FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Pinball Breaker DELUXE]

Pretty neat little break-the-targets arcade-y pinball experience! Overall the game feels quite flashy and fun with great menus and fun characters that brighten up the experience with their unique animations and backgrounds as well as their informative callouts, like when you're on your last ball. Certainly an improvement from the previous version!

Having said that, though, I'm still a bit down on it in some regards:

*Pinball is all about pizazz for me, and while this is an improvement from the previous version in terms of that, it still felt quite lackluster in a lot of regards. Potentially exciting powerups like slow-mo felt pointless in their usage and nukes felt limp with the way they just clear the screen with no exciting explosive sounds or visuals. A bonus round is usually something that shakes things up significantly and feels like a celebration and a reward, but here, barely anything changes, most notably the music stays the same, and the collection of coins doesn't feel that gratifying. Certain elements like winning the time challenge for a board or racking up big points should be broadcast to the player, but instead are being stuck in the corner where you might not even notice them.

*The gameplay also just feels kind of stale to me: the lack of pizazz as explained above contributes to that, but more so I feel like the game easily gets repetitive as the board only changes itself in very minor ways from level to level, with the main board construction not changing at all and lacking any sort of exciting elements like ramps, additional paddles, and so on. There are no significant changes to music, the board construction, your character or background, and so forth, to give a sense of progression, and the minor changes to the target patterns and introduction of elements like purple barriers felt like impediments rather than interesting additions.

It's a decent game that I feel has loads of potential, and so I can't help but wish for more!

CubePunks responds:

*As far as overlay elements go. Being mobile compatible, it had to be portrait rather than landscape with the hud being on the boarders optimizing screen space. Because of that, a lot of elements like the text overlay and character had to share the same real-estate as the game board; so the goal was lots of movement without distraction making gameplay hard to manage.

The Nuke is a good example: when shaking the screen violently on impact, that half second distortion can make a player loose track of the ball and then get a fallout (happened in testing). That level of player frustration would drop a review a few stars.

I reserved the timer and the score counter to the corners cause they're persistently available, having movement to not be too static but out of view that they don't distract from gameplay. I feel character reaction audio and animation make vision indicator that adding "text overlay of extra points from a time bonus in center focus" redundant and a poor use of real-estate.


*As far as board changing (not just layout changing) goes - its something I'd love to do ; but there's two barriers on that.

1- Game design: Layouts change but your ball never resets until a fallout, which gives the game a lot of the kinetic fun. As is, having that seamless feeling clashes if your foundational board elements spontaneously move on you. Some design work would have to be done to see how to have it not lead to player frustration.

2- Budget: I treat my browser games as demos/vertical slices I can put in a portfolio with hope that one day I can get the resources to expand the idea into a larger package. While everything is still self funded, I'd rather have spend (and have been spending) recent years establishing a variety of ideas rather than a refinement of a single one. This doesn't mean I don't ever want to revisit this game with updates (like I have the foundations to plug in new characters if I want) but a gameplay expansion requires a level of work on par with making another small game.

So either I need to be in a spot where I'd rather invest in an expansion over a new game (and I just did that with Deluxe being a ground up remake of the 1st) OR I need help (publisher, dev team and marketing) making a paid version that'd expand to a 5/5

___________

Either way, I want to revisit PinBall Breaker again in the future; so an expansion will happen IDK when.

- KageKMB

[Rootin' Tootin' Lootin' & Shootin' Demo]

Hmm, quite the interesting game, feeling like a cowboy-themed top-down turn-based version of SuperHot! Coming to terms with how the combat system works and the addictive nature of experimenting with the various weapons you have certainly hooked me, and the game overall felt like it had a decent amount of polish, what with its nice HUD and special effects.

