FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Type For Your Life]

Hmm, I certainly like typing games and this is not bad as a foundation for that type of game, having some niceties like the text highlights for direction, but the execution left me a bit bored.

Every enemy seemed to just be more of the same, neither escalating the challenge or varying the mechanics in an interesting way that matches their characters (and when it did differ, like the one that makes you type the same one character over and over, it was for the worse, not better). Furthermore, the tension of the chase is lessened by both the way the camera is so zoomed out, and the game just overall felt very bland, lacking pizazz and effects needed to heighten the mood.

It definitely could be something nice, but right now it's just a decent rough draft/foundation I'm seeing.

Also I felt a bit weird that I got caught by the demon but my timer hadn't depleted yet. Unsure if that's a bug or if there's supposed to be a weird desync between distance and time?

errorerratum responds:

Thanks for the review!

I had wanted to differentiate the enemies via the content of the sentences/paragraphs as well as how they attacked. Changing the typing mechanic more than once would have made the characters more notable but honestly I can't think of too many different typing challenges.

I do like the idea of bringing the camera closer to the action and adding more effects, however I did want this game to be a bit more "toned down" in its gameplay.

As for the demon thing: All the enemies will "catch" you if you get too close to them, regardless of where the timer is. The only thing the timer indicates is how long the challenge will last.

[Bloodlust: Santa Monica (Definitive Edition)]

Wow, pretty neat game! Always interesting to see how creative demakes get in representing the original material, and to see Vampire Bloodlines recreated as a point-n-click adventure is neato: reminds me a lot of SNES Shadowrun which I loved back in the day!

For the most part, the game is cool in a lot of ways: a very rich world with loads of interactions and flavor text, tons of quests and character choices, solid presentation and intuitive design, and so on and so forth. It feels really professionally done! Having said that, though, there were a lot of pain points that stood out to me that got in the way of the fun:

*The biggest problem with the game is the dialogue/text system: it commits the cardinal sin of making it so that when you click when text is filling out, it skips to the next line altogether instead of just fast-forwarding the current line to be completely filled out, then requiring another click to go to the next line. Because of the way its setup here and how text-heavy the game is, its so tedious to have to wait for the text to fill out.

*While I like that the game is incredibly rich with interactions, it can be a bit much: there's so many unimportant people to talk to who say unimportant junk, and get us involved in unimportant quests. I know people enjoy sidequests, but I'd like if they at least stay somewhat aligned with our main goals and vampire culture in general: why the hell is my character offering to help out people with so much meaningless garbage? Don't they have more important things to worry about?

*Some of the puzzles are pretty dumb. For example, there's a dog supposedly blocking the way to the suites, but really he's off to the side: can't we just walk right past him? Even if he was in the way, why in the world can't we distract him with the steak or a frisbee?

*I tried playing as a Nosferatu, but was really disappointed. In the original Bloodlines, playing as Nosferatu makes you approach the game in a completely new and fresh way, having to sneak around through sewers and such. In here, all that happens is everyone gets spooked when you first see them, but are easily convinced by a silly excuse. It's really tiresome to do so everytime and a complete waste of an interesting setting.

*Quest log progression is a little weird in that it shows you information you shouldn't be aware of yet. For example, I haven't even read the note yet, but it's already showing me my next steps of meeting with Mercerius at the suites. Likewise, I went over to the beach during my exploration and suddenly got a new quest telling me that Mercerius wants astrolite from the beach: I haven't even met him yet so why would I know that???

*I really wish that the game told me right at the start that I couldn't save when playing the browser version! I just wasted like 30 minutes, only to realize that I wasn't going to be able to save!

The game definitely has a lot of potential, but some of these errors are pretty major. If they get ironed out, I think this could be excellent!

emontero responds:

Thanks a lot for your feedback! I'll try to address all of the issues in the following update.

[The Bugs Manor 🦋 - Prologue]

Hmm, seems like this could be a decent horror adventure, but I didn't find this prologue that helpful in giving me an idea on how the game is going to play, as it is way too hand-holdy, never allowing me to explore or do anything beyond exactly what it prescribes. The story didn't sell me that much either, being a haunted house lorded over by this jackass who is using monsters to raise dead family members and all those classic cliches we've seen done to death. All that left was the general presentation, which to give it credit, did seem pretty good in terms of pixel art.

