FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[A Walk in the Woods]

Hmm, decent little walking sim horror game, I suppose! It's pretty small, simplistic and kinda rough in some aspects, like how you can see the seams of the game when it doesn't fluidly loop you back around to the convenience store, for example. But it does enough to build tension and provide a somewhat immersive experience, and I like the extra touches of being able to drink beer, even if there's no point to it. Not bad.

One thing I'm curious about is whether there was actually any threat at all. Would be interesting if all the spooky noises and 'press shift to run' were just trickery to make you think something was chasing you when you were totally fine the whole time. If so, well played. Either that or I just got lucky, especially considering I was trying to get myself killed at one point.

Octopus9000 responds:

Thank you!! My main goal with this game was to build a spooky atmosphere so I'm glad it came across! As for whether there's anything out there I cannot say, you never can be sure with all that fog.

[Kity Builder Advance]

Cute little game! I like the overall presentation, and the idea of exploring this island and using buildings not just as decor, but as makeshift ladders to reach new areas, is an interesting idea.

Unfortunately, it didn't take too long for me to lose interest though. Exploring was interesting at first, but the lack of a concrete goal, repetitive recolored rewards, and no new systems made it all feel kinda pointless. The game not saving and letting me continue after a break didn't help either.

Was kinda hoping it would be more like Sim City or Animal Crossing where people start to move in and I make sure it's all balanced for them to live comfortably. It just felt like such an empty world. I could be wrong, but maybe the point is just to build a nice little city and snap photos of it, and if that's the case, I feel like the game might just not be for me.

Sambero responds:

I agree with all you're saying and invite you to try the Steam version!! We added pretty much everything you ask for, but sadly we couldn't make it work in a web build :_)

[Clear the Skies!]

Wow, considering how bland the game looks with its clip art-esque graphics, I was surprised at how much I got into this! The way you need to struggle to balance so many competing factors and experiment with different approaches reminded me a lot of some of my favorite survival games like Frostpunk, Pathologic 2 or Plague Inc. It's quite addictive stuff, and I feel like this is a classic case where looks aren't everything!

That isn't to say it's not without problems:

*I found the research/upgrade system quite confusing in that I would get upgrades that didn't seem to make any sense, like batteries that somehow reduce pollution or create power on their own. Surely the upgrades should be more appropriate in where they apply, like capacity for batteries, power for solar panels, pollution for coal plants, and so on. I suppose it does add a bit of interesting randomization and improvisation to the game, though, so I guess it's a necessary evil.

*I really wish the HUD would provide better information that you can read at a glance: everything just being text and numbers makes it all just bland together in a mess. Would much prefer if there were more graphical representations like bars. One thing I easily lost track of was what my current power demands were: the way the numbers keep fluctuating made it difficult to grasp. Graphs and other features that track data would be great too in helping to strategize.

Pandaguru responds:

Thanks for the detailed review. Those are some really specific UI feedback I can try and apply to my next game.

Thanks for playing!

[Planting Frenzy]

Hmm, I think this has the potential to be a nice arcade game. I like the cute presentation, wholesome concept, and act of weaving through obstacles while planting seeds. Unfortunately, I had a lot of issues with its design that got in the way of the fun!

*Considering the game has a tiny red X on the character, I thought it was indicating the player's hurtbox, similar to bullet hells. However, unlike bullet hells where the hurtbox is a pixel, the hurtbox and hitboxes in this game were crazy huge and confusing. I was constantly getting hit by stuff that was miles away from me which made it feel incredibly unfair.

*The audio is nice at first, but once you start throwing seeds, moving around, and collecting the pollen all at once, it turns into an absolute sonic hell that was hurting my ears to listen to.

*I like when arcade games have a way to skillfully increase your score when you play well. Unfortunately, the gameplay in this felt incredibly braindead: there's practically no reason to not be holding the seed throwing button the whole time. Where's the strategy? Where's the challenge? Surely there should be some interesting balancing act, like having throwing seeds make you move slower which puts you at risk of getting hit, or make it so that you have to throw seeds in a special or precise pattern to get more points.

Not a bad attempt, but there were too many frustrating aspects and I didn't feel like the core loop and scoring system was interesting enough for sustained play.

QCrimson responds:

Thank you for your feedback!
I'm really happy to hear about the issues in gameplay.
It gives me encouragement to keep improving on game making.
.
We will fix them with new update soon.

[Waha's Circuit Break]

Hey, it's great to see this come back! Through a combination of a charmingly goofy world and characters, a challenging escalation of puzzle difficulty through the introduction of neat mechanics like boss blocks, and intermission stages which help me remember all of the subtle intricacies of your moveset, it all sums up to create a wonderful adventure! Some great craftsmanship on display here in general, and I especially enjoyed learning how to make the most of the moveset despite how challenging it was for me to master!

