FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[The Newgrounds KinitoPET Collab]

Cute art collab! I'm not familiar with the source material unfortunately, but the art is nice and I do like the whole fake-OS presentation you got going. That said, I do wish the art was presented in a more creative fashion than the typical slideshow format, and I was bothered that some of the art is difficult to look at because the artist credit gets in the way (there's a piece of Hexamak where a speech bubble is covered up). I also wish there were some other quality-of-life features, like being able to click on an artist's name to go to their NG page, some sort of gallery view, being able to move or zoom the art, etc. Not too shabby, though!

riot100233 responds:

SKIBADI TOLET

[Homestuck FreshJamz Collab]

Neat music collab! I'm not familiar with the source material or anything like that, but the jukebox interface was clean, there were some cute easter eggs, the game provides credits with links to artists profiles, and I quite enjoyed some of the music! If I were to have any complaints, it'd be that it'd be nice to have a volume knob and to have links to artists directly adjacent to their songs instead of being stuffed in the credits, but these are very minor nitpicks. Cool stuff!

Wiserim responds:

The player was based on this panel: https://www.homestuck.com/story/830
Originally it was flash based interactive music player.
TBF the fact that it was replaced with static image was the main reason behind this collab.

[Lightning Katana - [Alpha]]

Hmm, pretty neat game you've got here! I was a bit worried at first since I'm typically not a fan of these old-school Wolfenstein 3D-esque games, but the fast-paced and skillful killing frenzy you can get into this game was pretty cool and very akin to games like Anger Foot, Mullet Madjack or Hotline Miami! I really enjoyed all the various ways you could style on enemies: kicking doors into them, comboing abilities one-after-another by targetting colored enemies, parrying and dodging: it can get pretty deep and expressive!

As much as I enjoyed it though, it's certainly a bit rough in some aspects, and I'm not talking about the obvious stuff like how the death animations all reuse the same default thug sprite: that's probably because it's just a work-in-progress and those are placeholders. Moreso I mean something about the game was just off or inconsistent at times which led to confusion. Sometimes I couldn't tell whether I got hit or not, sometimes I couldn't tell what the significance of whatever sounds playing were, sometimes I would swear I picked up a power-up only to have nothing and therefore ruin my planned combo, and so on: just these awkward moments that didn't feel like they were necessarily my fault or anything.

If I were to nitpick something else, it's that I don't like the whole aspect of some enemies being immune to swords because they have this aura assigned to them: if you must have something like this, I'd prefer it be a new enemy type which carries a riot shield or whatever that consistently has this property instead. Oh, and I was disappointed that there is no foot animation that comes with kicking: c'mon, ain't you ever seen Duke Nukem's big boot? We need something like that in here!

Hope you continue to work on it because I think it's got some good potential!

FCPXAV responds:

Thanks! Hotline Miami and Anger Foot definitely played a part in establishing some of the pacing and game feel!

You're right and the game is still a work in progress, and I'm gonna be implementing a cleaner and more clear UI for some of the more confusing things like seeing how much health you have left, where you were hit from etc.

I'm working on some art for more animations like the kick and gonna expand on it so that you can kick enemies and objects in the environment as well, and hopefully add more enemy types if my budget allows for it!

[Stickyfoot]

It's simple but fun puzzle arcade madness! With so much bite-size content on offer that is progressively adding new innovative mechanics over time to keep things fresh, as well as some great juicy gamefeel and amusing touches like how the character vibrates angrily to reset the level, I couldn't help but get addicted to going for the gold! It's not exactly blowing my mind or anything with something I haven't seen before, but it's just all-around a very solidly constructed and executed game!

If I were to have any feedback, it'd just be for minor stuff, like how it'd be nice if there was a ticking timer during gameplay and a preview of what award you're currently on track to get: in this way, if you see the gold switch over to silver, you could tell whether you've already failed at acquiring the gold and restart immediately without having to go through the entire level to check.

platformalist responds:

Thanks for playing, FutureCopLGF! Glad you enjoyed the little touches.

If you pause the game with Enter and select Show/Hide Timer, you can toggle on a timer! Based on your feedback, I added two little colored lines on the existing timer that change color based on what trophy you're currently able to get. Hopefully this is helpful for you! Thanks again for playing and for the detailed feedback. :)

[Bug Ball 3D]

Pretty cool game! Even before the game starts, I was already impressed at how lively and animated the presentation is with the title and menus, and I was glad to see that same energy carried over into the fast-paced gameplay! While I did have a bit of a rough start (I selected medium instead of easy which made me skip over the tutorial), it didn't take long for me to get addicted to trying to speed through these courses for higher ranks. Switching between bug and ball mode was pretty interesting and I liked trying to set up right-angle ricochets off of angled walls for maximum efficiency.

