FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Jeri II: Tower's End]

Oh man, it's great to see a new Jeri Tower! I absolutely loved the first one, and was really excited to play this. While I do think this is overall a great adventure with awesome music and a large variety of cool mechanics, such as the whole switching mechanic which reminds me of Toodee and Topdee...I'm a bit unsure of how I feel about this as I found it a bit more frustrating than fun!

Some notes of my experience:

*The game definitely feels like it gets way too hard, way too fast. Maybe it's not actually that hard if you know what you're doing and are patient and all that jazz, but I was getting wiped in some of the earlier levels and losing my patience. Feels like I'm playing Mario The Lost Levels instead of just Mario 2. Maybe you took that criticism that the first Jeri Tower had a slow start and went too far in the opposite direction, haha!

*The controls can be a bit finicky and annoying to deal with. No, I'm not talking about using ESDF instead of WASD, that's fine (though I have no idea why you did that) I'm more talking about other stuff, primarily the awkward delay when shifting forms, or aiming the gun with the mouse, which I wish would just fire in cardinal directions like the sword so you don't get slightly angled shots that don't make it all the way down a corridor when you want it to for example. My mouse also kept leaving the screen and messing up my inputs: it was the worst on the level where you have to aim at the brown blocks which are, guess what, right at the edge of the screen! It's like you were trying to screw me over.

*The game does have a lot of enemies and mechanics of all sorts which adds a lot of novelty, but I feel like it also kinda loses focus and just turns into a mish-mash of whatever. There was a long span in the middle where it felt like the levels completely forgot about the switching mechanic except in an incredibly token way, for example. Again, it's neat, but artistically it feels like it lost its identity.

*Game just feels like it was jerking me around. Jeri Tower was a fun time, but playing this made me grunt, scream and moan constantly, and I'm a pretty patient guy who likes to play rage games. I'm not even talking about some of the maliciously annoying mechanics like the stars that run away from you or the chaser dragons (though screw you for them anyway). No, I'm talking about stuff like how every level is a claustrophobic mess and just has so much damn busy work of clearing out enemies and collecting stuff before you get to try the part you're having difficulty with, only to fail and have to run it all back. There were also oddities like how the bouncing system works: I'm still unsure why some enemies die to it yet the same one will die later on. Add up all the previous complaints about the controls and such as well.

*How in the world does a game as long and hard as this not have a save system? There were so many times I would get frustrated or tired and want a break, only to tell myself that I have to keep pressing on, otherwise I need to do everything all over again, and I don't want that. Eventually, even knowing that, I just got too annoyed and shut it off around creature catcher ii or whatever it was called, most likely never to return, unfortunately. I had no problem returning to Jeri Tower to redo it when I realized it hadn't saved my progress, but this?

As frustrated as I was, I still want to try and view it positively. As said before, perhaps this is meant to be a sequel like Mario The Lost Levels was, a challenge pack for the diehards instead of starting from scratch again, and I imagine it would be good for those folk. Saying that, I thought I was one of those folk, but I dunno anymore.

succojones responds:

Thanks for you thorough thoughts as always. Glad to have broken your spirit ^_^

A Mario 2 of Jeri using the original game as a base was my original intent. And I actually got pretty close to making that but I had some technical issues and wasn't enjoying making levels, so I decided to add the gun and start the project over, using saved code and gfx space to make the new enemies and stuff.

I think the problems come from slight jank in the mechanics and yeah the levels are super hard. You start with all the movement options dumped on you at once and expect you to have great motor skills and understanding of the physics like I do from testing the game for hours on end.

This was a really long and drawn out project for me, I started it about a year ago and just really wanted it done so I can move on to other stuff. I was super burnt out at the end of development. So I'm not the proudest, but I'm really happy with the art and some of the crazy levels even if they're only fun to me :')

Thanks for the almost 5 stars nonetheless! I APPRECIATE YOU!!!!!

[Glim]

Nice little arcade game! It's a bit simplistic, but it's got some good vibes, I liked the varied Glum behavior as it creates some challenging patterns to deal with when they overlap, and the risk/reward of consecutive bounces and flips to get a hi-score is cool. I don't really care for the colors and hats as much as others likely do, but the challenge room with hard mode is a nice bonus.

Some subtle aspects that I enjoy are the fact that the Glums have animated attack telegraphs: it does a lot to make everything intuitive and avoid unfair/cheap deaths from sudden attacks. As grim as it sounds, I also love the death animation: the sudden freeze and the explosion afterwards gives me old-school vibes like the Adventures of Lolo (and I like that you can skip it once the novelty wears off!)

If I were to have some feedback, it'd be:

*While they are generally ok, the hitboxes can be a bit wonky at times where instead of my character getting hit, it's more like the invisible space of their bounding box gets hit. Also I've had some rare times where I totally jumped on top of a vulnerable non-attacking enemy and I get killed instead of bouncing off of them for some bizarre reason.