That said, as much as I enjoyed my time, I did have some issues with the design here and there:

*You'll call me stupid, but I took a long time before I realized that the goal of each match was to delete all of the robots from the board. I would just keep making matches and assume I was dealing damage to the dropper with each match, or was building up to some sort of score threshold, or just needed to survive for a certain amount of time. Finally my brain made the connection after some time, haha! I wonder if there would be a way to make that more obvious, like a counter on the HUD telling you how many enemies are left.

*Speaking of the HUD, I do wish the game had a bit more information to give to the player. For example, a little preview of the next block would be nice and would let you plan ahead. It's also a bit of a bummer that there is no score tracker: would be great if you could see how well you did with some sort of grade after beating a stage. It'd also just help add a bit of pizazz to the game.

*Considering puzzle games are usually quite juicy and animated to make things exciting, I was a bit disappointed how dry this game is. You could argue it's superficial, but consider this: taking the effort to try and make a big match like 4 or 5 in a row, or setting up and pulling off a combo, only for the game to not give any sort of positive feedback to differentiate it, is quite demotivating and makes me as a player only want to do the bare minimum.

*I'd get annoyed when I'm standing right below the block dropper, ready to intercept whatever it drops, only for it to insta-teleport to another position right when it drops. I really feel like the dropper should smoothly move into its next position right after dropping something and stay there to serve as a preview of what's coming next. It would make things feel more fair and let you strategize.

*Some mechanics were a bit unclear, particularly the way to damage bosses. I kept trying to blow up bombs next to them, only to realize they have to 'lead into' the boss to actually cause damage. Feels like an unnecessary complication, and the way bombs blow up simultaneously instead of one-by-one towards a direction doesn't help make it intuitive.

Despite that big wall of text of issues, though, I had a grand ol' time!

EDIT: Whew, still working myself through story mode. It's probably because I'm a puzzle noob, but damn if those fights on the train and the doublecross were really exciting and challenging!

TharosTheDragon responds:

Thanks FutureCopLGF! I was certainly looking forward to your review. You've made some good suggestions about how to make the mechanics more clear. I was certainly confused myself when I played Robot Daze for the first time, and I'm not sure I would've ever figured out everything that's going on if I never looked at the source code.

Robot Daze actually does have a scoring system, but we ditched it because it doesn't make sense. If you get more points for destroying more stuff, that incentivizes slower victories when we should be incentivizing speedy victories.

I think the game does have a fair amount of juice. There are sound effects, particle effects, and screen shakes. Getting a combo of 5 or more produces a gem/superbomb, and detonating it produces a huge complicated lightning effect.

It seems you're not the only one who's not getting that hostiles have to be in the combo line in order to be damaged. We may have been too biased because of our familiarity with how this mechanic works in other games.

[DUNGEON RAMBLER [demo]]

I'd write a review for the game, but it seems like you've already covered that in the description, haha! As you say, it's a pretty decent prototype for a dungeon-crawler, but it currently is rather simplistic, repetitive, and frustrating in its design.

I just had a hard time getting immersed or taking it seriously due to the lack of functionality. It had the feeling of playing, like, a tiger electronic version of a dungeon crawler, where the simplification is to such an extreme that it loses the essence of what the genre is. I couldn't tell whether the game actually had a map you were traversing or if it was all just random, like a paper tiger, if that makes sense.

Anyway, I still think it shows a lot of promise, and as a lover of dungeon crawlers, I would love to see this evolve into something greater!

thriceAccursed responds:

mmmh... yeah... well to be honest, i doubt you're gonna like the final thing much 😬 see i'd love to make something complex and abtruse and berlinschoolish but i am, how should i put it... rather limited, as a developer. i do what i manage, and then i go say it's "casual" o "minimalist" or whatever XD
And no, there's no map at all, it's all is sheer wantom randomness. which is part of the core concept i guess, so not likely to change... that's why i get the impression you're not gonna be a fan. it wont really change that much.
anyway, thanks for checking it out!

[ALIEN HAZARD]

Cool arcade shooter! Overall, the look and feel of the game is impressively polished, with some fantastic pixel art and great retro audio. The controls are rather novel in using the mouse for movement, and while the gameplay is a bit basic, it makes for some decent fun in blasting all sorts of guns while zipping around.

I gotta admit though, as nice as it is, I didn't find myself wanting to stick with the game too long. There were a few issues that got in the way:

*The difficulty curve is a bit too spiky and awkward. The first few levels are super boring and easy which makes replaying tedious, and then suddenly around level 4 a new shooter enemy type is introduced in a large number and it just feels overwhelming. You'd think that maybe the shooter enemy would be introduced in an earlier wave in a lesser quantity to build up to it slower. It's pretty hard until around level 7, then suddenly the difficulty dips down to being very easy for quite some time!

*To add to this, once you get to the later waves, it feels like once you die, you're screwed: recovery is way too difficult that you may as well just quit and start over. Reminds me a lot of games like Gradius which suffer the same thing: losing all your upgrades on death and having to grind them up is impossible when the game has gotten so hard.

*I don't understand the reason behind continues: your score is reset if you use them, so what's the point since going for a hi-score is the entire reason for the game? It'd only make sense if this game had a goal beyond scoring.

