FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[STRG.SNEK]

Hey, pretty neat game we got here! Certainly an interesting premise with a cool story hook to keep me motivated, neato ASCII aesthetic and blending of a scavenger hunt with snake mechanics, and a nice big world to explore around with tons of different obstacles like warps, hidden proximity tiles that keep the challenge and pacing up, and so on and so forth. Definitely a lot to love here and it feels like a great adventure through cyberspace!

However, I do have some complaints with the game that did kill some of my enjoyment:

You'll laugh at me for this, but I had no idea how to start the game for quite awhile: it was a cool reveal once I figured it out I could go past the footer (which I thought was a wall just like any of the other walls), but I came really close to thinking that the game was broken or I was just misunderstanding and almost turning the game off from confusion (thank goodness I didn't).

I appreciate a good challenge, but the game could be incredibly frustrating in unfair ways and led to me losing patience in wanting to continue. There were plenty of times where you transition between screens, either normally or through a warp, that could put you in a spot where you have zero time to react and end up running into a wall immediately in front of you: sucks that you feel like you have to trial and error and memorize sooo much.

Not only that, but the game loved to have warps and corridors, even ones outside of challenging situations, be just one single character wide which made the game feel so cramped and requiring an annoying level of precision, even for things that aren't part of the challenge, but just trying to use a warp room, for example.

Another issue with the game that might've led to a lot of these annoyances is the adherence to the ascii aesthetic, which makes horizontal movement very slow compared to the lightning speed of vertical movement due to the different way characters are spaced compared to new lines. Entering a new room vertically that has a wall immediately in your way leads to constant deaths.

These constant unfair or annoying deaths when coupled along with the checkpoint system, which only spawned you at the last character collected or checkpoint added insult to injury. The checkpoint system isn't too bad, but at times I would've preferred if the game would just spawn you at the entrance (or wherever you warped in) to the room you last entered, though I understand if maybe you think it would make the game too easy. In my opinion, I feel like being set back potentially a lot after a failure doesn't add much to this game, making it just an annoying addition. In particular, backtracking through areas you've mostly cleaned out but you feel you might've missed something is super annoying, because you've removed all potential checkpoints in your first run and now a single mistake can set you back so far.

Overall I'd say the game was an unfortunately frustrating game due to some of its design choices, but I still had a really good time with the game and think its pretty cool.

[Santa Clauminid (Demo)]

Hmm, not too shabby, but in its current state it is quite rough.

The game certainly did have some nice things about it: some of the more subtle special effects like how the sleigh and gun arm tilt based on direction was nice, and I liked the way the enemies exploded (especially the bosses). I also liked how it tried to do some interesting stuff like rewarding risky play (grazes) with MP to use for a special attack, being able to change powerups by shooting at them, and it looked like it had some sort of present dropping mechanic that could create an interesting multitasking challenge.

But the game also felt really janky in many ways. There's a few obvious ones like in how short it was and how the Santa boss was absolutely nothing, but in terms of other complaints:

*For example, I kinda hated how power-ups blocked bullets which would actually end up not only giving cover to enemies behind them but also make it too risky to pick up since you could get insta-shot by someone right behind them due to the lack of attack telegraphs.

*Doing grazes felt incredibly awkward because the actual hitbox of the character felt very vague and ill-defined, and it wasn't worth it anyway since you barely get anything out of them and the payoff special move is pretty lacklaster, being just a rapid-fire gun, similar to your regular gun, instead of a cool bomb or beam or some such.

*The present dropping mechanic felt really silly and not emphasized enough: it only comes into play briefly later on and it's not worth the risk to engage in it. Maybe if the present dropping gave you power-ups back it could be worth the risk to keep an eye out for houses, or maybe if it was an objective you have to accomplish to beat the level or keep an acceptable score similar to Paperboy it'd feel crucial. I definitely feel more importance should be given to this mechanic as it could be a clever and interesting Christmas themed twist on typical ground-bomb weapons seen in space shooters.

My biggest complaint though, as stated before, was that the game just felt really rough and unfinished: more of an alpha than a demo, I'd say. Not only was the game overall a bit rough and stiff with things like how static and unanimated enemies, space shooter games are kind of a dime-a-dozen and this didn't really bring anything interesting to the table to hook me in and want more, which should be what a demo does first and foremost.

