FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Doodlepup's Missing Wagon]

Not bad! Certainly a cute little point-n-click adventure that had an impressive amount of depth to it with its multiple endings and all sorts of choices, as well as a focus on trying to be nice in this dangerous world. In particular I though the minigame where you have to try very hard to keep yourself cool and say nice things was interesting: I find that way more authentic than typical dialogue in games where its way too easy to take your time and always pick the right answer, and I'd like to see more games take after that!

While it was nice, I did feel like the game, for the most part, was a little bit repetitive with its constant fetch-quests. I know it even mentions this as if to make fun of it, but I would've preferred if you didn't do it in the first place: you're not fooling me! Anyway, I was hoping that there would be a few more puzzle elements to it all that might require some brain power or item combinations or what-have-you. For example, maybe instead of just literally getting ketchup chips and bringing them back which is boring, you could've mayhaps found a bottle of ketchup or even red paint somewhere and a bag of french fries somewhere else, and try to combine them to create ketchup chips: obviously that's not how it works, but perhaps you could've gotten a joke out of this shoddy imitation, like perhaps the guy doesn't even taste the difference when you give them to him?

There was also a bug I encountered where I couldn't interact with Beatrice and her bag of chocolate bars when she first appeared: only once I left the shop and entered back in was she now interactable. Odd!

Finally, and this is a bit of an odd complaint, but I did feel like the game was a bit awkward to play, as it felt like I was reading someone's fanfic that's filled with inside jokes and lore and friend shout-outs that I'm not knowledgeable about. Felt like it wasn't really made for public consumption, but just shared amongst some select friends, in a way. But hey, at the end of the day I was still able to have fun with the game and got the general gist of it all, and heck, what am I talking about, as where else would a Newgrounds fangame be submitted besides Newgrounds?

Loopykins responds:

I was really looking forward to receiving your feedback on the game, and I'm genuinely grateful that you took the time to play and share your thoughts!! Your input means a lot to me, and I'm thrilled that you enjoyed the game and had fun with it, despite some awkward moments. I completely understand your point about the fetch quests being a bit repetitive, and I intentionally acknowledged that while writing the game. I'm still learning and growing with ActionScript, so there's definitely room for improvement, and your feedback helps me identify areas to work on. I'll for sure work on improving those aspects with future projects. I also want to apologize for the bug.

Most of the content I create on Newgrounds is primarily for myself and my close friends, but it's awesome when people beyond that circle also appreciate and enjoy it. That's why I choose to share it around. The story to the game is a giant shitpost. Not supposed to be taken seriously in the slightest, but I had fun with making it.

Although I generally don't respond to reviews - beyond a reaction to show I read it - unless they're from friends or people I'm familiar with, I genuinely value the feedback, including the constructive criticism you've provided. Thank you so much for that!

This game represents a significant step in my journey as a game developer. As time goes on, I plan to dive deeper into coding and explore more ideas with mechanics, storytelling and the likes, which will hopefully lead to even better games in the near future. Your encouragement and input inspire me to continue. Thank you again for your kind words and thoughtful review; it truly motivates me to keep pushing forward!

[Re-Heart]

Hmm, this was a bit of a rough one for me!

On one hand, I thought the mechanics in this game, in particular the 'pillar summon' were pretty unique and interesting, and overall it provided some decent endless runner gameplay that keeps things exciting by constantly escalating the stakes with new obstacles. Despite the frustration I was dealing with, the fast-paced nature of the game and the insta-respawns made retrying actually rather addictive! But speaking of frustration...

As alluded to, the game was a very frustrating, and more importantly, unfair feeling experience. Instead of trying to get good at the levels, it felt more like I was trying to get good at controlling the character at a basic level: so many random dropped inputs and wonkiness made me feel utterly confused and not knowing what the hell the game wanted out of me. To add insult to injury, even when I did somehow master the controls, the levels came down more to trial-and-error memorization as the obstacles just come way too fast due to a combination of the camera not seeing far ahead enough and the base speed being very high that there's no way to react on your first time.