*Aiming with WASD felt really unintuitive for me. For some reason, I kept aiming to just the right and left since trying to aim diagonally and up/down was too much. As novel as mouse movement is and how much I enjoyed the challenge of getting used to it, I feel like movement with WASD and aiming with mouse would be a lot better.

*Because the game doesn't lock the cursor, I kept getting screwed over by my movement getting suddenly halted when my cursor left the screen momentarily. This happened even on fullscreen! I tried to avoid it as much as I could, but when the later levels get so hectic, it's unavoidable.

*Bit of a bummer that there doesn't look to be any high-score table integration with Newgrounds.

It definitely has a lot of potential and I wanna love it, but it was hard to so at times! Still had a good time overall, though.

WLCSoft responds:

Thanks for playing my game and giving feedback. The controls were inspired by the mouse control in Platypus. But I couldn't make the cursor lock to the player, like in Platypus. When I found out that the engine I use didnt allow me to do that, it was too late, the game was already half done. Too late to give up. I already knew it was going to be an issue for some people. Also, getting the highscore isn't the whole point. There's a reason to use continues after a game over: if you beat the final boss, the final cutscene is different from the cutscenes you get when you just give up or run out of continues. Even if you don't get a highscore. Anyway, all I wanted with this game since the beginning, besides bringing some fun and challenge to people, was to learn how the players would react to these unusual controls. Although I've received positive reviews about the game itself, the opinions about the controls were kinda mixed. So it's unlikely that I'll make this kind of controls again in my next games. Unless I find a way to lock the cursor to the player, at least. Thank you very much for playing!

[Anxi's Carnation]

Hmm, this is a tough one! I was definitely pretty intrigued by the game at first because it just gives off this mysterious and artistic vibe. I dunno what it is exactly, but just something about the art and atmospheric music, as well as the little extras like the bonus dialogue on the title screen as well as seeing all of the achievements allude to these endings and bonus modes, makes me think there's a lot cooking here. The gameplay as well was neat in how it keeps adding layers and layers to the basic loop and it becomes this crazy plate-juggling challenge.

In spite of all that, though, I bounced off of this game hard, unfortunately!

*As much as the game tries to help with the tutorial screens before each level, there were a lot of times I was confused as to what I was supposed to do since the pictures can be very vague and easily misinterpreted. Look, if you're gonna tell me what to do on the game over screen, maybe just say that on the tutorial itself so I'm prepared!

*To continue on with the point above, it doesn't help either that the game is incredibly muted and lacking feedback for your actions, leading to further confusion. For example, because your basket doesn't fill up with a flower for each flower you click, I spent a long time confused as to whether I was making progress clicking flowers or whether I was picking the wrong flowers and was only making progress when I got lucky and clicked the right flower. As another example, it'd be helpful too if some sort of effect happens when the red mist reaches the time where it deals damage, otherwise it's like, did anything even happen?

*Being sent all the way back to the start of the game because of an honest mistake is too harsh a punishment for me, especially since the very start of the game is incredibly slow and boring, making it so frustrating to work your way back up to where you left off.

*In general, while the gameplay does add a lot of layers as it goes, it is still at its core just repetitive click-click-clicking, over and over and over, and it wears down not only on my soul, but my old hands as well.

So yeah, the vibes were neat and I wanted to like it, but unfortunately it wasn't to be since the gameplay let me down. A good attempt at least, since to me, you got the game half-right, so next time just make sure the other half is good and you're golden!

Tyhond responds:

Sweet, yeah, It was something I try out for fun xP I'm not really a game designer.

Thanks

[saraOS]

Hmm, an interesting...game? I guess? It kinda sits in a weird spot where it's as much of a game as a DVD chapter select menu is, largely just being a collection of goofy short movies. Sure, it does have those short minigames at the end which were nice, but they were such a small part of the complete package: wish we had more of those! Anyway, as much as I'm ragging on it, I think the presentation is nice and polished, and I had some good chuckles at the content on offer, so yeah, not bad.

Nabella responds:

Pseudo DVD menus with little animations are the next big genre to plague the indie scene like rogue-likes and deck-builders. Just you wait, lolololol.

[Eyebot VS Scarlet]

Cute little choose-your-own-adventure movie/game hybrid, kinda like Henry Stickmin or Dragon's Lair! It's kinda short and doesn't have much meat on it, but the animation/presentation is very nice and it's got a good sense of humor, so I had a decent time. I imagine it ain't easy to animate all the failure states compared to if this was just a straightforward movie, so kudos on the effort: well done! Looking forward to seeing what the great mind behind Eyebot comes up with next!

TheGuyWhoMadeEyebot responds:

Thanks! Huh, yeah, I guess it is a bit like Dragon’s Lair, I never thought about that. If I ever make another game in this same sort of style it’ll definitely have more to it, assuming I won’t have a deadline to worry about then, but as for what my next project will be, I’ll probably do something a bit different.