However, in its current state, I find the execution of its interesting ideas a bit rough:

The game was difficult in not letting me get enough information. For example, while I can see info on guns when I'm buying them, I was annoyed that I couldn't see information on guns that are in my inventory, and the gun info was incomplete, lacking details like the cooldown between shots. I found it confusing too that gun info only appears when you mouse over an item, when I feel like it should happen when you walk over it instead (or perhaps both). Speaking of, I would've loved to have more information, such as seeing a preview for attacks and explosion radiuses and so on since I wasn't sure how they'd play out, as well as seeing enemy health amounts. Other aspects were a bit confusing, such as how some enemies will fire in a rigid cardinal direction cross formation, yet they will still point a gun in your exact direction as if they're going to fire directly at you like other enemies do.

The game also just felt a bit lackluster at times. The levels felt incredibly cramped and claustrophic which made all of the gun fights quite boring as you have no space to move around strategically. It was really easy to run out of ammo and get in a dead-man-walking vibe where you just don't have anything to fight with and no cash to buy more guns since it disappears almost immediately from when it drops: would much prefer picking up guns/ammo from enemies or chests instead of buying as I think it would help create more improvisation.

Again, really interesting ideas you got here, just don't feel like its been executed in the best way yet, but best of luck!

RaspberryJamGames responds:

Thank you so much for the detailed feedback!
I am currently working on a new version of the game for Early Access, which will address a lot of your issues.

I intend to add tooltips to the inventory, extra tooltip info (such as cooldowns) and also tooltips for when you walk over an item.
I hadn't thought about attack previews, that's a good idea.
It feels like showing enemy health might clutter the screen to much, but I could give enemies their own tooltips.

I'm sorry that the levels feel cramped - At some point I want to revamp the level generation, so I'll keep that in mind.
About the money disappearing, that's quite a common criticism and I'm trying out some alternatives, but I still want people to play aggressively, rushing to get money as soon as it drops.

Thanks again for the feedback.
I agree with almost everything you've said and I will keep on improving the game.

[Moomoo's Maple Mishap v3 (Third Demo)]

Nice to see another chapter of this! Certainly a promising sonic-esque platformer that you're building up here, and it seems to get a bit better each time I see it. I'll just give you some play-by-play impressions as I went through:

Level 1: Decent level, basic stuff, very easy, but good to start off and get used to everything. Does feel a bit silly at times though, like how you can be standing right next to a rock wall and hit roll to smash through it: you'd almost expect to have to charge up or build up momentum. Can get health back so easy I practically don't need to think about it. Again, though, fine to be forgiving starting out.

Level 1 Cow Boss: Good variety of attacks, but sometimes it felt really confusing to figure out when you're free to hit him. Had loads of times when I tried to attack him right when he finished an attack, but he'd suddenly transform into a new attack right when I hit him and I get damaged instead.

Level 2 Snow Stage: Nice to see so many new mechanics like rails and see-saws. Can't really get a handle on rails, end up losing speed and coming to a stop, slipping around, reversing, feels awkward. Some nice puzzle sections like where you need to use the seesaw to make a ramp to get up...oh, maybe not and I'm just supposed to wall jump? That's a bit of a letdown. I appreciate the increase in challenge but it just started to get really annoying with so many see-saws and snowballs rolling down: a real uphill battle, pardon the pun. Felt like I was playing those annoying Hoth levels on Super Empire Strikes Back, it's just too much and I end up wanting to facetank through it!

Level 2 Hat Boss: Decent, fun animations, certainly easier to determine when I can attack compared to the first boss, but he was a disappointing one-trick pony.

Level 3 Mirror Stage: What a cool level! Love the whole puzzle element of having to look in the mirror to see invincible platforms and hazards reflected. I wanted more of this! Though, sometimes it was a bit annoying to be speeding along and suddenly you're in a mirror and you hit some spikes in the mirror you couldn't see coming. Speed and these puzzles don't mix well at times I guess.

