FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Viva Hexagon! Feat. Ipulo]

Wow, quite the cool puzzle game you got here! For the most part it feels very well-put together and professionally made, bursting at the seams with a lot of content: impressive stuff!

In particular, I love how fun it is to move the player character around: gives me Pizza Tower vibes with how how animated and expressive they are which not only helps with making actions clear to distinguish, but makes certain actions, like slamming blocks down, very satisfying to pull off again and again. Speaking of satisfaction, the game, while not overly explosive in its pizazz, does still feature a lot of those subtle touches, such as playing a sequentially higher-pitched sound for chain bonuses. While it is a bit overwhelming to grasp their entire moveset at first, I enjoyed the challenge of getting it down and becoming not only more effective at scoring, but stylish in doing so. Again, it just overall feels well put-together and fun to play!

As mentioned, if there is one downside to this game, is that it can be a bit rough to grasp at first. To be fair, most of the design is rather intuitive and will be familiar to players of games like Puyo-Puyo and the like, but there are certain aspects that kept catching me off-guard despite seeing them multiple times, such as how similar color blocks will stick while others fall, how you need a full shape and not lines or columns of colors to score, how you can't grab blocks when standing by them despite the character doing the grab animation, and I'd just plain forget I had a lot of moves like dashing and attacking.

Similar to that is the tutorial, which can be rather overwhelming due to how verbose and jam-packed it can be. Kudos to making the tutorial very interactive and visual, and I appreciate trying to explain all the various oddities the game has, but it was just so much and that very same interactivity could screw me over at times where suddenly the text would move onto something else when I wasn't done reading it. If I were to have a suggestion, it would be to have the tutorial not be a single huge overwhelming sequence, but several split-up chapters, some for very basic gameplay and others for advanced techniques and special cases: a player could just do the basic chapters and get into play faster, coming back to the advanced chapters if they spot something confusing when playing, and it'd be much easier to just look up something specific without having to do everything from the start. In addition to that, I think there were a lot of cases where text could be more concise or replaced with a picture, or split up into separate pages to make it look less dense, and some things are just so obvious you don't need to waste time explaining.

Still, the initial process of learning the game, while it could be improved, wasn't that bad and it wasn't too long before I got into the game and had a bunch of fun!

zeddy1267 responds:

Thanks for your kind words! The movement is definitely the part I care most about, since I do really enjoy platformer's that play well.

Yes, the tutorial/general introduction to the game is definitely the roughest part. The game, being a unique/gimmicky puzzle game, can take a moment to wrap your head around at first. This is partly why I made the tutorial as verbose as it is. Think of it more like the included instruction book rather than a quick tutorial. It's the full, unskippable documentation.

I certainly WANT to improve the tutorial in some way. If I had to do this again, I'd something along the lines of making a short interactive tutorial to just quickly introduce you to the game, and then have the rest of the text stored in a separate in game handbook. Quickstart & full documentation.

I ultimately decided to leave the tutorial as-is. Since this is more of a demo for a true Viva Hexagon! game, I didn't spend too much time on the tutorial. For example, something I really want to do is a single player arcade mode/campaign, like what Puyo-Puyo has. This is something I want to tie tutorial into in some way or another (even just stuff like quick tips between stages). Not being able to do this in the current state of Viva Hexagon! (No arcade mode) definitely made me spend less time on the tutorial than I probably should have.

The tutorial is also just the most difficult code to work with, since it's very fragile. I realized the flaws with the tutorial, but just couldn't be bothered to fix them in this release of the game.

TL;DR yeah, I'm aware of how overwhelming the tutorial is. Thanks for the feedback!

[Madness: Fueled By Hotdogs]

Wow, really impressive stuff here! Really gives me Severed Steel vibes with the way you've setup these really fun and frantic firefights where you're constantly on your toes, diving through gunfire and grabbing whatever guns you can get your hands on when you've run dry. The Madness vibes are great as well with all the cool gore, varied executions, and tons of weapons to try out. I also liked some of the crazy systems in play, like getting tac bar back if you dive through gunfire, making effective use of it very rewarding. Again, really neat stuff!

Unfortunately, while I think that the game is pretty cool, I'd say it is more cool in how it has loads of potential, as its current setup is just way too rough and unrefined:

*While it starts out alright, as the game went on it felt like combat was just way too fast and confusing to keep track of. The combination of enemies suddenly being able to spawn out from monster closets wherever and whenever, enemies always being aggressively locked right onto you and firing undodgeable hitscan weapons, the player getting practically no feedback from damage (especially tac bar damage compared to health), not being able to keep track of enemies positions through things like footsteps which are absent, and so on and so forth made a lot of fights frustrating messes where you just get constantly killed before you realize and can't do anything except trial-and-error memorization.