It certainly could be a rather nice endless runner, and the difficulty could be considered as intentional to create a 'rage game', but I feel like challenging precision platformers or rage games only work if the controls are polished enough so that a player's failures feel like their own fault, and with this, that unfortunately wasn't the case. Perhaps if it wasn't constrained to a game jam time limit, this could've had a bit more polish to make everything work! Would like to see a better version of this as that pillar summon was rather memorable!

RaidenKramata responds:

THANK YOUUUUU!!! I do plan on making a revamp of this soon once im finished with a big nutty project i have in mind so yea, THANK YOU FOR YOUR AWESOME FEEDBACK!!! I hope you play more of my games soon in the future

[Beswitched]

Pretty cute puzzler with a really neat gameplay concept! For the most part, everything felt really intuitive and I enjoyed some of the mind-bending puzzles you setup based on this transference technique! Game also felt pretty smooth and nice in terms of visual appeal and game feel, what with the nice touches like puffs for walking and landing, the cool slow-mo effect for transferring, and so on. Very impressive overall for a game jam game in that it was very memorable!

It's definitely a little rough in some aspects though. For example, the controls can be a bit jank when it comes to special actions like trying to jump off of a jumping frog platform: many times my inputs were ignored for those. And I hated how sometimes when you transfer into a frog it'll force an immediate hop, mostly into spikes! But more so than any of those things, the biggest issue I had with the game was the level design, as while it started off pretty decent, it felt like it started to devolve. Not only did the levels start to feel out-of-order, with some really easy levels coming after very hard levels, but also a lot of the levels just had extraneous elements that had no bearing on the puzzle solution: if I were to be nice I'd say they were intentional red herrings, but it really felt sometimes that I was skipping the intended solution and the levels weren't constructed well enough to not realize this exploit.

Also, just as a nitpick on the side, I did feel like starting off the game with possessing moving platforms was a bit boring compared to possessing other living creatures like frogs and tanks and such, but it's fine. Oh and I would've loved a save/load feature as well since I had to leave half-way, and I dunno if I wanna work all that way back.

Frogrammer responds:

hey thank you so much for all the feedback! as always really appreciate it, the controls definitely could use a big improvement as most of the players have mentioned it too. the forced jump is a bug that we unfortunately didn't have the time to fix and as for level design I can see what you mean and with more time we definitely will be able to craft the structure more carefully for levels to feel intended but also not to limit the creativity. oh and you can skip levels with the button in the top right corner if you don't feel like going all the way back :)

[Space Order Mine]

Quite the interesting fusion of the FTL and Minesweeper we got here! It's a little rough around the edges in some aspects, doesn't quite have a proper story and isn't balanced properly, but I still had a lot of fun and got quite addicted to this, so I think you've got a solid core concept and decent execution at play here which is the best case for an early build! Was quite impressed that it was already doing a good job at increasing the complexity of combat in interesting ways with a variety of equipment, ships, items, and new tile obstacles like ice and lava: really makes me interested to see how it grows.

In terms of feedback:

Would love if the game had something like a combat log that you see in CRPGs which keeps tracks of various actions: a lot of the time I've got my eyes focusing below on minesweeper and suddenly a whole bunch of simultaneous actions can happen up-top that I miss and find difficult to figure out what exactly happened, especially when you've got drones and all sorts of stuff doing their things.

The info pop-ups can be a bit hard to read at times, what with their both tiny and pixelated text and my old man eyes finding it difficult to focus.

Could stand to have a bit more pizazz added to the game, stuff like explosions, special effects, music and the like, though I totally understand why it isn't there as an early build needs to focus on the core gameplay before juicing it up.

There would be some times where I thought the minesweeper was cheating me by not surrounding the energy tile properly with number indicators, but I realized later on that this was because there were initial gaps in the rock where indicators would be: they just become difficult to see/remember once the rock has been mined around that area since everything's so dark.

