FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[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.

[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.