FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[E.T.P]

Wow, really solid game! Definitely quite impressive for a game jam game: it really feels like a complete package. A decent gimmick, smooth increase in difficulty, a good variety of mechanics that are introduced intuitively, and tops it all of with a boss fight (which I loved how it foreshadows with the music drop) and then freedom! It even has some good polish to it: I especially love the little touch of the red laser, since it intuitively shows how teleportation requires line of sight and thwarts a lot of potential confusion from people who would naturally assume they could teleport through walls. Only complaints I can think of is that I felt like the teleporter indicator was a bit too large and the movement could be a bit weird sometimes with how much you slide from the slight of movements. All in all, while it's not the most unique or outstanding game or anything that's gonna take the world by storm, it's a great short and sweet experience!

[What Makes You a Man?]

Hmmm, bit of mixed feelings on this one. I feel like my initial impression wasn't that great:

While the climbing mechanics were intriguing and I liked the whole 'single player but coop' concept, I felt like the whole 'jump up then the person below jumps and you jump off them mid-jump' was unnecessarily awkward to have to utilize, the rope mechanic was really janky and mashy to deal with, and the game didn't really introduce any significantly new mechanics or level layouts as it went out, just minor differences.

The story also felt super lazy with tons of parts that could've been utilized to flesh out the characters or introduce some subtle hooks or just have some flavor/fun, were instead just replaced with filler like "talking on the way to the mountain" or "shows picture of sister" (why not actually show a picture?) until the game just last-minute dumps the moral on you at the end in a very cliche and almost comical way, like a cheesy after-school special or something. Heart's in the right place and maybe it's a good thing that it's so chill about it instead of being dramatic or whatever, but yeah, it was pretty cheesy.

The game was also lacking some critical elements like a quick restart or anything like that to get out of unwinnable stuck situations. The awkward way the game would squish when you get separated, while funny, was really glitchy and should've probably just caused a restart or something instead. Also what's the point of showing L/R below a character when it just gets lost in the graphics of the ground?

Having said all that, though, I did, for some reason, find myself going back to this to finish the game. Something about wanting to see what happens at the end and actually getting used to and having fun with the climbing controls after the initial awkwardness of it: not sure exactly what. So yeah, something about it hooked me in some way: not nearly as professionally as I think it could've done, but I came back and had some fun, so credit where it's due.

plufmot responds:

Cheers! I agree with most of this, I just wanted to try doing everything myself and the writing ended up being super difficult to do. I'm not used to writing more serious stuff like this. Although I strongly disagree about the "filler", I think it worked better to leave some stuff up to the player's imagination. All in all, we're on the same page though aha and I'm glad you liked it! Can't wait to watch you play it in your video ahaha.

[Logica Emotica]

Pretty nice puzzler, but I gotta admit, and hopefully this doesn't sound too harsh, but I think it's the worst bonte game I've played so far. Now, I'm not saying it's a bad game, heavens no: I actually had some good fun with this and overall think it's well put-together and worth a play. It's just that, compared to factory balls, which had some really crazy complex puzzles to plan through, or blue/pink/green/etc, which constantly kept the novelty up by switching up the rules and bending your mind, and so on and so forth, this was just a constant parade of basic sokoban/snake/collect puzzles over and over. It just didn't have the same addictive or unique quality to it like the others have, and putting that aside, the graphical presentation was very boring as well (I know it's intentional since it's emojis, but it just didn't work for me in any creative or intriguing way). Maybe I'm being unfair by comparing it to previous games, but I just can't help it. Again, it's still rather solid, but just generic: nothing special or memorable to be seen here, I feel.

[Pico Party]

Quite the interesting game! I'm not usually a fan of this grindy type of games where you just keep getting resources to keep upgrading slowly, but I did like the 'guess who' element it brought to the table where you have to id guests. Certainly amusing and novel to see all of the different guests showing up and trying to deduce their fake counterparts.

The game definitely felt rather clunky and confusing though. I had to go through the tutorial 3 times because it doesn't wait for my confirmation to finish reading it and just dumps so much on me that I couldn't fully digest: maybe could've had the controls pop-up when you get near an associated object, or maybe do a more guided walkthru of inviting and inspecting your first guest. Identifying guests was awkward as well because I could never tell whether I was getting it right or not since there was no immediate confirmation/reward: I'd lock people out that I thought were wrong but I could never tell if that was correct. Dialogue felt like it was google-translated from another language and was super annoying as well because you lack the critical element of allowing the user to click to fill the text line: instead you can only click to skip the line completely, meaning you are always forced to wait if you want to read the full line. Game also seemed to start doing repeat guests rather quickly as well, kind of killing the motivation to keep going.