I certainly think this game could be cool in a finished version, what with if the bosses and enemies become better, more mechanics like present dropping get expanded and so on, but it's hard to see that potential in its execution at the moment. Still, fingers crossed!

Chdonga responds:

Thanks for the long review LMAO.
I'm glad you see potential in this. I actually started working on it in '21 but stuff got in the way and it was even more rough than what I released this year. Hopefully I'll be able to finish it by winter '23!

[Sophie The Slug]

Cute little puzzler! Got some nice pep and overall good construction to it all, what with its goofy music, satisfying squishy sounds and animations for movement, and solid level design that keeps you hooked with its constantly increasing difficulty and new mechanics being introduced!

Well, I say it keeps you hooked, but I have to admit that the game is somewhat generic overall, being a sliding game that has been seen many a time before, so I found myself dropping off after some time. Don't get me wrong, it's not bad: it's well put-together and does a solid attempt at keeping things fresh by introducing crates, buttons, and so on, but in general it is kinda same ol' same ol' without anything really unique or eye-catching.

In summary, it's a solid game with no overall complaints, but nothing really incredibly or noteworthy either, so it is merely 'good' (which is fine, of course)! Again, general construction felt well-crafted so I look forward to seeing more games in future!

[Aurora]

Wow, this game is amazing: can't believe this one got missed out on for the best of the month for November! Ok, that's a lie, I can easily see why people might've skipped this one as this is some Avengers Level Threat nerd shit that is niche as heck and might've been updated before I got my hands on it, but still!

This game heavily reminds me of some of my favorite Zachtronics games like TIS-100: very similar feel of messing around with building instructions for tiny systems that move inputs to outputs and reading manuals to figure out how everything works.

All-around I felt like the presentation and construction of the game was very professional and solid: loved how the game had a really cool story and theme to it with its cutscenes and style that made progressing more than just wanting to solve puzzles, and despite being a very complicated game, I felt like the HUD was very intuitive in how it was laid out and operated, especially due to the way you could hover over things to get tooltips which made me practically not even need the manual (that being said, I loved how the manual was in-universe crayon scribblings from Sasha: adds so much charm and immersion to the whole experience)! I ended up getting quite addicted to this and loved solving not only the puzzles but the puzzle of understanding how to be able to solve the puzzles in the first place!

While people rating the game low because of the complexity of the game could be taken as them just not being the target audience, I do think the game could have some slight room for improvement:

For example, I spent an incredibly long time stuck on the Dye Mixer program because I had no idea that moving a color onto another color would combine them: it seemed silly to expect that over a more logical overwrite/replacement of colors, and so I got stuck trying to get something done with add/subtract color and just got confused. I feel like I had a similar experience in TIS-100, but in that, I feel like there were more hints/example code in the manual that helped me learn these kinds of unobvious tricks, whereas in this there was nothing I could find.

Speaking of the manual, as charming as I think the it is, it might be a bit too obtuse and confusing to decipher its chicken scratchings: perhaps it could've been written a bit less busy or something to make it easier to read. I do appreciate the in-game manual which has both the crayon drawing and an attempt at deciphering it on the side.

It did feel like the game started to get to some complex stuff pretty early on, what with complicated jump commands and the like within the first four levels: as a programmer I appreciate it cutting to the chase and not babying me, but maybe for general public there could be some more tutorial-esque levels to let you learn concepts, maybe some programs that are finished but 'broken' where you fill in some missing lines, you know, simple stuff like you did for level 0, before letting them loose and writing their own stuff. I mean this is some college-level tough stuff that automatically assumes familiarity with binary numbering and assembly and so on: I like it but feel bad for everyone else!

Could also maybe make to have the manual have it's own dedicated shortcut button on the HUD instead of hidden away in the esc menu: I think that's an ok place to have it, but in my experience it took me awhile to find it so perhaps if it was more prominent people might have an easier time (instead I used the manual found in the description since I couldn't find it in-game).

Seriously can't believe something was made in a week: well done on this and hopefully you can take it as a compliment that it was missed out on as it's definitely niche stuff that isn't meant for mass appeal (though perhaps with some better tutorials and slower steps you could do it, but most likely at the cost of reducing its mystique).

EDIT: Getting a weird bug with Blue Green Separator: the program works, but it just keeps spinning its wheels after going through the first string of example inputs and never moving onto the next set. I've tried refactoring my code several times but it doesn't seem to have an effect: very strange!