*The tutorial window is terrible as not only is the text grainy/distorted, it auto-advances too quickly for me to read, and when that happens, all I can do is hit the block to start the sequence over and wait for it to get back to the page I want to read. Ideally, you should hit the block to advance to the next page when you're ready.

*While you do get some sparkles and sounds when you do a high number of flips which is nice, I wish that the feedback would be more specific: I'd love a number to pop up for how many flips I've done during the sequence, and how many points I got when I end my flip combo.

*I'm not sure as perhaps I'm missing something, but it feels like the game is stagnant, meaning that it doesn't increase in difficulty the farther you get, and that means that once you get good enough, high scores are just a matter of patience, not skill. Ideally, I'd like the game to speed-up or perhaps transition into hard-mode after a certain amount of time or points.

Joshmellowfellow responds:

This is some pretty awesome feedback thanks for playing! You’re not wrong about the game feeling stagnant, the angry glum is supposed to accelerate and become much faster but I thought it was too fast at a point m. But I’ll workshop this a little more. I’ve been meaning to do flip and how to play ui update aswell I’ve been on vacation and work has taken up a lot of my time but I’ll try and get to some of it tonight.

[Meta Wargames]

I had a rough time playing this at first because the camera kept drifting for me. Eventually I learned that it seems to be a Firefox issue (and a lot of games seem to be suffering from this too), but the fact that I didn't immediately quit in frustration and kept going by playing this in a separate browser is a testament to how much the game impressed me and made me want to stick with it!

The game's already nice enough in delivering a good set of MGS-esque VR third-person stealth missions with a load of various mechanics to keep things interesting as you go through the levels. But when you then add on some neat story hooks and a fun ranking system, well, now you've impressed me! While a bit janky here and there, as well as not having the most impressive graphics, this was a great lil' adventure!

EndworldReaper responds:

Thanks for the review! I agree about the graphics and jankiness, if I had more time I would have liked to polish both. Glad you had fun!!

[King of Sliding]

Not too shabby! It's a tad bland, the low poly graphics aren't used in any interesting way, and the sliding puzzle mechanics aren't particularly exciting or new, but nevertheless this game makes for a decent puzzle-solving experience with plenty of levels to go through that add some interesting complexity when you have to work cooperatively with multiple characters. The inclusion of par star scores to go for is always a nice bonus too.

froggyrs responds:

Thank you! I really appreciate your feedback.

[Stain World : Prototype]

Hmm, not too shabby for a prototype!

It's certainly rough in a lot of ways: I would get stuttery performance hiccups a lot, I'd get confused over how much I need to clean up to lower the thorn walls since there's no gauge or tracker, it's rather repetitive to clean the goop up, and in general the game can feel a bit too big for its own good which leads to a sense of directionlessness.

But the movement shows some promise in how smooth it can be to platform around, the world has a decent amount of obstacles and secrets to keep things interesting, and above all else, it has some neat melancholy vibes due to its music, world design, and characters you meet.

So yeah, feels like this has some potential to make for an interesting adventure. I'd love to see the act of cleaning get a bit more interesting than just spamming the broom: it'd be great if fancy movement techniques could be used to clean-up, similar to what you'd see in something like Dustforce.

trixelbit responds:

Thanks for playing! This summarizes a lot of the feedback I've received.
I need to improve communication with players. I think I left most players without important tools that aren't obvious.
Thing's like not needing to swing to cleanup areas, and ways of increasing distance in jumps.

Either way, lessons learned and things I seek to improve in the future!
Thanks again for playing!

[Psychofind: Anomalies]

Hrmm, this one is in too rough of a state for me to enjoy, unfortunately! I think the characters are cute and I'm always in the mood for a good beat-em-up, but the game just feels wonky in almost every respect imaginable: even doing something as basic as just moving the character feels stuttery and unpleasant, like the game is barely holding itself together! I try to fight the ghosts but my attacks are so stubby and awkward that I typically end up messily trading blows, and after beating a few, the game just seems to stop, leaving me in this empty subway with nothing to do but assume it either glitched out or is just unfinished (which seems to be the case based on the description).

It's very rough right now, but I'd like to see this game in its ideal state if you continue to work on it. I wanna lightning kick the heck outta those ghosts properly!

psychobun responds:

I haven't thought about the movement, I recycled a code from my current developing game, but I always thought it was fine, if you want you can tell me more about the movement and the fight stuff, the punches goes to the camera direction which is controled by the mouse but if you're near to the enemy it redirects to them, idk if it's better to snap automatically to the enemies or just punch at the view direction 🤔🤔. The same is for my current game, so I don't wanna have that bad feeling in the big one 😭. I used this game for this, to get feedback that will be useful for the big project (and also polish this idea)...
And yeah the ghost are supposed to spawn all the time so its a bug and also isn't a bug (? I want to make it a propper ending.
thank you for the feedback

[Daxolissian System: M46]

Argh, this was a rough one for me!