If there was one notable aspect, it would be the inventory/interaction mechanics, where it has you hold down the triggers to grab hold of objects. This could be interesting as it could add some nice physicality to handling objects beyond just stuffing them into a pocket dimension inventory as most games do. Unfortunately it seemed a lot more simple than I liked: I thought each trigger would represent a hand, but everything seemed to require both triggers to be held, even when they were activities than can be done with one hand, like opening the cabinet doors. Also, it was quite awkward and tiresome to hold down the triggers when moving around.

As much guff as I'm giving it, I do think the game could shape up into something nice, but I'd say that the written description did a way better job at selling me on the game than this prologue did, because it at least gives me an impression on what the intended gameplay is!

Moonth responds:

Hi, thanks for the feedback.

I'm sorry that the prologue didn't convince you, I hope you like the final game more.

It's true that the story is a cliché of the horror genre: "kids exploring a haunted mansion and discovering the horrors it hides." But I don't think that's bad per se, I've tried to give it narrative charisma through the characters and the setting, but I can understand that there are people who don't like the story for lack of originality.

The full game will make more use of the object interaction system, and I'll also put in the possibility of changing the control from needing to hold down the button, to simply pressing the button to grab/drop an item, for those who find it annoying.

And of course, you will be able to explore the whole house, including the areas that are not accessible in the prologue, so I hope that exploration will be more interesting.

['Lair of the Missing Sock']

Not too shabby!

On one hand, it's a pretty bog-standard action platformer: bit janky and rough, lacking any sort of special spice or quality-of-life features like being able to peek downwards. On the other hand, though, the art and story are very goofy and lively, there's a good variety of enemies and level design, and the boss fight was pretty cool.

Basically, it's not necessarily something I'm going to remember or recommend to people, but it's not something I'd kick outta bed either: it provides a decently fun short adventure and has enough potential that I'd like to see how it evolves in your next installment!

Butzbo responds:

Thanks for the review! Good to know of the aspects of the game which stand out post experience, and others that can be further developed.
Thanks for playing, and great to see you're still at it! (:

[The Device: No$ Ghost Finder]

Hah, this was quite the experience! Not necessarily all in a good way, but a memorable experience nonetheless.

First impressions were a bit rough. For one, call me paranoid, but I'm always a bit reluctant to give out location information and other such data, and two, I had no idea the game was meant to be played on the phone only: my attempts to play it on computer just had it error out for location permissions, not giving me any sort of direction to change devices. It may seem obvious, but I was quite confused for a good few minutes.

Anyway, eventually I sorted everything out and got my own little ghost detector on my phone! It didn't seem to be doing any that special except barking out random garbly words now and then, but I was of the impression that there must be some sort of cool AR puzzle game at play here: maybe if I get the readings up to 100 or so, it'll give me a clear ghostly message that I need to use the symbols on the phone to decipher which will point me to some sort of location/website which I then solve using yadda yadda yadda. So, I set forth into the neighborhood!

Eventually though some hot and cold deduction, I was able to get my ghost detector all the way up to 99.9, which seemed like the highest it could get! Unfortunately, all that I encountered was a fire hydrant: no ghosts, no special message, no puzzle, no nuffin'. None of the random words that were popping up during my walk seemed to have any sort of significant pattern or spooky message either. I suppose this is accurately recreating toys of old, but it didn't make it any less disappointing.

So yeah, a bit let-down, but nevertheless I admire your creativity with this and hope you continue to experiment: last year's phone adventure game was great, for example!

alsoknownas1 responds:

As always, thanks for the review. Getting your feedback is honestly one of our biggest motivations to qualify for monthly voting. You always engage with a project on its on terms, from striving epic to ersatz happy meal toy. Apologies that it took a bit of unraveling to figure out which of those we were going for this time. We always try to take all of your feedback onboard, but communicating that better will definitely be the key takeaway for our next more esoteric project, and there will be more. We're definitely going to continue to experiment, rest assured.

We're forever grateful for you championing GoTW. We have a bunch of super special projects coming up, but we're definitely still working on larger scale projects in this coming year.