Having said all that, I still do find myself a bit intrigued to keep playing to see if I can make it to the end goal, so take that as credit for delivering a rather unique concept: we'll see what happens!

[Return to Castle Penistein]

Hmmm, this is a really rough one for me: I definitely think it's a solid prototype for a NG Wolfenstein 3D type game, but at the moment it's lacking a lot of crucial touches to make it fun and exciting.

Don't get me wrong, I think that the game in its current state is very impressive. It's got all the necessary mechanics for a decent shooter in place, and I love the presentation with old-school DOS/shareware menus and such. Definitely some kudos are deserved for getting this skeleton into place that you can improve upon.

But yeah, while the core engine might be there, the game is seriously lacking. First and foremost are the obvious things: there's only one level, and its very boring because it only has one type of enemy and the same graphics plastered everywhere. Even Wolf 3D would shake the levels up a bit with different enemies and different props/walls such that it didn't feel like a bland maze and had some actual landmarks. But moving on from that, what I definitely felt was lacking was the shooting feedback. While enemies would die in impressive ways, I hated how they would not react to being shot/taking damage: made it confusing to tell if you were even hitting them at all (and in fact, sometimes I didn't hit them because I hit a wall corner off to the side, but without any puffs of smokes or bullet holes, there is no way to tell). Getting pickups like ammo and armor off the ground was bad as well due to awkward hitboxes and a lack of feedback: need a screen flash or a sound at the very least. Movement also felt pretty stiff and lifeless. Also there is the issue that it is pretty much just a Wolf 3D clone, and doesn't really bring anything new and exciting to the table: I always felt like Wolf 3D was quite boring and could really use something new to jazz it up, and I didn't see that in this.

I could go on, but I'm very glad to see that you say that the game is super unfinished at the moment: gives me hope that my feedback can help make this into an incredible finished product! I'm only being harsh on it because I love shooters and there is definitely a lot of potential here for a great game, so hopefully no harm no foul!

[Pico-Cross Collab]

An interesting twist on the picross genre by fusing it with an art collab! Usually I would think that the art collab part would involve the finished picture in the end being something someone drew, but the idea to have the art pieces be found within the filled parts of the board was quite unique. For the most part, the game works well and provides some decent picross fun while allowing you to see some cool artwork (and the artists behind them as well!)

There are some awkward aspects to it, though. Because the artwork shows up for filled spaces immediately when you complete a row, it allows you to 'cheat' the usual Picross rules by just brute-force filling in rows until you see art pop-up: usually you don't get that type of confirmation until the very end, so this is a lot easier than typical Picross. Furthermore, it feels like the usual thrill of a Picross game, where you want to see the end result, is gone because it's second fiddle to seeing the tons of art within the tiles. Viewing the art is also a bit odd: when you click on it you can zoom-in, but only on the center and not anywhere else, why no dragging or scrolling? Also in general I wish the game had a bit more pizazz to it, like special effects or sounds for filling a row or completing a puzzle: felt pretty dry without it, just listening to the same music over and over. Because of these issues, I did feel like I found myself not getting too addicted to this as I usually would for other Picross games.

Despite my complaints, I still think the idea is pretty neat and there is a fun game here, so kudos on the rather special way you choose to have this art collab: certainly more creative and unique than your typical gallery!

[Toggle Cube]

Solid puzzler! It ain't the greatest thing in the world or anything, but this felt really decent in all aspects: cool concept, great level design that intuitively teaches and expands upon the large variety of mechanics it introduces, decent visuals/music/sounds, and so on. Certainly found myself getting addicted and wanting to see what pops up next in the game, and never got frustrated from failure since the levels were nice and bite-sized. Very nice work!

Only complaint I can really think of is that the difficulty curve, while overall good, did have some awkward levels here and there that either went too hard or too easy suddenly: like they'd retread concepts already covered or suddenly introduce new mechanics that it'd forget to use again till way later. Also some of the way the levels would utilize the mechanics could be a bit weird, like levels where you'd need to turn on/off cubes when people are inside them.