*Diving could've been the savior of the combat here, especially since it looked like you were going in the right direction with being rewarded for good dives and making it possible to tactically chain them together. But without slow-mo for a dive, it felt pointless as it was impossible to get any accurate shots off during, and despite always trying to dive through shots, it didn't feel reliable to get the tac bar reward, leaving me unfairly high and dry. The worse part as well was how absolutely terrible it felt to hit space and C to dive: just make it its own button for gods sake, like shift!

*There was also tons of jank with the game. For example, ammo counters were incredibly unreliable as it seems like they don't update until you fire the gun: whenever I picked up ammo from the ground or picked up a dual wield weapon or swapped from a dual wield weapon to a new single one, the old ammo counters would remain what they were before until I fired, making me think I had more or less ammo than I did. Not ideal for frantic firefights like this where every bullet counts and I need to know what I have! Weapon management was annoying as well: when you run out of ammo for dual wields, why can't I throw my weapons like I do for single guns? Is there a way I can swap back to single from dual? And so on and so forth.

*Also it felt like the game lost the whole central hotdog mechanic? Felt like it was so important initially before being thrown away. It's ok as a gag but the idea of having to tactically use these 'berserk' powerups could be iterated upon.

*There's also the fact that the camera can bug out and turn way more than you wanted at times: I don't think its necessarily an issue on your part through as lots of these HTML FPS games have this bug for some reason or other.

I really do want to love this game: I think it has loads of potential to become a Madness version of Severed Steel or Trepang2 or so on, but the general combat is just too awkward and unrefined at the moment. If the inventory/ammo management was fixed, slow-mo was added to dives, enemy AI and spawning was refined, and so on, I think this would be some top shelf stuff. Please continue to polish this up as I want this to be great!

frdy responds:

Thank you for the detailed feedback! This was exactly what I was looking for. I'm struggling with the control scheme, since there's a big balancing act with keeping as few keybinds as necessary while maximizing the amount of control players have. A dedicated dive button is a super common request.
Dual weapons are a very tricky design problem. I had many ideas for how running empty with them should be handled.
At one point, I created an animation for switching the gun in your left hand to the one in your right hand if you ran out of ammo for the right gun. If I wanted to retain all of the features of single guns (bashing, turning into a melee weapon when empty), that'd require an entire new set of animations and a lot of extra programming, which I didn't have time for.
If having one empty gun while you're dual wielding were to let you bash/throw while you could still control the loaded gun as normal, there'd have to be a choice -- have the respective mouse button either bash or throw.
I think I just rubberducked. Letting you throw the empty gun would work.

Would you like to join my development discord server? https://discord.gg/DVprYTP8p
I seriously appreciate any sort of blunt feedback.

[Madness Combat - The Sheriff Clones]

Hmm, this unfortunately felt quite rough to me.

It definitely had a pretty solid first impression, as the general gunplay, gore, weapon swapping and so on seemed great: felt and looked pretty smooth and well-animated, and it was very satisfying and fun to blow people away with guns and watch their gibs and blood fly all over the place. Certainly feels like you've built a decent core array of assets.

However, while the game showed a lot of potential initially, the gameplay itself very quickly just ended up feeling very bland, simple and repetitive, making it all feel like a very style over substance situation.

Once you play the game for a minute or so, it felt like you've seen everything it has to offer. It just felt so tiresome to run around this maze chasing these Sheriff clones, spamming the dodge button over and over to keep up with them. The world felt so dry and annoying to navigate, and the way enemies were spaced out made the flow of combat very awkward: sometimes you'd have huge patches of time with no action, then suddenly you get this mass of enemies all bundled together. It looks like the game might have a clown boss later on, but I just didn't have the patience to get there.

Upgrades were very boring as well, not only being the same three things but they didn't add anything to the gameplay and were typically so minor as to be unnoticeable. As enemies start to get guns later on, combat gets more annoying since the cramped corridors combined with the fast bullets means dodging is practically impossible and you just take so much chip damage, especially since you need to chase the Sheriff.

Melee feels absolutely terrible. I can understand having melee be a bit weak to drive the player towards seeking out guns, but even if that was the case, it's just too rough here. The range is so short n' stubby and there's no stun/knockback for hitting people so you frustratingly can't deal damage without taking damage, making it feel pointless.

