FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Iced]

Pretty neat action-packed game! For the most part, it seems very similar to something like Super Crate Box except with the inclusion of bosses and a temperature mechanic, and with this it indeed delivers some great, explosive, juicy and slick action as you chaotically juggle all sorts of weaponry and dodge enemy attacks all while trying to keep yourself warm. Definitely enjoyed myself a bunch with this: it's simple but fun!

My initial impression wasn't that great as I felt like the heat mechanic wasn't that interesting as it was too easy to stay in the middle: felt like maybe there should be another mechanic to gather wood for the fire to keep it going, or for the fire to move. However, as the waves increase it gets more and more difficult to stay in the middle so it all works quite well: I guess it's just a bit of a slow burn and takes awhile to warm up, if you pardon the pun. Maybe it could stand to increase the difficulty quicker to get to the good stuff faster: feels like it takes until the 3rd wave for the game to actually start.

Still, I do have to admit that, in regards to the heat mechanic, I wish it was a bit more easy to tell. I actually died in the tutorial and had to do it again because I had no idea I was freezing: basically I think the effect of getting colder is a bit too subtle for its own good. Would probably help if the effect was a bit more amped up: maybe make the vignette larger or more dark blue as you get colder, use maybe some more ice related visuals like frost or cracks appearing on the screen, maybe some ice cracking or winter wind blowing sound effects, and so on. I also felt like the simple change in opacity and nothing else made it too difficult to tell how close you were to the limit: there's beeping but it covers too large of an interval, where sometimes I'd freeze not realizing I was that close to the end and thought I had more time. Maybe you tried to make it subtle so as to not impair the players vision, but I think you overdid it by not overdoing it. Oh, and I also wish it was more obvious when you get hit with something like a screenshake or a full screen red flash.

[Star Trek: Collective Mischief]

Pretty decent little shmup! It ain't gonna light anything on fire as it is pretty much a bog-standard shmup without any crazy new mechanics (and what new mechanics there are, like the decision to make the torpedo button use all torpedos at once instead of one at a time, can be a bit confusing rather than interesting) but for what it is, it's a pretty short and sweet time with good explosive effects that doesn't wear out its welcome by stretching its content too far.

A particular highlight is the inclusion of two crafts to choose from, with one being fast but weak while the other is slow but strong: adds some good replayability through needing to use different strategies. Another highlight was the boss fight which was pretty cool: I had a really rough time with it as the Enterprise at first since it felt way too slow to be able to dodge the patterns, but with some practice I was able to see that the boss was designed enough to have gaps to exploit despite the slowness (you just really gotta be on your A game). Nice stuff!

[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!