EDIT EDIT: Bug with Blue Green Separator has been fixed woo~

crow-seeds responds:

Late reply, but thanks for going through and playing! This was super helpful, did not realize that color combining could trip people up haha, will probably make some edits to the manual.

The game was inspired by Zachtronics! I really found those games to be really fun because of the fun in trying to decipher how to operate the different mechanics in the game. Once you take the time to learn the mechanics, programming in it becomes a sort of flow. Like you code in this almost alien-like language almost natually, and then when you run the program and see all these complex dot sequences move up and down, you're like "Holy shit, I wrote this. I wrote this indecipherable block of code" and it just works! It's similar to when you first learn how to code, where it's painful to learn but really fucking rewarding. Wanted to make a game like that for programmers like me and you, but also able to be picked up by non-coders (Which it actually did! People who aren't in the field like JimmyCarlos and qwerty741 aren't programmers, and they actually beat all 11 levels in the main game!! Like holy shit, JimmyCarlos even beat it in a version without a text translation of Sasha's drawings!!!).

Maybe making it a free game on Newgrounds isn't the best target audience (though I want the game to be on a free platform, I would feel bad taking someone's money!). I don't really care about score or being front-paged nominated for best of the month (If I did, I would be making drastically different games, though views would be nice, especially on the multiplayer games!). I just thought it would be really funny to make a machine coding game, a completely alien and extremely different game from what you would typically see on this site, for Robot Day. The judges didn't really like it, but I didn't really expect them to!

Anyways I'm going on for way too long, Aurora is my favorite of all the games I've made by far, and I'm really glad there were people who genuinely enjoyed this nerdy programming game! I wanted to make a game that reflected the theme of a "robot day", and by making it about the true essence of making a robot (Like the low-level coding shit in real life, not the cool laser shooting stuff in pop-culture), it hopefully embodies what a "robot" themed game could be!

[『さかさま MOOD』]

Hmm, certainly a strong contender for 3 stars coming from the leader himself, but does it maybe do too much?

It's certainly got ups and downs...

It starts off strong, as the game certainly is rather shallow and insubstantial, being something like a single minigame from a Warioware collection, feeling like a paltry serving that begs more content.

However, just like a Warioware minigame, it has a rather charming and funny design to it in general and is filled with many variable interactions like not only hitting the bomb, cheese or Tom, but also kissing the forehead or, uh, nape, that are great to witness and belies the facade of shallowness.

Shikashi, the way you get those interactions is awkward and strange since not only is the hit detection kind of vague, the game is not robustly designed enough to always generate a scenario where you have a chance to kiss the lips for maximum points, forcing you to have to frustratingly accept a forehead or nape kiss.

Sarani, it sucks when you die and the game just skips whatever the event that caused your death and goes straight to a restart: feels very awkward and reduces what should be a strong point of the game.

Chinamini, there isn't a way to succeed at all, only death, so what point is this game?

Demo, as short and shallow as it was, it did make me have a memorable fun little time, while a 3 point game would probably not induce any emotions in me beyond boredom, so perhaps it deserves more credit? Hrm, tabun...ma ii ka!

panpikidaan responds:

FuturecopLGFさん、、、
Kiku is Big Fan..I look forward to your next YouTube video Upload(((o(*ﾟ∀ﾟ*)o)))

[Newgrounds Rushdown Rivals]

Hell yeah, I love me a good beat em' up and this delivers in spades!

All-around I feel like this game looks and feels wonderful and has a very professional level of polish and huge amounts of content. There's just so much to love, like the great variety of enemies and bosses to fight, all the referential humor, the combat with its fantastic feedback and subtle guiding auto-aim/stickiness and clear attack telegraphs, tons of characters to play with all sorts of distinct playstyles and unique hidden techniques like whacking back bullets with Pico's bat, the great menus and controller support and so on and so forth. I probably can't even list all of the positives about this game because they are innumerable and also subtle: so good you don't even necessarily notice it (but you sure as heck feel it from how fun this is)!

If I were to have any nitpicks, it would be:

*Would've loved to see character stats/bios being accessible on the character select screen instead of only in gameplay: can end up going back and forth if you end up picking someone that doesn't gel with you because you didn't have a chance to study beforehand (though I felt like I loved all the characters I tried).