The game also had a bunch of glitches, such as invincible enemies that would phase through walls for some reason or other.

Again, it has a lot of potential for some good Madness-style shooting action as it does a lot of things right in terms of combat, but the core gameplay loop of chasing Sheriffs around this maze just made wore me down and bored me quickly: with a better world and more interesting objectives/events, I believe this could be very nice.

Aalasteir responds:

Thank you, your thoughts are greatly appreciated and insightful.

[Unloop]

Not too shabby! Seems like a nice little puzzler, primarily focused on finding the right order of operations to take for untangling a series of wires, which can be quite satisfying to pull off and very meditative and chill, accentuated by the music and graphics (particularly the background).

It wasn't really hooking me in at the beginning, but once it started introducing things like splitters and track switchers and upping the complexity in general, it got me good. Level design felt solid: not only did the progression of difficulty feel nice and smooth (though as mentioned, a bit of a slow start), but I also felt like the levels did a great job at subtly introducing and teaching new mechanics very intuitively.

All in all, the bite-size levels, chill atmosphere, good sense of progression and just general polish/craftsmanship made the game very addictive and more-ish and I found it very hard to put down despite these types of games not being my wheelhouse: nice work!

ThreeTreesEU responds:

The first levels are indeed easy, as they serve as the tutorial basically.

They get more complex as new elements are intorduces, and a lot more complex later in the game (Mobile/Steam versions have 150 levels with the later ones being a lot larger and intriguing).

[Rogueblast]

Interesting little hacky-slashy game! It's pretty fun and addictive in how fast-paced and simplistic the general gameplay (combat and looting) is, but unfortunately it feels rather shallow and short-lived: once you've played one level of it you've pretty much seen everything.

As said, there definitely is a lot of potential here: while it is rather simple, that very same simplicity allows the game to never slow down and just keep you moving forward, and the game does attempt to vary things up with certain special events like scrolling rooms, hidden tunnels, and all sorts of equipment. There's a certain smoothness to everything as well: movement/animation feels very slick and the combat feedback is decently satisfying. And the music is a jam as well, to top it all off.

However, as said before, the game gets old quite fast and just ends up feeling repetitive. There's just an overall lack of feeling like you're actually progressing in a meaningful way, which should be the core conceit of these kind of games. Yes, the colors may change, but I was disappointed to see the same enemy types just get recycled over and over with higher stats, the same bosses with the same patterns, the same weapons and trinkets, the same rooms, and so on, with nothing new being introduced. The numbers may technically be moving behind the scenes, but nothing is changing since they all move in tandem: it's meaningless. Compared to something like Risk of Rain or Isaac, the equipment we get doesn't stack to create fun combinations, but instead just constantly gets replaced, keeping us static. It especially doesn't matter anyway since everything is just boring stat increases instead of fun abilities that would change your playstyle significantly.

In addition to that, there are some minor things that get in the way. The stat menu is very boring to look at since its just a bunch of text: it's practically a debug console instead of something the player should see, where's the nice equipment inventory tiles that you can mouse over for info and such? If an item drops at the edge of the screen, you can't even read what its tooltip says because it bleeds over the edge. Those same descriptions can be confusing too: a cape says it gives you +atk spd and its a trinket, but a claw says it gives you +atk spd but its a weapon when I thought it was a trinket. Speaking of trinkets, if I have two slots, why can't I pick which trinket gets replaced when I pick it up somehow? Finally there's just a lot of confusion where enemies can suddenly do more damage than you think they would, there's so many acronyms and shortened text that makes it hard to decipher, and so on. Balance is also a bit of a mess with weapons like the staff being just too useful.

Definitely feel like it could be something fun with more polish, balance and content, however! The core seen here is quite decent and ripe for expansion.

ErikSwahn responds:

Glad for your response on the game! Currently it is not meant to be super deep and I think renaming it to "Rogueblast Prototype" could be more fitting. I have uploaded a project file so people can edit my game in Construct 2, which lets people use this idea to expand it more. I am glad to hear about the critique though as it helps me with upcoming games :)

The project file can be found on my patreon page for free!

[ScrapLegs]

Wow, quite the good puzzle game we got here!

For the most part, it feels solid in all aspects: an intriguing core concept of leg durability meaning you need to carefully assess each move, overall pleasant presentation and controls, smooth escalation of difficulty that hooks the player both with great tricks to keep them on their toes (like having to intentionally break themselves when you'd think you should always keep yourself healthy) and tons of new mechanics like grass and bouncepads that are taught to the player very intuitively, and bonus content that serves up additional fun challenges to go for. I was easily hooked!