FluffyLotus responds:

Thanks for the feedback! I never tought of a log, which could be usefull.

For the "initial gaps" problem, it's something I'm struggling a bit on finding a good solution :(

[Polly The Frog 3: Billy Bullfrog's Decree]

Seems like a pretty cute game in many aspects, and I was impressed at the ambition of creating a big 3D platformer, but unfortunately a lot of the construction and design left me underwhelmed and feeling like it might've gotten a bit too overambitious (a common habit of indie devs, though nothing to be ashamed about).

First and foremost, the number one thing blocking me was the performance of the game. For some reason, I was constantly getting all sorts of stuttering and frame rate drops which was annoying by itself but especially annoying since it would happen during jumps and cause me to miss my target. I feel like I've got a respectable computer especially for such a simple game, leading me to fear the code must be very terribly unoptimized. This happened even when I switched the game to the lowest quality and I'll be honest, I'm not sure if the quality button even works in the first place.

There were also just a lot of annoyances with the controls and presentation. For example, the game says you can use a controller and while it does work in general, if you try to go into, for example, the settings menu, suddenly the controller no longer works and you need to use the mouse to interact with the options. Furthermore, all of the controls are still listed with keyboard controls like space and WASD when you'd think the game would recognize I'm using a controller and instead display controller buttons instead.

There's also some very shoddy design in the gameplay world as well, such as a camera that both can clip into terrain which blocks your vision and not be zoomed out enough which causes you to have to take leaps of faith too often. There are also bland or absent effects for actions like attacks which just have the enemies blip away with no satisfying visuals or audio, and a lack of a ground shadow for the player to help them be able to tell where they are landing from jumps with any precision.

There were also some bugs like the save system which would sometimes completely lose or not save my progress for no reason I could tell.

But even if we sweep aside all of that stuff, assume that all the menus and performance and camera and such can be fixed up, and instead choose to focus on the core gameplay, I still feel like the game would be a bit lacking because the gameplay is so bog-standard. What I played felt like a rather generic platformer without any interesting or unique mechanics, just stuff you'd see in any other platformer but lacking polish or satisfaction. Potentially satisfying movement mechanics like dashes don't add much and are locked behind an annoying forced movement instead of being an accessible button press.

If I view this through the lens as a newbie developer making his first platformer and being a bit overambitious, I'd say it shows potential and could become something big with this as practice, but considering this is the 3rd version, I'm a little let-down as you'd think this would be incredibly polished by now. Still, hopefully you can continue to move onwards and upwards.

EDIT: I did try playing it in Firefox instead of Chrome and I didn't get the performance issues: not sure what weird compatibility issue is going on there!

Brad-Games responds:

Thanks for taking your time to review my game, I appreciate the feedback!

I'm very new to the Unity game engine, so while this is the 3rd version of the game, it's the only one I actually put a lot of effort into, so it feels like more of a first installment on my end.

As for the poor performance, I'm not entirely sure as to what causes that. I've tested the game on many different devices, including a Chromebook with 2GB of RAM and a slow processor, and it runs just fine. It's possible that it's some browser setting that could cause the game to run poorly, or just a Unity WebGL bug of some sort. I'll look into it more.

Always good to see people taking their time to give constructive criticism instead of getting frustrated and leaving a bad review with not much to say. I'm not sure if I'll make a 4th installment of this series, but if I do I'll definitely take your points into consideration. 😄

[Sandwich Stacker]

Cute little arcade game! It's simple to grasp and fun to stack up the sandwich...at least for a bit. By the time you get to the 2nd or 3rd level, it felt like I had seen everything the game has to offer and there wasn't much point in continuing: all it was gonna do was just the same thing but a bit faster and longer each time. But it was still a decent little time as it lasted!

