FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Curseball]

Cool game! It's a simple and intuitive concept to start with that gets built upon with the curses to lead to more and more crazy fun, and it's all helped by the smooth controls and graphics with juicy feedback. I liked the inclusion of the helper characters and their little funny dialogues here and there: made everything a little more peppy and lively. I also liked the fact that you bounce off of the curse ball when you hit it: I felt pretty slick when I used that bounce to also simultaneously dodge a curse obstacle. Definitely a fun and addictive experience.

Only major complaint I had is that I felt like it didn't hook me that much to make me want to replay it: without a story or some sort of end goal to strive for (that I know of), I didn't feel that compelled to start all over again to make it further and further. It was fun and yes I could go for a high score, but it's difficult to start all over again with zero curses when I was having so much fun with how hectic it got. Also I was never sure what the purpose of the doors were? Did they lead to different curse wheels? Oh, and also the feedback explosions, due to them being X's, would confuse me sometimes on whether it was positive or negative feedback.

[Pico Pizza Frenzy]

Not bad! It ain't the most complex game and it's over rather quickly, but what's there is some decent beat-em-up arcade fun! I think what really helps the game is how great and juicy the presentation is: love the feeling of shooting and whacking enemies, love the little dialogues that pop-up at the bottom, love the graphics and animations, love the goofy/frantic mood and music, and I just generally love how the game cuts to the chase and gets right into it! Easily found myself replaying it a few times just to beat up more losers and go for a higher score (though I dunno if it's even possible to get 25 pizzas, don't they spawn at a schedule I can't do anything to influence?).

Only major complaint I could think of is that, while the mortar robots do have an animation for launching a missile into the air that corresponds to the markers on the ground, it's not very noticiable and without an actual projectile, the two actions seem disjointed and not apparent of the connection.

Also there's sometimes a weird bug where I can't get the game to focus and hitting space just makes the web page scroll down: dunno why exactly.

Just-a-ng-dummy responds:

Thanks for the review Futurecop!
I'm really glad you enjoyed the short premise of the game! The pizzas spawn based on a timer and if you collected it, so if you collect a pizza, a timer starts and when it ends a new pizza spawns, then the cycle repeats. During the half way mark, the time decreases, so you just need to roll your way to pizza town!

I think the markers issue can be fixed by adjusting the z-index and a visual animation, which is quite easy to do, but I'm currently doing a lot of stuff rn.

Idk about the bug though, I think the game only focusses if you click on the game, so a "click to start" prompt would be more easy-going to the player.

Cheers on reviewing this month's games!

[ENA: Decimation Journey (Demo)]

Ok, this was a bit of a trip.

First and foremost, this is one of the difficult times I've had just trying to start a game. The amount of roadblocks it threw to try and stop me was ridiculous. I had the browser pop-up a message twice that it thought that the game was frozen and made me think it crashed and was unplayable: yes, I know you say it takes a long time to load in the description, but please, if there is some way you can help the load times or put a message in the game itself by the loading bar, it would help immensely. As a game developer, I understand the difficulty and you have my sympathies, but don't expect the general public to be sympathetic: they will just assume the game is busted and leave, and it would be completely justified. Even after the load times, however, I had no idea how to start the game on the main menu: I tried enter, space, the arrow keys, WASD, Z/X, ctrl, and all other common controls and nothing worked. Only later I realized that the game wanted Q to start the game: what other game in this world uses Q for confirmation!? If anything, E would've been slightly acceptable, but still, these are some crazy uncommon controls and again, it would be helpful if there was a prompt in the game to guide.

Ok, moving past that and starting up the game, the game is somewhat cool. Definitely gives me heavy Shin Megami vibes with its maze-like levels and use of the elemental press turn system (except it takes it a bit easier by only rewarding you for hitting weaknesses and not punishing you for hitting resists). I actually thought it was a horror game at first where someone is chasing you because of the warning meter, only later realizing it was a random encounter meter as seen in other games like Etrian Odyssey and such. Certainly an impressive game that seems to have a lot of potential.