[The 1000]

Hmm, it feels like an interesting concept, but unfortunately felt really underbaked to me.

I think there is a lot of cool stuff going on in this game. It certainly is quite a spectacle to see these big mob fights happen, and there's a little bit of strategy to it where you try to get in there and fight but keep yourself safe at the same time by dodging bullets and keeping a human wall between you and the melee units. I also appreciate the nice little touch of integrating NG avatars onto the characters. There's also a bit of fun progression in getting new upgrades and weapons and such every fight.

Unfortunately I felt like the game lost me rather quickly. The tutorial was confusing: it went past a lot of the tips before I could finish reading them and even had some tooltips overlapping each other which made them impossible to read. While there is some minor strategy to the combat as I spoke of before, in the end it really felt super mindless and repetitive due to the lack of abilities or direct control, lack of enemy variety, lack of a story or some goal to go for, and lack of satisfying feedback for attacks and damage and such. It didn't help that stuff that could help pep things up, like skills, were gated behind large amounts of money being required that I wasn't willing to grind to acquire. All in all, the game just felt bleh: combat was vague and unsatisfying as everything got lost in the crowd and the sense of progression or a goal was not there to keep me wanting to grind.

Would love to see something like this improved upon: I think the concept of these big mob fights can be fun and it's certainly a neat prototype, but this just had so little content to it at the moment for me.

jefvel responds:

Thanks for the thorough review! I agree with you on all points, there’s a lot more I wanted to have fixed in the game, but sadly just didn’t have the time to do it.

[The Life and Death of Boe]

Cute little game! Certainly a lot of fun animations and crazy deaths to go through: found myself getting addicted to see what new sequence (and new art style from another animator) would how up next.

The flow of the game is a little awkward though at times. I was kind of expecting it to be like, I dunno, Henry Stickman, where there's an overall sense of progression as you try to get to a goal, where you select the death responses until you get a good one and then proceed to the next set of choices, but here you just exhaust the choices which all end in death and then go to the next set for...some reason...to get to some unclear goal.

Speaking of, the animations can be really confusing and uneven at times: some of them make sense and have deaths involving the object in question and are short and sweet, but some of them are overly long and go on weird non-sensical tangents. But then again, some of those weird tangents were amusing in their strangeness, so it's not like it's all bad that it went weird places like that: certainly kept things interesting!

Phaox05 responds:

Maybe one of the no sense is mine, and I also noticed that the message didn't come up well, what I wanted to show is that you cannot brush your teeth and drink orange juice because of some chemicals mixing in your body but with exaggeration, doing that doesn't kill you irl

[The Railroad to Elsewhere]

Pretty neat game, but felt like it was too short to let the rather heavy themes it was playing with have any chance to effectively hit an emotional nerve.

I definitely was rather impressed with the game's construction: graphics and animations were very lovely for the most part, and as repetitive as it could've been to enter every single room, I enjoyed seeing the smooth animation of my character entering a room every time it happened. I will admit graphics-wise it wasn't all great: a lot of the train was copy/paste assets, particularly the last dilapidated section, but still, overall very nice. The rooms were quite interesting as well with most of them containing some quaint little games that test your skills and memory.

So overall it was a nice little adventure. But the way when you get to the end and suddenly it is delivering this super judgmental epilogue where it rates how you interacted with everyone and compared its to how you treated people in your previous life and so on and so forth: it just comes outta nowhere and felt so silly! I can definitely see what you were going for and I think it's pretty cool that it was tracking all that, but it just didn't work for me. It's like you saw what games like RDR2 did but you only saw a speedrun of it: Arthur's redemption and about-face works in that because it took the time to build it up and showed you the before and the after. This game goes by so fast and you never get to see any of our previous life through gameplay or even flashbacks or hints: it just makes it feel so damn shallow, like you're giving the cliff notes version of a Shakespearian tragedy.

Your hearts in the right place, of course, and again I see the gist of what you're trying to do and it could work, but something this heavy needs a lot more meat to it to make it work, in my opinion: would love to see a more fleshed out non-game-jam version of this, as I feel like you've already did a great job building the necessary core assets for it.

Also was it even possible to interact with the broken door section? I dunno if the game was playing with me there or if it was a glitch: difficult to tell.