FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[PUP]

Cute little game! It's a little rough, what with the crudely drawn and awkwardly stretched graphics, lack of juicy effects, and the incredibly short length, but I thought the game was funny and did a decent enough job of selling its concept and providing some nice levels that build upon the challenge. As always, I like the inclusion of bonus levels, but with a story campaign so short, I almost felt like they should've just been mandatory, haha. Pretty good example of an ideal game jam result, I think: sells a unique concept and leaves you wanting more.

[Coca & Their Shotgun]

Don't get me wrong, I love me some bullet hells, I love me some boss-fight centered games, I love shotguns, and I love it when games put you right in the action quickly. But, uh, maybe I should be careful what I wish for, haha!

The game definitely has a lot going for it. I enjoyed that the boss has multiple phases, each with tons of patterns which were very beautiful in their choreography, and the general presentation is charming in its goofiness. However, this game does kinda just throw you in at the deep end, and as much as I like a challenge, I ended up just quitting after a few attempts.

There's just so much stacked against you. The arena is so cramped and claustrophobic, the additional enemies so annoying and spongy, and the patterns so chaotic that it just became difficult to parse anything. The bullet hitboxes were super whack: when you practice dodging at the beginning you can get hit by bullets that don't intersect your shadow at all, meaning that all you can rely on is spamming the dodge which just didn't feel satisfying or elegant. Finally, the nail in the coffin was the fact that the game doesn't allow you to hold down the fire button to keep firing, instead forcing you to click each time: my old man joints just can't handle this type of control scheme no more, argh!

I still kinda like the game in all its wackiness and jankiness, but I need to put some ice on my hand before I give it another go.

Just-a-ng-dummy responds:

Thx for playing Futurecop! This isn't my best game and more of a dumb shitpost so I didn't really expect much of this. You made some good points and I wanna try and use em for reference later on if I make other bullet hell games. Although I should make a small update for this game just in case haha!

Hope you'll have fun reviewing the other games last October!

[The Last Man]

Not too shabby in an old-school shooter kind of way: certainly makes me think of early Newgrounds flash games and the like, but overall, I'd say it is rather dated and amateurish by modern standards.

While the core gameplay is decent shooting fun with a nice challenge twist of one-hit kills, resource management and navigation through darkness, it's nothing really that special and gets boring rather quickly as you face off against the same enemy over and over in the same looking brown facility. While the game boasts a lot of weapons that could spice things up, they typically aren't worth the trouble since ammo is so lacking for them and you can only carry one, meaning if you use many you'll likely need to backtrack too much to swap back, so why bother.

Furthermore, the game just looks very cheap from a presentation perspective and lacks any sort of flair, personality, or charm: everything seems like it was built from asset packs, the game uses the same font for everything including the title, the knife is really jank in how it animates and doesn't register if you click instead of hold, and there's just so much skimped out on, like how its game over screen is just a dark screen with two buttons. Finally, the camera makes me nauseous with the way it keeps moving around and zooming in and out and so on.

I think it could be decent if it had a bit more charm and personality to its presentation, as well as a sense of more progression by increasing and changing up the enemy variety, level construction, and having some sort of story or objectives to go for. But in its current state, I'm not sold on it.

[Long Shot]

Certainly got a solid elevator pitch: only being able to shoot once every 10 seconds is quite the concept that gets me interested to see what's going on. Unfortunately, at the end of the day, what's going on is a rather simple and bog-standard SHMUP: decent enough in that it feels competently put together, but doesn't really have anything special feeling about it and takes no time at all until it feels repetitive as it keeps cycling through the small number of wave patterns over and over that aren't hard enough to really pressure you into using your gun, rendering the concept moot. I certainly think the idea has merit: if there was some sort of fully-fledged story or level progression to make things get harder and harder, some bosses to fight and other cool stuff, I think it could be really great: perhaps a post-jam version?

[Ophisk]

An interesting little game, but unfortunately I think it was more interesting in terms of concept rather than execution.

Don't get me wrong, there's some fun little stuff in here and I think it plays around with the combination of snake with dungeon crawler in a neat way: navigating a dungeon as a snake, cutting off dashing enemies with your body to kill them, managing your growing body through avoiding collectables or getting counteracting shop upgrades, and so on!