Having said that, I easily found myself getting bored and dropping off. The maze was incredibly boring and repetitive with no notable landmarks and barely any fun interactions, and the map was useless because it was too zoomed in and I couldn't find any way to see the full map. Combat was just a rehash of Shin Megami combat as said before with nothing new to it, without any of the niceties that modern Persona combat has (such as previously hit weakness hints) and with barely any SP to allow you to engage in the elemental system without immediately running out. Definitely feels like there needs to be something cool and fresh in the game to serve as a hook, like a bit of story or characters or a more interesting world/maze to explore: I just felt lost and quit due to boredom and frustration quickly.

Again, it certainly does seem to have an impressive Shin Megami RPG-esque engine in place that could be used for great things: I'm hoping that this feedback, as rough as it is, can serve to help this game become something great and exciting in the future.

[Reel Deep]

Pretty cool game! Delivers some nice addictive arcadey fun and certainly has an interesting take on the fishing game with the inclusion of having to get your rewards all the way back up: usually all you need to worry is hooking good stuff in the first place. Adds a whole element of risk/reward to the process that I both loved and...hated, haha. While the game could be frustratingly difficult at times, the upgrade process and the fact that the game is so juicy (such as the great impact from hooking things) made it quite addictive and have a professional feel to it all. The only thing missing would be a bit more of a guide to the game: I had no idea there was a treasure chest as an end goal, for example (though I did feel naturally inclined to go deeper because of the record markers, though that might've led me to go too deep too early).

I gotta say though, that as much as I loved this game in theory, I found it incredibly frustrating and just plain annoying to play at times, especially at the beginning. As much as I think the whole reeling up sequence is interesting, the frustration from losing your already gathered loot was palpable and made me want to rage quit constantly. It was just so annoying how incredibly aggressive fish could be once they get the slightest whiff and how the only way to reel up faster is to put yourself at the edge of the screen where you easily get hit by enemies you can't react to in time (so what's the damn point). Eventually by sticking with it and getting upgrades it became a bit easier to deal with, but I could easily see me and maybe others not willing to put up with that initial annoyance.

Maybe something can be done to help bad first impressions like that from happening: for example, I felt compelled to try and go deep for better rewards, but maybe the game should to guide you away from that until you get upgraded somehow with like a story or missions or something. Also maybe the game shouldn't change the speed based on your position on the screen so you can feel free to use the whole real estate without screwing yourself. It was also a bit annoying that you could contend with obstacles that weren't in your way on the way down during your return trip (felt annoyed that I passed a coin on the way up that I didn't on the way down). You could also get rid of the whole aspect of having to take everything back up and potentially lose it, but I guess that would hurt the core identity of this game too much.

Frenchie14 responds:

Awesome review! I agree - this game turned out to be much more of a "rage game" than originally intended. I think you have some good suggestions on how to reduce the rage. Some other things I thought of were adding upgrades for an indicator for off screen enemies and a few slots of "permanent" inventory that wouldn't get knocked off. I never added them because I underestimated how frustrating the game could be and at this point I'm ready to just call the game done in spite of this one big flaw.

Thanks a lot for playing and reviewing!

[Realm Raiders: [DEMO] Ep. 1]

Pretty cool beat-em-up! Definitely feels like it's got a pretty solid start in the right direction: in general the combat felt quite nice and satisfyingly impactful, and the graphics and animations were smooth. Loved how the enemies had great telegraphs for their attacks. There was a bit of confusion at the start for me since usually 2.5D beat-em-ups like this are very horizontal-focused, but this game had so many vertical and diagonal attacks that typically aren't done in those games (are you sure you're not trying to make a top-down game instead? that type of camera might be more intuitive, but whatever) Anyway, here's what feedback I could offer:

1) While the game did seem to offer some amount of input buffering, it didn't feel sufficient and there were a lot of times where an attack or a roll wouldn't come out mid-combo despite me putting the input in for it (yes, you could say that I put it in too early, but still, really felt like the game was just dropping some inputs, so perhaps experiment with making it more forgiving)

2) For some reason, I couldn't attack to the lower-left: unlike any other direction, if I tried to attack while moving down-left, it wouldn't come out (which was unfortunate since so many enemies spawn that way!)