I will admit, though, that I'm a bit torn about the game:

*Speed is fun, but the sheer amount of speed you can generate is just too much and can easily lead to either chaos or being too scared and forgoing it to carefully putter around instead, made all the more annoying by the camera not allowing us to see far-enough ahead: maybe the top speed should be reduced, or the camera should zoom-out as you get faster? I know it's part of the challenge and you can get used to it, though, I suppose.

*As said, I really liked to try and bounce off of angled walls since the game's courses seem to be built around that being the most efficient route. The problem was that this requires the player to immediately switch direction when they bounce off of the wall, otherwise the angle gets screwed up and that throws off subsequent bounces and everything goes to hell. You could argue that there's a bit of skill the player needs to acquire in timing their inputs, I suppose, but it just feels really annoying to have to be so precise and delicate. It almost feels like the game should be a golf game instead, or adopt a more tank/car-esque control scheme where up is go forward/accelerate, instead of up being, well, go up, as those controls would allow for more precise angled bounces to be consistently achieved. Maybe the player could have a limited amount of slow-mo, or they can use slow-mo but it doesn't slow down the timer so eventually they wean off of it? I dunno, just spitballing.

*Also it's a small nitpick, but some of the graphics would irk me slightly with how awkward they'd look, like when you fall down a pit or into a hole, but your character keeps going and generating dust clouds as if they are still active and above the ground: basically the 3D is kind of fudged where I guess you're just shrinking the character instead of making them actually go downwards.

StaggerNight responds:

Big fan of the monthly game vids you do! Thanks for the review

[Trivial Trivia: The Newgrounds Collection]

Pretty neat quiz game! For the most part it seems pretty well-put-together, and I was impressed at the sheer volume and variety of questions: sometimes those questions would be a bit too hyper-specific for my liking, but I suppose I've always been terrible at dates, times and all that jazz, and I'm sure some people appreciate the challenge.

In terms of feedback:

My biggest complaint would be how dry the presentation is, which is weird because it actually starts off with a decent first impression: the game's title screen and menus are quite lively with animated buttons that react on hover, smooth transitions, and the music is cool (once you turn it on, dunno why it starts turned off). However, once you go into the actual gameplay, all of that is lost and everything is so static and lifeless! Would love if it just had a bit more pizazz to it: you know, a bit of fanfare and confetti when you're right, boos when you're wrong, get the animated buttons back, stuff like that! Right now the game is like taking a test at a government agency when I want something like Jackbox!

Another aspect of the game that I found a bit rough was that when you guess a trivia question wrong, it just says you're wrong and nothing more (and displays your answer in a button for some reason, as if you could select it again). I suppose I can understand that you don't wanna give the answer away and keep the pace of the game up, but I found it to be an awkward design decision. Ideally, I'd like it so that whether you guess right or wrong, it would show you the right answer afterwards, as well as maybe some fun bonus factoids to go along with it. I know you've got a menu where players can look up the question/answer sheet and it even has links for the player to learn the answers themself which is pretty cool, but it's just so weird that this information is so separated: this stuff should be integrated into the game itself!

Oh, and I was honored to be featured in one of the questions! Cheers for that!

ElRandomGMD responds:

Thanks for the Review :)

[Golf Escape]

Fantastic short and sweet adventure you got here! It's got all the hallmarks of a great game: a clever and intriguing gameplay hook, intuitive and responsive controls, an addictive escalation of difficulty, slick and smooth gamefeel, and all with a charming and juicy presentation! It's the complete package and I am gobsmacked that this wasn't winning prizes immediately right when it was submitted: truly buried treasure we got here!

Davbo37 responds:

Thank you so much for your kind words! Glad you enjoyed it and all those aspects came through 😄

[DECK FURY (Alpha)]

Wow, I was pretty impressed with this! It's got some rough edges here and there, sure, but as a fan of games like Mega Man Battle Network and One Step From Eden, I like the direction that it's going, and I really loved how smooth and intuitive the game felt, what with its excellent usage of tooltips, target previews, tutorials, icons/symbols, and other great UI/UX elements! Heck, for an alpha, it's already practically got the core loop settled and is a complete experience! Cool stuff and I feel like its got a lot of potential from this great first impression!