It just didn't take too long until the game started to feel really shallow and I lost interest. Floor after floor was more of the same, no different from the very first floor: practically constructed all the same way, same enemies over and over, keys easily found, no variety in upgrades, so on and so forth. Perhaps there's a boss or change-up eventually, but I didn't have the patience to see it if there was. I also felt confused about the collectibles: was never sure whether I should be collecting them or not, since it feels like they are a risk to collect, and yet surely the usual modus operandi should be to collect, no?

In a way, while I'm down on this, I'd say this is an ideal game jam game in that it explored an interesting concept: it's understandably hard to get a solid execution with just a short time constraint, but it provided some good food for thought for future games that might like to iterate upon it.

[CATS AND COFFEE]

Cute game that I really like the look and concept of, but think it unfortunately flubs in execution for now.

Game definitely has a wonderful art style going for it, and I always like these shop management games as well as multitask juggling games, so it's a good combo for a solid first impression. I also like that the game tries to subtly help by highlighting the current items you can use depending on what step of the coffee making process you're in. Certainly could be a fun little game.

Unfortunately, the game is incredibly unintuitive without any in-game instructions or tutorial: the only instructions being found outside of the game where they can easily be missed or lost over time. Interactions can also be super frustrating with the cats underlapping other interactables so you can, for example, be trying to make a latte only to end up clicking on a cat behind the machine and getting punished since the game thinks you were trying to wrangle a cat while doing coffee.

Game can also be very vague and confusing in terms of feedback: game overs come without warning and without a mistake counter, serving coffee didn't give enough positive feedback, and successfully wrangling a cat rewards you with a hiss which I thought at first meant I did something wrong. Speaking of, I hated how wrangling cats has to be achieved by tirelessly mashing click on them: not only did it hurt my hands, the way it turned them red made me think I was angering them and needed to handle them differently. Game also ultimately feels pointless: no story, no score table, no stats, no ending, nothing, it just crashes to the title whenever you win or lose.

While I'm pretty harsh on the game, I absolutely would love a more polished post-game jam version of this. I think you could have a great store management game in the likes of Cook Serve Delicious or what-have-you: could have a whole career mode where it gets tougher as the days go by, coffee making ramps up with stuff like a foam machine being introduced creating more steps, maybe cats require more specific maintenance to keep them docile like giving cats their favorite toy which you need to memorize, and eventually you build up your shop to be a thriving business!

[I HATE circles]

Huh, not too shabby! It's not the deepest or longest-lasting game or anything, but this seems like a pretty decent score-attack arcade game. It's simple enough, collecting crystals over and over while avoiding circles that bounce around the arena, but there's some hidden depth and strategy to consider: increasing your size to increase your multiplier at the cost of it being harder to dodge, as well as being able to decrease enemy circles size through engaging them with your dodge, are cool and subtle forms of dynamic difficulty and risk-reward interplay. I think the characters add a lot of good variety as well as they can change things significantly in fun ways rather than just being boring cosmetics (though some of them aren't well-balanced, such as how mad is just a straight upgrade from happy with no downsides). Game overall also has an acceptable amount of juice and charm to it. A good game jam result, I'd say!

[Endacopia - Demo]

Pretty neat game! It's certainly a very charming and wacky world to explore with all sorts of strange but interesting logic to it. I love me some point-n-click adventures when they have a lot of interactables and flavor text, and for the most part, I think this game delivered on that decently: for example, I love doing nonsensical actions like attempting to talk with toilets and seeing what sort of gags the game will insert for those. Game also had a very intriguing plot and put effort into its fun moments: loved seeing the extra step of the camera whipping over when the sign said he'd look to see if anyone else was around, for instance.

Having said that though, I did experience a lot of oddities with this game, and with this being a demo, I feel like it would be appropriate to unload:

A lot of the controls seemed rather unorthodox and against standard, intuitive conventions. For example, I don't know why the game went for WASD controls instead of just being able to click on the floor to move somewhere: I mean, when you click on an object, your character will move over there, so why not be able to click anywhere else? It didn't ruin the game for me or anything as it's not important in the grand scheme, but it really confused me initially and took a while to acclimate.

Found it difficult to parse what objects are interactable and what aren't. This lead to a lot of confusion, like how you couldn't interact with the clock or calendar despite them being given significance due to the camera change when you first examine them. Why do you put the labeling for 'Feelings' and 'Items' only when you hover over your character? Shouldn't you have labels pop-up when hovering over everything interactable to be clear and consistent? At the very least, it'd be nice if your cursor would glow when you're over something interactable.