If I were to have any complaints:

*I felt like the grass, which serves as a soft landing pad, could've been something else a bit more intuitive like snow. Snow would pop out a bit more strongly visibly (the dull green of the grass can easily blend into the dull brown environment) and more easily represent the quality of 'softness'. Would've also loved if landing on grass or snow played a soft sound effect, like a puff, to more accurately declare its use: maybe even have a puff come up visually as well. Bouncepads could also use some sound effects when you use them. But then again, the way you set up the level teaches the grass quite well, so I might be complaining about nothing.

*One big constant and confusing annoyance I had was picking up repair kits mid-jump and having you not have full durability at the end of the jump. Yes, if the repair kit is hanging up in the air and you grab it mid-jump, it makes some sense that landing after the jump will result in your having damaged legs, not full legs. But when there is a repair kit on the ground and you land on top of it from a jump, I feel like that should give you full legs, not damaged legs: so silly to have the very minute gap between grabbing it and landing count as damage.

*Also I found it a little silly that it represents the levels that still have a battery to collect with a pip: usually I feel like common sense would make it so the levels that I have collected the battery in would be the ones that have a pip, not the blank ones, as blank usually represents a neutral state. Also a bit strange that if you beat level 9, but not level 10 yet, the level select will have level 10 as a question mark, when I feel like it should be 10 since you are on it, similar to how the game starts with level 1 as not a question mark because its the one you're on. But whatever, got used to it!

*I did have a few glitches come up, like when I fell onto an elevator platform and instead of landing, it kept me on top of the elevator in a falling state.

KanartStudio responds:

Thank you soooo much for the review and feedback.

I agree with you 100% about the grass. It blends in a lot, but I couldn't think of anything else that would fit in this trashy/post-apocalyptic environment of the game. I actually added sound to the grass and the trampolines, but I didn't have the time to upload it yet. I also added a better tutorial since some people were having trouble understanding some of the game's mechanics.

About the repair kits, I actually thought about this during the development phase of the game. I tested the robot not losing a leg after falling on a Repair kit, but I felt that something was wrong because this was basically canceling the player's momentum from the fall. So, I went with a more realistic approach: if you fall, you still experience the momentum and break your leg when you hit the floor. You are not wrong tho, the game freezes a frame and slows you down when you collect a repair kit (something that I added later to improve the game feel). This really gives a false sense of security when falling, but by the time I realized that, I already had a bunch of maps 💀.

Those glitches are actually very rare, so rare that I couldn't find a consistent way to reproduce them. It's kinda hard to fix issues like these, but it's something that I will keep in mind for my next game.

[[BURNOUTS]:Tower Of Power]

Hmm, interesting little game that gives me a bit of a mixed impression!

On the plus side, it seems like a rather charming game that is going for those quirky Earthbound-esque RPG vibes, what with its funny dialogue and characters, modern day themeing/aesthetic, and turn-based combat with QTE minigames. It mostly pulls this off quite well, such as with funny dialogue that is delivered with effective pauses for emphasis, by keeping the combat QTEs short as to not disrupt the flow too greatly, and my favorite part of the game was when it seemed like it was going for interesting 'puzzle' fights, such as the beer pong boss fight which needs to be defeated with the shoot move as it is invincible otherwise. I feel like there's a lot of potential here!

However, there were a lot of complications that brought it down for me:

For one, the general feel of the game felt very janky. No, it never bugged out of me fully, but there were a lot of minor things that just made it feel like it wasn't smoothly put together. For example, there is a strange, subtle delay when you try to navigate through menu options rapidly: if you're fast enough, it can end up ignoring your inputs, so it felt like I was forced to move through options slowly as not to break it. There were also awkward things like how moving to the equipment menu from the main menu has it laggily close and re-open a whole new window for some reason, and in combat you can have prompts come up for a brief second after you've already moved past them, like if you interrupt the enemy's prompt to do your attack, it'll go back to play the rest of the prompt out despite you already moving on. Nothing crazy, but it just is slightly annoying to deal with all these minor hiccups, like having a pebble in your shoe.

In a similar vein to above, the music minigame for Eli felt misaligned: if you try to hit the arrows to the actual beat of the music, it won't work because it is slightly desynced. Instead, you need to intentionally not follow the beat and just hit the notes according to the visuals, which just felt bad. In addition to this, feedback for hitting notes felt a bit confusing: yes, the overall feedback for the end result of the game was clear, but I'd like a combo count or affirmation for each note I'm hitting during to check my timing.