3) Tutorial is incorrectly in staying that A,A,W is a combo (only A,A,A,W is a combo)

4) Not sure of what the purpose of the W attack is: could use more explanation (maybe it has invincibility frames or something like a shoryuken?). Also game didn't even explain any of the other buttons like Q and S.

5) Didn't like how easily enemies could insta-switch directions: felt really unfair when I'd see the club goblins charge up their upper attack and I'd roll behind them, only for them to insta-turn around and smack me with their upper. Feels like they should have to commit to their initial direction more.

6) Similar to above, hated how fast the archer could nock an arrow and shoot at me: sometimes he'd be able to shoot an arrow at me when I'm hitting him mid-combo for crying out loud! Long-range units should be a bit slower in general, I feel.

7) Feels like, especially for a demo and a first level, the enemies are a bit overly fast, aggressive spammy and hard to lock-down. I feel like I'd only see this sort of behavior on a game's hard difficulty, heck, maybe mania difficulty: for now, I'd make it so that the fodder enemies are a bit more passive, pacing around, taunting and such, instead of beelining directly for the player.

8) Swear it feels like the 2nd hit of the basic combo misses so many times and enemies just get out for free: dunno if it's just got a bad hitbox or enemies have some weird recovery invincibility where they dodge it and get out for free or what. Definitely fix the hit box and maybe add a lot more stun on hits to make it easier to combo/stunlock.

Definitely a lot of good potential here: looking forward to seeing a great beat-em-up in future!

Tyler responds:

Thanks for such an in-depth review.

I agree completely with the 2nd combo attack comment completely.

As for the W (uppercut attack) button - it instantly knockbacks an enemy. However, contrasted with the A (light attack) button which only does damage. A,A,W,W can lead into uppercut mid-air downward lunge attack. Im not sure how many people actually realized there are mid-air attacks (A does a midair strike and W does a risky downward plunge that launches you on hit or gets stuck in the ground on miss) but we didnt explain that. Ep. 2 shows off a more aerial focused character so we’ll teach that better then

I also agree that the tutorial needs some work

Thanks again for the thoughtful input :)

[PICO'S BRAWL ARENA]

Wow, definitely a pretty cool game! All in all seems like you got a pretty cool Smash-esque fighting system here. Characters are pretty neat with a decent amount of moves and variations, and their animations are great. Presentation overall is really top-notch as well: it wasn't just the fights that felt great, but the menus and title screen and so on also felt really slick and stylish. I have to give massive props for the satisfying hit feedback you have here: the screenshake and particularly the hit-freeze works wonders to sell the strength of attacks. It's not every day that I see a developer take the necessary steps to implement hit-freeze since it can be a hassle, so again, massive props for including critical like this.

That said, I gotta admit that for all of that, the game is rather shallow. The amount of characters and levels that are present are very small, the AI is dumb, the amount of abilities that a character has are incredibly limited (can't believe there's no blocking, dodging, grabs or anything even), they're no systems like items or whatever to shake things up, and the stages don't provide any significant variety in unique terrain or obstacles. All of this leads to the game not really having any cool strategy or unique selling point to it that I can see: all you can do is just bonk each other in a simplistic, repetitive manner. The game takes some steps for adding variety, like how the Philly level has a death pit on one side, but it's just not enough. And as said before, as a single-player game, the bot AI is overly simple and exploitable. Also the menus can be a bit confusing: dunno why you make it so that you have to grab and place the CPU chip instead of just using the 2P controls to move it around, but that's just a little nitpick.

What I'm hoping is that this can continue to be built on to create a really great and fleshed-out fighter with a lot of options and content, since this seriously shows a lot of potential. Online play and stuff like that would be great as well, though I can understand if that's overboard. Or, if this game was just a small Pico Day project that's not continuing, I'd love to see you make a beat-em-up out of this engine: again, your hit feedback is wonderful!

[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.