Speaking of that, why do you have inventory accessible by interacting with your character? It makes some logical sense, yet at the same time it's kind of confusing: looking at yourself to see status is fine, but for inventory? For me, this kind of reeks of you doing something so confusing that you have to make it more clear by doing the labeling which makes other things inconsistent: you've created a whole new problem, why not just avoid the issue entirely by doing it more conventionally with, for example, a little suitcase symbol in the corner to click on?

Found interactions annoyingly inconsistent. For the most part, objects consistently responded to all actions: sight, interact, and speech, with proper or funny reactions, but there were some objects that did not respond to one or two of them, like this one door that could only be seen and interacted with, but not talked to. I mean, if you're going to make illogical actions like the toilet responding to speech, why not the door: what makes it so special to be exempt from consistency? I hate losing out on potential flavor text! I also found the clickable objects kinda weird, like clicking on paintings with any action has them animate a little show: maybe that should only happen when you interact with them, but should have other reactions if you look/speak?

Anyway, while I know that may seem like a lot of gripes, I was nevertheless hooked on this game and am very looking forward to its final version!

[SingScar 1]

Huh, can't say I recall the fad this is referencing, but if I were to have my own take on it, it's kinda like an alternative YTMND-generator, but whereas YTMND combined a background picture with text and looping sound/music (and eventually transformed to utilize gifs), this combines a spoken prompt/caption with a youtube clip. It's like Mario Maker but for memes or youtube poops or shitposts or whatever kids call it nowadays, haha.

Certainly an interesting and clever little thing once you get used to it, in a way, but I gotta say that my first impression was that it was incredibly ugly, obtuse, and confusing: for example, the font used for the menus is all grainy and distorted, the overall colors and presentation is garish, there are no good developer-made SingScar examples to draw from and you can end up watching user-made ones that aren't created well which gives you a bad/wrong impression of how SingScars are supposed to be made, and the tutorial isn't voiced and takes way too long. If the presentation and instructions were cleared up for people and made more intuitive, as well as some other features could be added like being able to search for certain SingScars your friends have made or whatever, I think this could actually be quite addictive and fun to share jokes around with!

[Void Scrappers (demo)]

Hmm, I think it's an alright entry into whatever we call this genre nowadays (Survivors-likes? Bullet Heavens?) but unfortunately I feel like this falls quite low on the list compared to its contemporaries. Sorry to compare it to other games like that, but I felt it was appropriate considering this is something that is on steam and is being asked money for.

Don't get me wrong, I think the game is decently constructed and there is some fun to be had here: once the game gets going and you've got a lot of power-ups, you can do some really crazy stuff and just enjoy the chaos. When I played I did enjoy some notable power-up combos like creating explosions on my dash and having my dash rewind me back to my previous position: really changed my dash from defensive to offensive with that in a cool way!

But at the end of the day, the game just felt really bland, boring, and muted to me:

*The collectables were really dull grey objects that didn't feel fun to collect.

*While enemies in these types of games are usually quite dumb and just charge at you, this game's enemies seemed especially dumb and robotic, maybe due to their weird jitteryness or lack of animations or something.

*I dunno if I was unlucky or something, but leveling up never seemed to give me anything cool, in fact it constantly gave me upgrades for things I didn't even have yet which felt silly.

*Weapons felt really disconnected and lackluster. For example, the artillery power-up just made explosions happen on the screen, but they'd just happen, instead of them coming from a rocket firing from my plane to make me feel like it was really me doing it. Orbitals were similar as well, with them not having any sort of visual tether to me. And the bullets fired by the gun were just very boring dots.

*And overall, while the game was juicy, it wasn't to a satisfying extent: like it had explosions and dialogue popping-up and stuff but it was all so muted and unnoticeable. This whole genre lives or dies on how satisfying it is to mow down hordes of enemies, and I feel like this one didn't deliver on that front.

Again, it's not bad, but I just didn't feel any sort of hook from this compared to 20 Minutes Till Dawn, Holocure, Rogue Genesia, Soulstone Survivors, and of course, Vampire Survivors. Maybe I'm just played out with this games nowadays, haha.