I found the font that the game uses to be a bit too fancy, garish and bold to make it rather difficult and annoying to read, and I would much prefer a more simple and clearer font, at least when it comes to dialogue: you can keep the stylish font for things like actions and titles and names, if you must.

I felt like combat was lacking a certain level of pizazz or juice. So many attacks play out with no special effects or animations and it really makes it boring: for example, practically all of the enemy attacks just have the enemy grow large and shrink. I feel like it would be much better to have special effects to distinguish attacks from one another and give it more character: for example, there should be things like a big music note explosion when Eli does his attack, a lighting bolt for Jolyne's spark skill, and when the philosopher quotes Kant as you, you should be assaulted by a bunch of word balloons and the sound of 'blah blah blah'. You put special effects for the death explosions, so just make more like that for everything else!

There was also some confusing inconsistency in the game, like how Eli's Fury Fists doesn't have a minigame for it, yet Jolyne's spark does, and I have no idea why the Superego boss fight gets a special QTE to defend from its attacks while every other enemy doesn't.

Finally, above all the rest, my biggest complaint is that a lot of the fights were pretty brainless and repetitive, boiling down to simple attack spam with the occasional heal. The game got me really excited when it introduced the special beer pong enemy shoot puzzle and the hint that you can interrupt enemies when they change color with a firebomb, and I thought, especially since the game is so fight-centric, that the rest of the fights would get even more creative and puzzle-like, kind of like figuring out to pray at the end of Earthbound. Unfortunately, the beer pong enemy was the only one of that nature, and firebombing the bosses that do change color didn't seem to have any significant effect as they still pull off their healing move. It was really disappointing: I wish more bosses required special strategies to get at their weaknesses, or even puzzles like maybe only being able to defeat the philosopher boss by talking to him and picking the right answer to confuse him like using the special talk action in Fear & Hunger.

Hopefully you don't take this too badly since, as much as I complain, I only do it because I think this does have a lot of potential, so best of luck on further development!

FCPXAV responds:

Thanks for the detailed review!
A lot of the jank things like some Eli music being misaligned are due to this being a PC game adapted to WebGL, so there are a few problems I'm still working on fixing :(

I like the idea of special effects on attacks! It's something I want to implement way down the line, but right now the project is just me doing everything and I'm not great with art so I can only do so much visually while still making the music/art etc haha. The fire effect halves healing and I do want to add more element-based things and more dynamic gameplay, it's just going to take me a while and this was more testing the waters and measuring progress. Glad you enjoyed and hope you like the other things to come!

[Bullet Hellween]

Hmm, decent and cute little bullet hell shooter! For a game jam game, I was quite impressed at the general level of polish and craftsmanship, what with the cute and animated presentation and especially with the great amount of enemy variety with all sorts of unique attack patterns to look out for! The boss was a great cherry on top as well, what with his very extensive attack patterns and telegraph animations for each.

While I do feel like the game is pretty neat, there were plenty of aspects that dragged it down for me unfortunately:

The enemies felt like they were incredibly spongy and became such unsatisfying slogs to defeat when you've gotta pepper each of them with so much gun fire (er, wand fire). I understand that, near the beginning where enemy density is low, high health for the skulls can be necessary to ensure they live long enough to get some attacks off, but when the game ups the enemy density, that sponginess becomes incredibly frustrating.

Speaking of enemy density, it does get rather overwhelming in the later levels and becomes a real unfair nuisance due to the way that enemies will stack on top of each other and not only become a spongy mess, but with the way that they will hide each other, making it impossible to see bats charge up their tackle attack, among other things.

Another subtle aspect of the feeling of sponginess present in the enemies is the lackluster sound design and feedback for kills: the game overall feels very quiet, muted and bereft of exciting notes which really dulls the satisfaction of combat. Screenshake is also very repetitive and just reduces the screen into a vague mush of confusion.

Powerups were ok, but rather unexciting and basic. But even more so than that, they felt silly and unfair: you'd think adding bullets onto your wand would be an additive powerup, but no, 2-shot or 3-shot are separate powerups that don't stack and override each other. Similarly, the powerup to transform your shots into larger shots can show up despite you already picking it up, yet if you pick it up again, nothing will change.