Level 3 Eye Lasers: Again, I appreciate the increase in difficulty and having a unique race challenge, but I literally cannot beat this. Not only do a lot of the courses feel like annoying trial-and-error, but some courses I do not physically know how to build up enough speed to get away. I feel like maybe I'm missing some sort of hidden tech I'm suppose to learn about how to accelerate or something: maybe this is why I was having trouble with the rails earlier on, maybe I'm missing something. I tried everything though: spamming roll, spamming jumps while rolling, jumping and hitting down into a roll, backtracking to build up a head of steam, nothing works!

Side note: if you jump straight up when next to a wall, I don't think you could wall-cling to it unless you physically move towards the wall. Since this game doesn't do that, the character can feel too clingy.

Alzter responds:

Hi again! Thank you for playing my game and giving honest feedback, I really appreciate it!!

Level 2 Snow Stage: I'm sorry to hear that the grind rails were frustrating and unintuitive to use. A friend suggested I make it so that the player can turn around whilst on them, maybe I will have to make that possible for them to feel less uncontrollable and awkward like you said.

As for the seesaws, yes, initially I wanted the player to use the seesaw like a ramp, but I couldn't implement the behaviour well enough for it to work on its own, but clearly that's no excuse and having the mechanic not implemented in the way you expected was a letdown, so I will see if I can improve it to work more like a ramp in future.

Level 3 Eye Lasers: Damn, that's a shame that it's not intuitive or clear how to gain speed to escape the eye lasers. I will need to add some way of teaching the player how to move rapidly before this section so that they don't get stuck here like you did. If you're still stuck, try mashing the roll button whilst you are rolling, it gives you a short boost in speed, and tell me if you can beat the section using that technique.

Can't get to all of your points just yet, but I will say, if you want to disable Moomoo clinging to walls automatically without having to push towards them, turn off Assist Mode in the settings.

EDIT 28/03/24: I have decided to make the Gazers (eye lasers) NOT immediately kill you. They now only deal 1 damage like other enemies. This means that you are not FORCED to know speed techniques (which are not yet well taught to the player) in order to make it to Chapter 2's boss.

[Mother's Sword - Web Demo]

Huh, this is a pretty neat metroidvania! It's a bit of a mixed bag at the moment, but overall the general construction feels pretty solid, impressive and shows loads of potential.

As a big fan of games like Sekiro, this game's focus on parries and deflections is right up my alley. The feedback from a timed deflection was sublime and made it very satisfying to style on these mooks, and the fight against the boss was a big highlight for me, being such a great back-and-forth due to how aggressive he was and so cool to parry his combos and sword waves back at them. The other design mechanics that reward aggression and style with bonus resources were great too, and it felt good to get new trinkets and powerups.

Having said that, though, the game was a bit bland when it came to other aspects. In particular, the sense of exploration was not so good: plodding along with no fun traversal powers through these cramped cave corridors that are largely devoid of any landmarks or fun platforming, instead just packed with the same spongy enemies over and over...it got pretty repetitive and felt like a slog. Combat also dragged because it just turned into the enemies waiting their turn to get parried by me over and over: I ended up just running past them! Sure, there are a few sidepaths with some trinkets locked behind combat here and there, but it didn't so much for the overall slow feel of it all.

It's up to you on whether the above is a problem and how you'd want to solve this. For example, perhaps making the environments a bit prettier and varied would be enough. Or, perhaps enemies could have their health reduced so they don't reduce the players pace, letting skilled players cut through them like butter. Maybe there needs to be more exciting traversal like slides, fast falls, dashes, wall jumps, and so on. Maybe there just needs to be more puzzles or challenging platforming sections to serve as a contrast to the combat. Maybe more interesting attack patterns for both the enemy and the player could help, particularly if both the attacks and level design were more vertical instead of being so grounded. Again, up to you, and best of luck as this does have some great core elements already in place!

