since you need to be sure to back up and give clearance before you jump! Probably need to change it so that wall-clinging only happens when you're moving downwards.

*The tutorial for the jump room is waaaaay too wordy with how it tries to explain everything at once, instead of pacing it out over several boxes. It should be more like the other room that only teaches you to butt slam once you get to the point you need it instead of cramming it into one single box at the start. The tutorial in Pizza Tower is a good example of this.

*I'm shocked that the game defaults to alternate controls which has run on circle instead of square. Who the heck puts run on circle?

*It's kinda weird that the title on the main menu goes slightly out of frame at the top. The text is also slightly off-center to the right, I think. Should probably adjust it a bit.

*I wanna promote this game, but you don't have good gifs on the Steam page! I can't sell people on the great movement with static screenshots! Get some gifs on there and I'll get to posting them around pronto to all the channels I frequent! And get the demo up there too (when it works with the algorithm of course!)

[Father's Banquet]

Quite the interesting game! It's kinda like a combination of a grindy/clicker game with an RTS, and as a fan of RTS, I enjoyed the multitasking micromanagement of sending my guys out to collect mushrooms and the heads of slain enemies and build my squad up!

Unfortunately, as much as I liked the concept, so many issues got in the way of having fun:

*Trying to select units could be really frustrating. Sometimes I'm just trying to click a single unit and it gets the wrong one or doesn't select them at all, with the game thinking that I'm trying to draw a selection square when I'm not.

*Similar to the issue with selecting units, a common occurrence I had was where I'd have a squad kill an enemy, I'd assign someone to collect the head, then I'm trying to select the rest of the squad to move on and kill someone else, but I end up getting the head collector involved in the selection and cancel their action. Call me impatient, but it was just annoying to have to be so delicate and wait for them to get far away enough to not get dragged in.

*There were plenty of other finicky control issues, but the biggest issue I had was with sacrificing cultists and not being able to get it to work no matter how much I tried. I was able to sacrifice a few somehow by random chance, but eventually I got hard stuck and unable to proceed, no matter where I tried to click or move the units to.

I dunno if I'm dumb or just got unlucky with some of the issues, maybe. Perhaps I tried to overcomplicate things by trying to flex my RTS micro by managing multiple squads when I could've just stuck with a single group. Maybe I'll give it another go later. It's certainly interesting as a concept that I want to see iterated upon!

[Xspam]

Nice little arcade shooter! Reminds me a bit of Super Crate Box and others like it. It's simple, but the presentation is good and juicy, there's a decent variety of weapons to use and unique enemies to fight to keep things exciting, and I like some of the design decisions like how picking up new weapons gives you health to serve as encouragement for experimentation. Not bad!

If I were to have any complaints, it would be that an auto-fire would be much appreciated: my poor fingers hurt from spamming the fire key over and over! Also as good as the enemy variety is, it would be nice if there were other elements to spice up the gameplay, like special events which shift the stage around like you see in Super Smash Bros where tidal waves of lava will appear on Brinstar, to name an example.

[Paperbound]

This was quite nice! While the forms and rules took a bit to get used to (what sense does having a crane be the only way to walk on rock make sense?) it didn't take long for me to enjoy trying to piece together the ideal route using your chess piece-esque origami figures! Definitely a solid and unique puzzle game.

I was actually quite surprised how often I was able to get the 3-star route right on the first go: the levels always looked quite intimidating with a lot of red herrings, but my intuitive was solid somehow. Maybe that's less a compliment on my smarts and more a compliment for your level design in making me think I'm smart when I'm not, haha!

All in all, I had a good time with this. I think the only major complaint I had was the crinkling sound was quite loud and could easily get frustrating and repetitive with how often it is played. There was also a time I finished a level with a 3-star rating but had moves left over still: feels like that shouldn't be possible since 3-stars should demand perfection, but whatever, just makes me feel smarter!

[ALIEN HAZARD]

Cool arcade shooter! Overall, the look and feel of the game is impressively polished, with some fantastic pixel art and great retro audio. The controls are rather novel in using the mouse for movement, and while the gameplay is a bit basic, it makes for some decent fun in blasting all sorts of guns while zipping around.

I gotta admit though, as nice as it is, I didn't find myself wanting to stick with the game too long. There were a few issues that got in the way:

*The difficulty curve is a bit too spiky and awkward. The first few levels are super boring and easy which makes replaying tedious, and then suddenly around level 4 a new shooter enemy type is introduced in a large number and it just feels overwhelming. You'd think that maybe the shooter enemy would be introduced in an earlier wave in a lesser quantity to build up to it slower. It's pretty hard until around level 7, then suddenly the difficulty dips down to being very easy for quite some time!

*To add to this, once you get to the later waves, it feels like once you die, you're screwed: recovery is way too difficult that you may as well just quit and start over. Reminds me a lot of games like Gradius which suffer the same thing: losing all your upgrades on death and having to grind them up is impossible when the game has gotten so hard.

*I don't understand the reason behind continues: your score is reset if you use them, so what's the point since going for a hi-score is the entire reason for the game? It'd only make sense if this game had a goal beyond scoring.

*Aiming with WASD felt really unintuitive for me. For some reason, I kept aiming to just the right and left since trying to aim diagonally and up/down was too much. As novel as mouse movement is and how much I enjoyed the challenge of getting used to it, I feel like movement with WASD and aiming with mouse would be a lot better.

*Because the game doesn't lock the cursor, I kept getting screwed over by my movement getting suddenly halted when my cursor left the screen momentarily. This happened even on fullscreen! I tried to avoid it as much as I could, but when the later levels get so hectic, it's unavoidable.

*Bit of a bummer that there doesn't look to be any high-score table integration with Newgrounds.