Checkpoints were a mixed blessing, or rather a curse: if you make a bad powerup choice or end a round with very little health, you could now be stuck in a very bad situation with no way out for recovery. I'd much prefer if the game were to just restart completely upon death to allow for the player to make better choices and get to where they were with more health, especially since it is already short enough.

Finally, as much as I am getting this game some considerable stick, it was a rather short game and it did make me want more! If this game wasn't a game jam game and got to have some more time in the oven, I could see it being incredible: while it isn't balanced in this iteration, I can't overstate how impressed I was with the sheer creativity and diversity in your enemy design! Would love to see more games in the future.

Meiallu responds:

Me and Nagasaki may do a bigger version of this game, if this actually turn to be true, I'll 100% fix everything you just said. Thanks!

[POKO LOCO]

Hrmm, this is a rough one for me! I really want to like this game as it does have a decent level of polish and juice to its craftsmanship and presentation, but I found myself very bored in no time as the core gameplay is incredibly shallow, repetitive, and one-note: it takes no time at all to see everything the game has to offer and there is no significant evolution as it goes on. It feels more like a rough draft or a prototype that hasn't yet found a core gameplay loop or unique concept yet.

As said, the game is quite lively and juicy, yet simultaneously very bland as well. Apart from some nice special effects for timed bounces and the psychedelic animated background, the game has a very bland, empty and almost clinically sterile look and feel to it when it comes to elements like the paddle and the unchanging world as you proceed forward in levels.

Compared to the lively title screen, I was really disappointed at the bland wall of text that is the tutorial. I'll grant you that it is at least categorized properly and tries to space out the sentences to help with reading comprehension, but I would much prefer if there were pictures or animations to help. Also the tutorial keeps repeating the same instructions over and over for some reason: if you can't even proofread the tutorial properly it doesn't give me much faith in the rest of the game. And to top it all off, the game says I can use WASD in the tutorial, yet it doesn't work and instead I had to use the arrow keys.

Bump timing for powerful bounces could be a fun mechanic, but it just felt incredibly frustrating and awkward to get used to it: it felt like you need to time the bump way too early when I expected it to be right when the ball hits the paddle, and even taking this into account I was constantly having my bumps not bounce the ball, leading to tedious gameplay in an already very repetitive game.

As said, the game feels like a step back from tons of other games that have come before it. Compared to more exciting powerups like being able to shoot bullets, summon multiballs, slow-mo, catching the ball, and so on, this game's powerups that just adjust paddle width and speed feel dire and don't excite. The bonus level doesn't even feel like a bonus level since it doesn't have its own music track or exciting scoring system. And as already said, every level just feels the same with no interesting layouts or new exciting mechanics: a couple bouncers being added here and there doesn't thrill me and keep me engaged. It just feels like a big waste of effort and is so incredibly outdated: I'd rather play something like Arkanoid on the NES which, for being decades old, has many times the amount of content and variety than seen here.

I want to like this game and think you've got a potentially great team here that can get stuff done, but there's just absolutely nothing exciting or fun about this game in its current state: it is the most bland student project paddle game, a bland scoop of vanilla ice cream with no sprinkles or whipped cream and definitely not a cherry on top. Make sure there is a focus on fun and addictive core gameplay in your next project before anything else.

KageKMB responds:

I fundamentally disagree with a lot of these criticisms. This game is a culmination of what I learn doing these leader-board focused browser titles. A key thing I honed in on, was what clicked with NG players, and what didn't.

To use Masahiro Sakurai's definition of game essence - your main criticisms can be summarized as "this game lacks game essence." However, things that increases game essence decreases broad appeal. There's a threshold with your target audience that if you cross it - they get frustrated at the challenge rather than entertained by it. Part of being a successful game designer is knowing how to be a people pleaser.

I personally play games with a lot of game essence. I also have to remember, one of Friday Night Funkin's common criticisms can be summarized as " too little game essence" - but it's also like the biggest game to come out of the NG community in a decade. If I dropped a game that fundamentally required you to do fighting game quarter circles and dragon punch motions, I'd be more to my taste, but I also don't see it getting past 3 stars.

Poko Loco was made with this site's general player-base in mind, (the itch.io uploads of the games never get hits lol)- and looking at the majority of feedback, I think I've demonstrated I'm honing in on understanding what works for this group. I'm not saying this with the intent of having an ego - but to illustrate that I had an intention, and got result in the ballpark I intended.

_________________
regarding some things like the WASD issue - that was a minor over-site and i've been wanting to do a minor adjustment patch sooner than later - but need to find the time.