It's not bad, but the game begs for a bit more complexity to it. There were so many ways I was expecting this game to go but it didn't do any of them. For example, the sandwich tower could've had some physics balancing to it where you gotta try to place ingredients directly on top to avoid the tower leaning, and be careful with your movement so as to not tip it over while running to gather ingredients. Could've also had more interesting objectives, like having to stack ingredients in a specific order of meat / veggie / sauce for bonus points or whatever: that way you don't just grab whatever ingredient you see and you have to think a bit more. But nope, it just loops the same basic gameplay over and over.

It was also strange that the game is so forgiving: because the game doesn't penalize you for letting ingredients drop to the floor, it's very easy to 'lame it out' and play in a boring risk-adverse way where you just sit in the corner and only go out to grab ingredients you're sure of. It's not necessarily bad to make an easy game that lacks punishment, but I feel like this game could've done a bit more to spice things up. For example, while you don't need to make it so that dropping food punishes players, you could at least make it so that if you keep catching food as it falls without missing, you get a combo streak bonus that awards you more points.

Oh, and there was a weird bug where, on my 2nd playthrough, the game was stuck on the leaderboard page without a way to continue (the buttons didn't show up like they did the first time) and I had to refresh the page to play again.

'Course, all of the critique is probably pointless since, judging from the background description, you were just recreating the game, and thus any feedback I give is not a problem necessarily for you to fix, but the original creators. Bit confusing as I'm not sure what to judge then, but hey, food for thought!

ElanMakesGames responds:

Thanks for leaving such comprehensive and constructive feedback!
Towards the end of development, we wanted to finish up the game and move on to other projects, but I do agree that there could have been more gameplay variety and depth.
We appreciate the review!

[Love Me Newgrounds!!! <3 J00 2]

Quite the interesting visual novel you got here! Quite the eclectic bunch of characters and art styles that serves to keep you on your toes and always feel like you're experiencing new things and learning more about Newgrounds. Very impressed at the effort it must've taken to have so much voice acting and character/background art: never felt like I was experiencing those usual visual novel doldrums where you're just staring at the same art so long it gets burned into your screen. Wasn't expecting to see a continuation from the first one, but it's a nice surprise!

For the most part it's a nice adventure, but if I were to offer some feedback:

*Kind of feels like the story and humor in this game trends towards, for lack of a better word, 'purple-monkey-cheese-dishwasher' jokes and what feels like inside jokes between friends, leaving me feeling awkward, like I'm reading something not only outside my age/demographic but more so not meant for public consumption, more for just between friends. It's not bad, of course, and it's likely fully intentional as hey, it's a Newgrounds game on Newgrounds so what better place would you publish this, but still, as someone who isn't part of the forums or art circle, I felt a bit weird, like I'm at a party with people I don't know or reading someone's diary that is not meant for me.

*Due to an overstuffed cast that all has to take their turn saying their bit, the pacing of the game can be a bit slow, particularly at the intro where it takes so long to get to the actual main premise and gameplay: they spend so much time hammering in the same recapped point (though to be fair, MC-kun deserves to have it hammered in). It can feel so pointless as well since some characters can take up so much time with their antics despite not even being plot essential.

*A lot of the characters seem they aren't differentiating themselves in great ways: the initial introduction for all them felt like deja vu where they practically repeated the same amount of being chill and cheering up MC-kun and MC-kun thinking that hey, they could be a cool friend, blah blah blah. Sometimes it feels like they have no states inbetween being super chill peptalkers or batshit nutjobs, haha!

*Script is riddled with a lot of typos and odd phrasings that should've been proof-read out, though I suppose it's not that much of an issue in this case since it somewhat adds to the comical appeal. Also sometimes a person will still be talking but their nametag won't be present anymore above the text: usually happens when they have multiple lines but not always?

*Game can be a bit unfair at times: on the first day I went to the dorms without exhausting all of my options yet and MC-kun went to sleep and advanced time, making me miss out on all the other options. Bizarrely, the very next day it actually does warn you of this very thing if you try to go to sleep before talking to everyone, so it was weird it didn't before. Furthermore, it feels kind of bad that the game seems to immediately railroad you into events for a certain character so early on before you really get to know them: I chose a person in my dreams thinking it would just maybe get a slight inclination to their potential ending, only for that to practically lock me in.