It definitely has a lot of potential and I wanna love it, but it was hard to so at times! Still had a good time overall, though.

WLCSoft responds:

Thanks for playing my game and giving feedback. The controls were inspired by the mouse control in Platypus. But I couldn't make the cursor lock to the player, like in Platypus. When I found out that the engine I use didnt allow me to do that, it was too late, the game was already half done. Too late to give up. I already knew it was going to be an issue for some people. Also, getting the highscore isn't the whole point. There's a reason to use continues after a game over: if you beat the final boss, the final cutscene is different from the cutscenes you get when you just give up or run out of continues. Even if you don't get a highscore. Anyway, all I wanted with this game since the beginning, besides bringing some fun and challenge to people, was to learn how the players would react to these unusual controls. Although I've received positive reviews about the game itself, the opinions about the controls were kinda mixed. So it's unlikely that I'll make this kind of controls again in my next games. Unless I find a way to lock the cursor to the player, at least. Thank you very much for playing!

[Rat Wrap]

Not too shabby! It's a little rough and clunky feeling which is very understandable considering it's a game jam game (would love some more juicy special effects), but that makes it all the more impressive how easily I got sucked into the game play loop in spite of that, and didn't even think of stopping until it was over!

The core mechanic of not being able to jump was interesting in how it recontextualized the world and made things that would typically be simple so complex, reminding me of other cool games like Bionic Commando. The way the game kept upping the difficulty and introducing new mechanics like gravity swapping made it very addictive.

If I were to have any complaints, apart from the dryness as mentioned before, it's that I thought it was weird how the game always gave hints a level after you actually needed them. Also, I was a bit bummed out with the ending: seeing that big head in the background of an empty room made me think I was about to have a cool boss fight, only for it to be over! But again, take that as a compliment that I was enjoying myself and wanted more!

[Anxi's Carnation]

Hmm, this is a tough one! I was definitely pretty intrigued by the game at first because it just gives off this mysterious and artistic vibe. I dunno what it is exactly, but just something about the art and atmospheric music, as well as the little extras like the bonus dialogue on the title screen as well as seeing all of the achievements allude to these endings and bonus modes, makes me think there's a lot cooking here. The gameplay as well was neat in how it keeps adding layers and layers to the basic loop and it becomes this crazy plate-juggling challenge.

In spite of all that, though, I bounced off of this game hard, unfortunately!

*As much as the game tries to help with the tutorial screens before each level, there were a lot of times I was confused as to what I was supposed to do since the pictures can be very vague and easily misinterpreted. Look, if you're gonna tell me what to do on the game over screen, maybe just say that on the tutorial itself so I'm prepared!

*To continue on with the point above, it doesn't help either that the game is incredibly muted and lacking feedback for your actions, leading to further confusion. For example, because your basket doesn't fill up with a flower for each flower you click, I spent a long time confused as to whether I was making progress clicking flowers or whether I was picking the wrong flowers and was only making progress when I got lucky and clicked the right flower. As another example, it'd be helpful too if some sort of effect happens when the red mist reaches the time where it deals damage, otherwise it's like, did anything even happen?

*Being sent all the way back to the start of the game because of an honest mistake is too harsh a punishment for me, especially since the very start of the game is incredibly slow and boring, making it so frustrating to work your way back up to where you left off.

*In general, while the gameplay does add a lot of layers as it goes, it is still at its core just repetitive click-click-clicking, over and over and over, and it wears down not only on my soul, but my old hands as well.

So yeah, the vibes were neat and I wanted to like it, but unfortunately it wasn't to be since the gameplay let me down. A good attempt at least, since to me, you got the game half-right, so next time just make sure the other half is good and you're golden!

Tyhond responds:

Sweet, yeah, It was something I try out for fun xP I'm not really a game designer.

Thanks

[saraOS]

Hmm, an interesting...game? I guess? It kinda sits in a weird spot where it's as much of a game as a DVD chapter select menu is, largely just being a collection of goofy short movies. Sure, it does have those short minigames at the end which were nice, but they were such a small part of the complete package: wish we had more of those! Anyway, as much as I'm ragging on it, I think the presentation is nice and polished, and I had some good chuckles at the content on offer, so yeah, not bad.

Nabella responds:

Pseudo DVD menus with little animations are the next big genre to plague the indie scene like rogue-likes and deck-builders. Just you wait, lolololol.

[The New Job]

Wow, this was certainly quite the adventure! It was already great just playing all of the microgames and interacting with all of the crazy characters in this crazy world you've built, but then that whole complicated business in the end to get the good ending? Wild stuff!

So yeah, quite enjoyed myself with this, even if the ending quest was way more involved than I thought and kinda threw me off at first, and it got a bit annoying to tell whether talking to someone would give me new info or just repeat. If I were to have any big complaints, it's that I was really let-down that there wasn't some sort of bonus arcade mode you unlock after beating the game where you can play a megapack of all the microgames together: it's such a bummer that they are just one-and-done!

[Eyebot VS Scarlet]

Cute little choose-your-own-adventure movie/game hybrid, kinda like Henry Stickmin or Dragon's Lair! It's kinda short and doesn't have much meat on it, but the animation/presentation is very nice and it's got a good sense of humor, so I had a decent time. I imagine it ain't easy to animate all the failure states compared to if this was just a straightforward movie, so kudos on the effort: well done! Looking forward to seeing what the great mind behind Eyebot comes up with next!

TheGuyWhoMadeEyebot responds:

Thanks! Huh, yeah, I guess it is a bit like Dragon’s Lair, I never thought about that. If I ever make another game in this same sort of style it’ll definitely have more to it, assuming I won’t have a deadline to worry about then, but as for what my next project will be, I’ll probably do something a bit different.