*Sound was kind of weird if you wear headphones. If you walk to the right side of the screen, you'll end up hearing footsteps coming from the right side of your headphones as if someone is to the right, not realizing its your own footsteps. Basically, its kind of strange that the 'ears' are centered in the center of the screen instead of tracking on your character: would be much better for a more informative audio, I think, but maybe some people playing view themselves as an outside observer and not the character so it makes more sense to them, dunno. Maybe it's because it can be a 2P game?

*Was a little disappointed that there was no story or campaign after it seems to be building it up during the tutorial: instead you just play in separate arenas at your leisure that largely have the same enemies to fight, not much unique stage hazards or geography or variety in minibosses, and in general no major differences between them except the final boss. Because of this, unless you're a score/difficulty junkie, it can feel like it's lacking a sense of progression and being a bit repetitive, like once you've seen one level you've seen 'em all (except for the boss, of course).

*I do love how simple and mashable the combat system is, but I was a bit confused and unsure whether it had a deeper strategy to go for beyond just comboing to get powered up. Would love to learn some strategies like how to proc 'vunerable' status on enemies and any other neat tech, as so far I couldn't find anything definitive in my attempts to research it. Think it could create a whole new deeper level of strategy and intention in the combat if there were enemies with certain weakpoints that you need certain moves or timing to exploit and get 'vunerables' with: as it is you can kind of just mash through everything no matter what, even if they're a shield enemy which you think would need another approach (which is a positive in some respects).

*While most of the characters are awesome and unique, some seem rather imbalanced and confusing in design: for example, Pico has the ability to whack back bullets with his heavy attack bat, and Hank has the ability to parry bullets or attacks with his special, yet Cassette can only parry specifically melee attacks with a very tightly timed up attack (why so specifically only melee? just seems so limiting and hard to pull off when I feel it could've easily just reflected any damage like Hank, but I dunno, maybe she'd be OP if she could)

*Weird mouse bug: if you're using the controller on the menus but stop moving for a second, the selection will suddenly snap to what your mouse is pointing to when I'm not making any major mouse movements to make it think I switched control schemes.

*I do find that the characters move a bit too fast and snappy: they all remind me of Fox from Melee whereas I liked playing characters like Marth for more slow, controlled movements. This game, however, has enough auto-aim and subtle guidance that it's not an issue: just an initial personal preference thing that bothered me slightly.

*Difficulty can be a bit wonky and up to luck at times: sometimes you get a round that gives you a lot of health and assist trophies, other times you're on your own. Sometimes you get a wave of normal enemies, sometimes you keep getting Dad-bot popping in over and over who is seriously way too spongy and way too much of a mini-boss to be within those waves of normal mooks. Maybe there's some way to reduce RNG, like a way to guarantee health drops (for example, I liked how Pico gets a free psuedo-health point for getting his combo up) and hand-craft the enemy waves for each level?

*I could see some people complaining about the fact that the boss fights have random mooks popping up in them: usually this design is treated as the boss not being strongly designed enough to stand on its own, random mooks being a cheap way to artificially increase the boss difficulty. I don't really have a beef with it since I think it works with the chaotic nature of this game, but maybe something to think about.

*Not sure how assist trophies work? I pick them up and they happen after a weird delay of time, or sometimes they don't even happen at all? I would expect them to either be used immediately or go into my inventory and press a button to use: maybe I am using them and not realizing?

*Medals seem to sometimes work and sometimes not? I got some of the medals like the assist trophies and some minibosses, but none of my full clears as Pico, Cassette Girl, Hank, etc.

Christ, I know that's mucho texto up there, but again, the above are very much nitpicks that didn't really hurt my great experience with this game, I just wanted to point em out just in case. Sorry I dedicate so much text to that instead of the positives, but well, it's kinda what I do, haha. Well done on this game!

Spagato responds:

I appreciate the detailed criticism as it's the best way I improve. Your feedback last year really helped with the development of this one and I'm glad I delivered :^)

Thanks again for playing! Please keep doing what you're doing. It really helps me and probably others as well.

- I'll probably put a way for players to see the movelist on the character select in the future

- That's probably a bug since the game has a listener in the center of the camera. I'll see if I can adjust that so it's not so weird.

- Ah the story, I REALLY wanted to make one and put one in, but the work was HUGE for a free fan game lol. That might come in the future but I don't think for the web version as the loading times for this game is already crazy.