*The fact that voice acting is very inconsistent (in that it can jump back-and-forth, sometimes within the same scene, as to whether someone gets fully voice-lined or just grunts) can create an awkward feeling to the conversations. Grunts as well can be quite repetitive: I recall a scene where Faye is talking to the locker duo where she kept repeating the same grunt over and over and it took me outta the moment.

Still haven't made it to the end yet, but I'll keep you posted!

EDIT: Yay, I'm part of a DDR trio! It's all I ever wanted! Thank youuuu

Bleak-Creep responds:

Most of this seems pretty fair. The scope of this game admittedly got a bit too big for its own good, and in some choices, like the lack of voice acting for certain parts of the game, were made just to finally release it, since we were already so far behind schedule.

As for the initial conversations in the school, you make a good point. We originally required the player to meet each character before going to bed for the first time, but I removed this requirement for the sake of speeding up the pacing after the lengthy intro. In doing so, I forgot to add a “Are you sure?” sort of confirmation, which I’ll have to go back and fix in the next update.

I hope you enjoy the rest of the game too! The routes do lock in early, but since they’re all different, the experience is almost completely new for each playthrough.

[Newgrounds Ms-Paint Collab II]

Pretty dang cool art collab! I always appreciate it when an art collab presents the art in a very interesting and creative way (aka not a slideshow) and this does that in spades with its very cool 3D gallery space which not only presents the art, but has a bunch of hidden easter eggs and all-around cool architecture!

A particular point of pain for me with this gallery, however, was the lack of artist credit/connection: would've loved if there were some way we could click on an artist's name to go directly to their profile (so we could follow them and see their other art pieces) or if we could click on the art itself to go directly to the art piece on newgrounds (so we could vote and comment on it). It's true that some people will make the effort to look up the artist or the piece themselves, but any measures you can take to make it easier will help increase engagement.

There were also some other points of confusion, like how some plaques were missing altogether (perhaps intentionally anonymous), plaques weren't present for some of the art assets like the resident evil items or easter egg trenchcoat agent in the fire, some plaques are too low to the ground to be able to read (perhaps a crouch button should be added), and some plaques just have godawful font choices that hurt readability, haha!

SageIsReal responds:

I aint reading all dat

[They had to be pixels]

Hmm, bit of a mixed bag! Kinda felt like a horror-esque Warioware game collection, or perhaps one of those budget '100 games in 1' CDs or a single-man game-jam where you'd find where it's got some decent little experiences.

I could go on about the details for each games, with some of them being kinda neat, others being a bit tedious, others being a bit confusing, deaths being so punishing, and so on and so forth, but overall feels like a bit of a quantity-over-quality situation where they are just recycling the same scenario and mechanics but making minor cosmetic adjustments in a vain attempt to stretch it out. As usual, there's a good amount of novelty in the presentation and experimentation, and it's not bad (especially given the low development time), but perhaps might've just liked a more solid fleshed-out single experience!

It didn't help that the game barely seemed to be holding itself together at times with glitchy/exploitable pathfinding from enemies making them feel less threatening, mission-critical items randomly spawning within walls making them impossible to pick up, wonky collision detection that can get you stuck in walls, and so on: really made me less inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt.

adriendittrick responds:

Yeah that's true, I barely spent any time on the physics engine, it's literally just a pixel perfect collision script with the background :p and yes, I was going for the quantity aspect in this one.

[Robot Factory]

Quite the interesting little game! Overall I feel like the game is pretty professionally crafted with nice and polished presentation and gamefeel, and it delivers a nice short and sweet story which is enhanced through the design mechanics. It's a nice little Papers Please-esque game, though I will stay that, for me, it did feel a bit predictable, didn't utilize its systems to the greatest potential, and ended in a bit of a dull blankness, even when considering the intentional depressing story!