I really want to like it for several reasons. Driving along as the tank feels very fun just by itself, especially when you hit the turbo and turn into a sick drift, kicking up dirt. The enemies can be quite challenging in interesting ways, such as the missile launchers which fire where you're going and thus force you to dodge. And in general, I like the idea of blasting stuff as a tank!

But man, I just found the experience incredibly frustrating and annoying to play. Call it bad aim or a skill issue, but trying to shoot at these teeny-tiny enemies with even tinier hurtboxes was impossible for me, especially since you need to be shooting at them while moving: I really need some sort of lock-on or generous aim assist for this to work for me. It didn't help either that the world and levels just felt needlessly big and dull, and I hate that the general enemies get hitscan weapons since it makes it feel like its just luck on whether they hit you despite your best efforts.

I think the concept behind the game could work, and there is some charming aspects to this like the goofy narrator, but yeah, the execution is lacking for me currently.

3p0ch responds:

Huh, I thought they'd be reasonable targets if you get close and/or slow down and shoot them without completely stopping. Hopefully you got a video, I'd probably have to see what's going on.

[Helmet Hood Hat]

Wow, this is pretty cool! It's not the prettiest or juiciest game (though I do like the cartoony graphics) but I was very impressed at how intuitive the mechanics were thanks to good symbols, language and tooltips, and how puzzle-like combat could be thanks to all the varied enemies you encounter. I liked being able to customize my party with abilities and potions, the combat hits the sweet spot between simple and difficult which makes it move at a good pace, and I love a good boss fight at the end of each zone: it all makes for a really fun and challenging adventure that reminds me a lot of the greats like Darkest Dungeon!

A few notes:

*While the game is rather intuitive, there were times I really wish the game had damage numbers pop-up to let me know exactly what's going on with all the attacks being thrown, and a combat log to keep track and review what went on would help too.

*One thing I wish the combat did was invoke some sort of pressure to have you finish fights as quickly as possible, or to wipe any buffs when you go to the next round. Currently you can cheese the fights by leaving one enemy left and stalling as you buff and heal up your party for the next fight, and it feels exploitative and adds a lot of unnecessary bloat to fights, killing the pace. With how tough fights can get later on, it kind of starts to avoid this naturally, but still, it's something to consider.

*I appreciate that the game has saving! A lot of games neglect to have such a basic feature, so it's very nice to see here, even if the game can technically be short if you know what you're doing.

AlkalinePineapples responds:

Thanks for the feedback!
I'm not sure about adding a combat log, but I'm definitely adding the damage numbers.
I'll try to keep the rest in mind for any future RPGs I make.

[Unmortis]

Neat little game! The world and characters have some cool mysterious vibes to them, and the concept of collecting intel on people's RPS strategies and then using that to beat them was quite novel and made me feel clever!

A few notes on the experience:

*I made it out with the minimum 4 souls, not bothering to defeat the rest of the opponents. I wonder if the game has a different ending if you get everyone? Would be nice if it did.

*I feel like the dialogue system needs some work. Sometimes I'd visit people after having already completed the quest they would've assigned to me if I talked to them earlier, and it treats it as if I have talked to them before despite not doing so. Just makes it feel a bit inelegant and takes me out of the experience.

*It's a nice game, but I can't help but feel like it's more of a prototype or proof-of-concept. The act of acquiring intel and such just felt stupidly simplistic at times, like picking up a note out of nowhere which apparently teaches you all about the knight's strategy. Ideally, I'd like there to be a bit more puzzle-solving, experimentation and mystery about learning their tics.

filgreen3 responds:

Thanks for the feedback! You're right, it's definitely still not a full game. I kept things simple since I wasn't sure if the concept would work.

Did you fight the samurai? That note tells you their strategy but they're still the hardest enemy. That's more like what I want the full game to be. Good to know the main idea is working!

[The Pharaoh's Tomb]

Solid short-and-sweet puzzle game! Took me a brief moment to understand the controls at first since they weren't explained in-game, and my eyes hurt from the CRT-filters and tiny screen, but once I got into it, I was hooked and had a nice time overall! Well done with the whole remote box movement mechanic and the way you evolved it in interesting ways over time!

One thing that really caught me off-guard was the puzzle design:

*There were early levels which have a lot of elements scattered about that make you think the puzzle is going to be complicated, only for the exit to be immediately reachable through simple means. Sometimes I couldn't tell whether these were intentional red herrings to lead me astray, or the puzzle wasn't constructed properly to avoid exploits!

*Some of the later puzzles seemed to rely on the player moving the box from two locations rapidly to try and catch the player or something like that. I enjoyed the challenge, but typically puzzle games don't have dexterity-based challenges, so I again wasn't quite sure if it was intentional or I was exploiting the mechanics in some way.

I think it's just that I've gotten used to puzzles being so focus-tested and having elegant/pure design that something a bit 'messy' like this is actually quite refreshing and makes you think!

Necryn1 responds:

The puzzles definitely arent as elegant as I would have liked :/ but the red herrings were intentional. The dexterity challenges were also intentional! I couldn't think of level progressions so I just went with that