- The armor just gets destroyed by damage or specific moves that do more armor damage (usually on attack2)

- I wanted every character to have something unique for themselves so they won't overlap each other as much as possible. I was going to make her kick reflect but that might make Pico's bat look outdated so I made Cass the only character so far with a melee counter hit. I gave Hank the parry because it looked cool like his character and I wanted him to play as risky as possible so the reward had to be high.

- I think the dadbots are a little tanky, might nerf their health next patch. You do get a guaranteed hp from foamy if your health is low and he usually spawns more likely when you're low.

- I wanted the minions to change a person's strategy mid-fight and make them move around more. I haven't gotten a complain about that yet luckily, but I'll keep an eye on this one.

- The assist comes out when there are a lot of enemies on screen, but much faster if a boss is present. When I play-tested the game I noticed the assists kept being wasted alot so I tried to make it "take and let it do it's thing" as much as possible. I'll try to adjust the times, maybe that might be the better option.

- That's my bad :( . I'll try to fix the medals asap.

[Snack Slice]

I really want to like this game as I think it's a cute concept, but execution-wise it made a bit of a mixed impression.

As said, my first impression of the game was pretty bad. The initial levels felt very confusing and frustrating to get to work: it felt like the game relied too much on luck and strange/illogical physics that were difficult to replicate consistently. Sometimes I'd slice something and it'd slice how I want, sometimes it'd just stay still or move completely differently than expected, and it felt confusing and weird how to slice round objects to try and get them to roll. Was begging for some sort of force push I could use to clean things up or get motion going. Furthermore, there was a lot of annoyances like slices/clicks not even registering in the first place at random times.

However, it felt like when the later levels came, the game started to hit its stride, where levels became a lot more simplified, both in terms of the complexity/steps being reduced and the goals being more logical and achievable without relying on weird physics. One could argue that maybe it becomes a bit too much about vague timing for some levels which might be worse for some people, but I quite enjoyed myself. Certainly, while I enjoyed the later simple levels, ideally I would want these levels to be the first ones that people see, and then challenge them with more complex ones later on: basically the levels are out of order!

If the levels were reorganized or culled to focus on the strong ones and create a better difficulty curve, and if the game was polished up a bit more to reduce the jank and create consistency in physics, I think it could be really great! Presentation and concept are already very good and intriguing and make me want to see more despite my bad first impression, so I would consider this an ideal game jam result!

[Simple RPGs]

Hmm, it's a cute little retro game, but unfortunately it might have been a little too retro for me!

It certainly is charming to see these games and I do think they effectively capture what old-school RPGs might have been like: particularly their limits. Reminds me of people who make NES games and ensure that it will genuinely fit on an NES cartridge and obey the palette limits and all that jazz. However, playing through them was an exercise in frustration as it just felt overly simple to the point of being boring and I was constantly stepping on traps with no way to know except from memorization. The little things that could've added some excitement, such as special effects for your abilities, gathering items and equipment, satisfying combat feedback, and a quest or sense of progression, were totally absent here and made me lose interest practically immediately.

As a side note, I was confused at the inclusion of two separate games: at first, I thought the idea was that two RPGs would be mashed into one for an interesting combination, not just two completely separate games. While it was certainly novel to see the technological difference between the two RPGs, like seeing one from the Atari 2600 era and another from the 5200 era, it felt like quantity over quality for me as both of them suffered the same issues.

I suppose take it as a compliment that you might've too effectively captured the boring, bygone era of old-old-old-school retro RPGs! I'd like to say I'm old enough to appreciate them but I came in around the Nintendo era, not the Atari era, so I'm missing that nostalgia which could've helped.

[Into Ruins]

Hey, not bad at all! Quite enjoyed my trips though this game: it's a bit of a traditional roguelike so it's not exactly anything super new or creative, but the little unique changes to the system it does have such as light management and health management from falling as means of progression added enough of a nice twist to keep things fresh, and in general the presentation and game felt very professionally-crafted and fun to play with lots of satisfying effects for actions and subtle touches like being able to see your sprite change with equipment.

Being a traditional roguelike at heart, it does suffer the usual annoyances such as a run's success feeling like it might be too much up to the RNG god's favor. Additionally, having to experiment with equipment to identify them always chafes me a bit as well, though I understand it's purpose. Moving on from that, there are some slight annoyances like the game being very vague with feedback for actions like combat (though again, maybe it's mysterious on purpose). All in all, though, I still had a very positive impression from my runs, so clearly there is enough good construction to this game that makes the slight annoyances ignorable in the grand scheme.