It might sound funny, but apologies for your taking a--perhaps--needless walk. :) Hopefully, it was pleasant despite the absence of ghosts.

[Scary Scuffle 3D]

Hmm, seems like it has the potential to be a fun, goofy brawler, but in its current state, it's more like an early alpha or prototype, lacking a unique angle or significant pizazz.

As said, there's a decent foundation here: I like the different arenas and running around chucking objects at each other and all that jazz. But the game always seems to devolve into a messy brainless mashfest, as the movesets don't seem to have any sort of real strategic depth to them. Why bother blocking, for example, if you aren't able to gain any sort of advantage against an attacking player for making a smart decision? You may as well just attack him as well and slap it out. Would definitely love it if characters had their own special moves, and if the arenas had special events that would happen to help increase the chaos and push players together more, such as meteors raining from the sky in the UFO level and so on.

I realize that my feedback probably isn't ideal because I came from this at a single-player angle, but I still think most of it is applicable. Still, something to consider, as human opponents could change some things around (but not that significantly, in my opinion).

DaemonPlus responds:

Thank you for the well thought out feedback! Very close to my postmortem of the project too. I wish we gave ourselves more time... But learnt SO much under pressure. :)

[Blood Gauntlet]

Pretty cool speedrun version of Castlevania! It's a rather short and simple game, but it felt very fluid and I enjoyed my time with it immensely: having to make both quick reactive decisions to dodge attacks and also more large-scale decisions as to whether it's worth it to backtrack for resources or just tank damage because avoiding it would take too much time were very interesting! The boss fight was a nice finale, and upon seeing that the game had a ranking system, I immediately went back for a replay, netting myself a nice B rank!

If I were to have one gripe, it'd be that I got a F rank on my first go, with most of my points coming from a 'death penalty'. This would make sense if I died on the second part or the boss and it revived me there, I suppose, but I only died in the very first part, which takes you all the way back to the start as if it were a new game...so why a penalty? What, because I didn't fully reset the game myself? It doesn't make any sense!

decafpanda responds:

You are correct. Giving a death penalty on the first level is an oversight on my part. The game attributes reset on the title screen. It should have been on level 1.

Pressing "R" will quickly reload the game if you die on your run and want to max your score. Any kind of death during your run will cripple your score. And yes there are checkpoints at level 2 and the boss. So that's where the death penalty makes sense.

Go for S rank! There are some tips in the Author Comments.

[Consealed]

Pretty neat game! The presentation is incredibly charmingly retro, and the concept of a fast-paced deductive whack-a-mole arcade game is cool!

However, while I like the gameplay in theory, I had a bit of a rough time with it! The game informs you of all the various tells there are, but I couldn't see any differences in their sweat or snot, which only left shaking as the somewhat reliable tell (piss being too random an occurence to be reliable). I was able to make it decently far by looking for the shakiest suspects, but I just felt bummed out because I feel like I'm missing a huge chunk of the intended experience. I understand you don't want to make it too easy or anything, but yeah, I'm a bit lost here: just how subtle did you make it!?

ProsciuttoMan responds:

I'm not saying this sarcastically, but are you colourblind? That might have something to do with it.
The sweat is slightly more purple and snot slightly more green for aliens (I think the snot is the more noticeable of the two, but I could be wrong).
Otherwise, solid review as usual.

[HelioBacter]

Hmm, it seems like it could be a nice tower defense game: the graphics and theming are nice, and the whole aspect of having to set down a trigger for the traps was unique, I suppose. The foundation is there, potentially, but ultimately the game feels incredibly unfinished and rough, most likely due to game jam time limitations: missing attack feedback for the towers, the confusing and unintuitive nature of setting down eyeball triggers for traps instead of them just being automated like towers, the fact that it doesn't lock the cursor which results in scrolling for eyeball positions scrolls the browser window, and so on: there's just too many rough edges to this, and while you have my sympathy, I need to be honest in that I didn't have a good time here, unfortunately.

HelperWesley responds:

Totally fair. Not our best jam game to be honest, we regret some of the choices we made in the rush of the time limit. 😅

We made some fixes based on feedback from people since the jam ended, like the full screen button in the title screen, and auto-pick up for points at the end of waves, but the basic concept of the game is a little too far gone to bother updating more.