MonsiStudios responds:

Thanks for your feedback! :)

[Mighty Tanker Power Wankers]

It has a certain goofy charm to it and could be a decent top-down horde shooter, but overall the game just felt a bit too simplistic and bland, leading to feeling rather repetitive and unsatisfying. The boss fight at the end was pretty interesting, but also felt rather unfair in how unpredictable it could be, particularly due to lack of telegraphs when initiating or disengaging from a pattern: I suppose I'm partly to fault and should've gotten more speed/health upgrades instead of damage, but I'm not going to play the whole game again to make better choices because of a trap like that.

Fish125 responds:

Thank you for the feedback! We hope you can find it in your heart to keep an eye on us and our future endeavors

[GhoulScrapers - Prototype]

Wow, for being just a prototype, this was a delightful precision platformer! In general the construction of the game seemed high-quality: the graphics and presentation were very cute, the movement felt smooth, the jump mechanics were interesting and intuitive (and had some sweet hidden tech to them), and the level design was challenging and had multiple paths/shortcuts for the speedrunners. Once I beat it the first time, I had to go back and redo it a second time: it just felt that fun! I find it very promising and would love to see a full version of this.

In terms of feedback, the only bugginess I noticed was that if you scrape a corner of a platform but don't necessarily land on it, sometimes it can act a bit odd, refilling your ammo or ignoring your jump input.

So far I've gotten it down to about 2 minutes flat!

ShortCakeCafe responds:

Thank you for your feedback!
Me and a team of classmates are actually working on a full version of this game as our final college project and are planning to release it on steam once it's done!

[Jeri Tower!]

Wow, what an amazing short and sweet adventure! It starts off a bit simple and even potentially a bit boring (I worry this slow intro might be the reason people aren't applauding this game as loudly as they should), but it does an amazing job at slowly increasing the complexity, keeping the levels pleasantly bite-sized, and dropping funny little gags like the level titles that I couldn't help but keep going and going.

From there the game drops some absolutely dynamite twists and turns: the introduction of blue mode and retreading the old levels blew my mind, as did the way you created so many clever new levels with the mirrors and such, creatively flexing the full extent of the mechanics you made. It was addictive, challenging, fun, and very memorable overall! Oh, and the music is an absolute banger!

The only complaint I have is that I feel like this needs a save/load system: when I first started playing this I had no idea it was gonna keep going and going and really wanted to take a break, but I didn't for fear of losing progress (and thank god I made the right call).

succojones responds:

I get what you're saying about a slow start. People would definitely be more motivated to get through if they knew about the twist, but for now it's a "if you know, you know" kinda thing, and players who do stick around really love the surprise.
On that note it's felt wrong to spoil it in my posts or trailers, but I'm sure eventually people will get spoiled through word of mouth or videos and want to check the game out because of it. I suppose we'll see :)

[Death To The Humans!]

Hmm, I'm not really much of an idle/clicker game fan, especially with my old man hands that can't take the strain, so I don't have much to say.

Overall it seemed pretty average, though I did feel like the game was pretty slick with its smooth cold open and funny with its news ticker, and while I didn't like the animation for the mothership shooting since it felt so disjointed to my clicks (would've preferred a missile being fired for each click), I liked summoning little scouts and watching them bombard the planet.

One thing I thought was really interesting was the fact that Earth actually fights back and you can lose resources: I feel like usually these games are just endless building so the fact that there is a bit of a war of attrition is a nice bit of welcome innovation and challenge. However, at the end of the day, it felt like humans were fighting back faster than I could build, frustrating me, and it didn't really add some strategy to the game like build order priority since you're still just clicking away as if there was no resistance, so I dunno.

blit-blat responds:

Yeah, I know what you mean about the mothership. I wanted to have the animation of it charging up the laser, so if lasers constantly fired on click, it would mean losing that animation or having it out of sync with the lasers. I could have gone either way on that tbh.