If I were to have some feedback, I'd say:

*I got really annoyed at how short the energy cooldown was: kept giving me whiplash with how much it keeps stopping the fight to reload the same cards over and over, and it made fights too easy with how much I could just spam cards with little to no consequence. In my opinion, I feel like cards should be a much more precious resource and you should really think of how best you use them, as if you blow them, you'll be stuck with just your puny blaster for a long time and not be able to handle a desperate situation, like getting cornered by drones with no push card. I found it much more entertaining when I pretended that my energy cooldown was much, much longer because of this: made it much more intense and strategic, and I loved scrambling and improvizing!

*Sometimes the aiming can be a bit odd and throw things off. It's like, if you're above an enemy and aiming downwards, but you're a little bit off, it can end up going to the side instead. It might be preferring certain angles? It feels like if you're aiming SW, it'll keep you pointed S properly, but if you are even slightly aiming SE a bit, it'll switch you to aiming full-on E and miss a shot.

Deltakai responds:

Hey appreciate the feedback and glad you've been liking the game so far!

Your two points of feedback are really interesting and they're both issues I've been grappling with since the game's inception.

Regarding the first point, I actually modeled the base energy cooldown off of MMBN's energy cooldown, which is 8 seconds. Now personally when I played the MMBN series I actually found this to be too slow and for me it actually created a bit of an awkward break in the gameplay where I use my cards too quickly and then have to sit around doing not much until my energy came back. The most fun part for me was when I was actually in the card selection, thinking about my next plan of attack and then trying to execute it while I have the cards loaded.

The main way I made this faster was adding the Amber Pearl starting item which refunded 10% energy every time you killed an enemy, as well as refreshing your energy each time a new wave was spawned. That being said, this is definitely a balance point of the game that I will have to keep an eye on, and a possible solution would be to make the base recharge time longer, but increase the benefit of Amber Pearl to reward players for killing enemies efficiently with their cards.


The second point I knew about as soon as I first built the aiming system - the issue becomes most apparent when you're close to the edge of the screen and trying to aim towards the edges of the screen where you can't move your mouse too far out and thus resulting in the aiming reticle to be a lot more sensitive to changes due to the close proximity of your mouse and character. I do however think this would be less of an issue if the game was fullscreen and you have more space to move your mouse about.

The way I tried to solve this was by adding the "Relative Aiming" option in the Gameplay settings which would instead clamp the cursor to the player character rather than moving independently. The feature is still a bit buggy but give it a try next time and see if it helps with the awkward aiming.

[Upbound]

Wow, this one really surprised me! It's a rather simple arcade game, but you did a fantastic job at giving the game so much style and soul, what with the cool astronaut-themed voicelines, the very bouncy and lively animation as you jump around, the way sounds pitch up as you combo, the satisfying feel of speed when you're comboing balloons/jetpacks and watching your power bar flare up, and so on! Great stuff and a fantastic example of the power of juice to elevate an experience!

yahhcheee responds:

wow.. we really appreciate your sharing. we really tried to go the extra mile on all things you mentioned and i'm so happy that it touched you. Thank you FutureCopLGF!

[Keep It In! 3]

Not too shabby! Certainly seems to be going for a simple-yet-fun arcade vibe, and the amount of game variations were rather intriguing. Had a decent bit of fun checking it all out.

However, I didn't have the best impression when playing this. At its core, the game just didn't really hook me with its concept, and despite having a lot of different types of games to play, it felt like a real quantity-over-quality situation as many of the games either felt superfluous and barely any different from classic (timed), or felt very unbalanced (multiball) or confusing (rhythm).

In addition to that, the game just had a very unflattering presentation to it, the music was way too loud and there was no option menu to turn it down, and it was missing quality-of-life features like being able to quit out of a game. Furthermore, I had a few of the games glitch out on me in weird, frustrating ways.

Also, and this might be a nitpicky personal thing that doesn't matter so much, but I really don't jive with the whole bouncecoin system where you're playing and logging in daily to purchase cosmetics and all that jazz: just feels really unnecessary and scummy. I know you're not trying to scam me or take money from me or anything like that, but it just rubs me the wrong way and makes me feel like you're trying to add this as a motivation to make up for the fact that the game can't motivate strongly enough by itself.

St4rryQueen responds:

Although it might not be the clearest, the BounceCoin icon doubles as a clickable icon that pops up with a pause menu, in which you can quit, or even change your background or style mid-game.