There is (some) strategy to the game, but unfortunately you didn't really get far enough to experience it. Once the humans start ramping up their attacks you need to balance between having enough ships to deflect attacks from the mothership and saving up for more upgrades. Although going by the reviews, most people's method is to launch ALL the ships as fast as they can - which incidentally is NOT the right way to do things! XD

[JOKE, PLEASE]

Huh, quite the interesting game! It kind of throws you in the deep end and can be a bit tricky to figure out what you're doing, but eventually I got the gist of it, being that you need to dig up certain information on each client you're processing by checking their logs and then accurately process them, akin to other document-checking games like Papers Please, the challenge being that you need to be efficient in what logs you pick based on the facts needed.

It's definitely quite the novel experience and I had a good amount of fun once I got my feet under me, but the game was a bit confusing and rough in certain areas:

*I don't feel like the game delivered on the whole 'joke' experience, as it never even once seemed like the generated joke worked off of the information we gathered, and I don't see how or why it even exists in-universe in the first place. To be honest, it felt like you just made a document-checking game and then crowbarred in the whole joke aspect last minute to replace a more standard accept/reject process: I personally wouldn't give it many points at all for meeting the game jam theme.

*Game's difficulty was pretty wild: first couple of times I played it, it seemed incredibly demanding for just the first day, failing my nearly perfect run due to a minor mistake. But then upon revisit later on, the first day now seemed to be rather easy due to randomly lowered requirements. Not sure what was going on there.

*As said, the whole joke theme and story aspect felt very confusing and not well-defined. I was disappointed that the game ended so quickly instead of continuing to evolve, and the ending just felt unclear what was happening.

*Game is also riddled with strange bugs: for example, I had a lot of logs for people containing repeated facts, or facts bleeding into each other.

Definitely seems like a fun concept, but the execution does waver significantly, most likely due to the game jam limits. It's cool enough that I can see the potential past the bugs and would want a more fleshed-out version of it, though, so that's a good jam result.

Frogrammer responds:

hey, thank you! always appreciate the honest dive-in

you are very much right it has absolutely nothing to do with jokes mechanically and we knew that from the start, I really hate the theme, and after losing the first 16~ hours just trying to come up with a mechanic that would actually incorporate the theme we just decided to ball. i haven't seen a single game that would incorporate the theme well either, most of them are just "funny"

so yes the game is about reading and remembering with a touch of manual management

about the difficulty: originally I uploaded a harder version of the game but after noticing the struggle of players I re-uploaded a version with lower quotas so that might be what happened


thanks again!

[Dino Time]

This one was really rough for me. On the face of it, this game is pretty much "baby's first game project" in that it is just an incredibly simple arcade experience where you jump up, collect points, and avoid falling to your death from the ever upwards scrolling death zone. Nothing really exciting or memorable about the experience: just a very bog-standard experience that attempts to elevate it by using goofy art and sounds.

If that was it, that'd be fine: every game dev needs to start somewhere and this could be ok for a few minute(s) of fun. However, the game was plagued by absolutely terrible controls which felt incredibly unintuitive and awkward. Trying to move had a weird delay on start-up and some very slippery momentum that didn't seem to have any natural reason to it: you go from not moving at all to slip-n-sliding to your death.

The strangest thing was that, I tried playing the game with a controller, and was able to control the character just fine with the analog stick: no awkward delay or slipperiness or anything! However, that didn't help in the long run because then I noticed the busted jump controls, which, despite using the same power for the button press each time, would randomly change the maximum height that my jump would reach, sometimes making me unable to proceed upwards and getting an unfair death.

If I was to be charitable, I'd say that the controls were part of some intended challenge, and perhaps some of the slipperiness is to make you utilize wall bounces, or something of that nature. But while I've played a lot of rage games which utilize difficult, tricky controls, the difference is that they all managed to elicit fun out of the process, whereas this absolutely did not, coming off as just badly programmed, if not straight-up broken.

NattoSumi responds:

Smh some gamers just aren't ready for momentum based movement. Btw the jump takes ~1 second to charge up all the way after landing. Hope that helps!