In terms of feedback:

*There was a consistent audio bug that would happen around the third level where the audio would start crackling and fizzling out until it was silent. Occasionally the audio would sputter back in momentarily before disappearing once again. Really bummed out as for all I know you might've had some cool audio/musical cues to enhance the story but I wouldn't know, so it really hurt the experience.

*I know it's a short game, but I was really shocked at the boneheaded decision to not implement a save/load system for the game, as you'd think it seems tailor-made to have checkpoints for each work session, no? Not only do I think it's silly to force that I'm expected to do this all in one sitting, but when I got the audio bug mentioned above, I restarted the game to fix it, only to see that I would have to start from the very beginning: not really the greatest feeling to get screwed over by something that's not my fault!

*A minor annoyance, but I was disappointed that there was no way to fast-forward dialogue: usually games allow you to click while text is filling out to instantly fill it to the end, but that wasn't present here. Not a huge issue, but it can be a bit frustrating for speedreaders or replayers.

*I'm not sure how the health/condition stat works? I tried experimenting by intentionally getting my health very high and very low and it didn't seem to do anything, which made all my fretting and planning feel for naught (though really I always had enough money to live comfortably, so the pressure wasn't there anyway). I'd expect low health to maybe cause robots to appear at a slower frequency, or maybe for more subtle/tricky defects to appear, or maybe for foggy/warped vision, but it all seemed the same. My fear is that it might be a bit of a red herring that doesn't actually do anything, which seems like a waste of a good concept.

*Story was ok, but I felt like it might've advanced a bit too quickly. There were some characters like Ben that got sacked too early when they still could've added more to the story by being a bit of a nail that sticks out: could've had more infighting against him to cause pressure before they feel silly for doing so since the greater threat was automation, for instance.

*The decision to have dialogue occur during gameplay was a bit of a contentious one. On one hand, I think it adds a bit to the experience as you could decide to prioritize work and ignore the small-talk from your fellow employees, or try to split your attention to stay social but at risk of causing blunders in your work. But it did feel a bit unfair as some people are just better at multitasking or speedreading so you don't even feel the intended pressure in that case (like me), while the people who aren't get screwed and feel slighted since most games treat talking as a time-freezing free action.

*There were some minor typos or incorrect/weird word choice here and there, like 'gormet' instead of 'gourmet' food, but nothing major.

*Bit disappointed as the gameplay gets quite repetitive with no evolution to it. I was really expecting that, similar to Papers Please, we would get more and more rules and more and more potential defects to keep us on our toes and be fearful of keeping our jobs, but no, everything stayed the same. Hell, even the initial tricks that the game hints at, what with minor dents or colors for antennae/eyes, never one popped up for me! I can understand that maybe the game is trying to hammer in the dullness of the work, but I was struggling to make it through the last levels due to how boring it was getting.

*I'm not sure how the performance reviews work out and whether they even do anything at all? I never had a problem as I was consistently number one so maybe I just missed out, but I wasn't sure whether it ever considered quality or quantity or anything like that. I did make a mistake and approved a robot that should've been rejected, but I never got chewed out or pressured like I expected to be, and my ranking remained the same. Again, feels like a lot of these features that would be good to add pressure like rankings and health and so on are just paper tigers.

*Bit of a downer ending! Don't get me wrong, I wasn't expecting for some sort of feel-good ending where we rebel against the system and save humanity and everything's sunshine and rainbows: yes, I was totally expecting a depressing conclusion and think that's fine. But even with that expectation, it wasn't that this ending was sad, it was just...nothing. Like, "wait, that's it?" I can't tell you what it should've been, and again, I'm not expecting good vibrations and can totally understand if you were intentionally going for bleakness, but I just felt like there could've been more, even if it's just one more epilogue scene at the very least.

*And don't feel like you need to make apologies for making a sad game: it's perfectly fine to do so, and being all apologetic just feels silly, lacks confidence, and hurts the game's reputation. Own it!

Chris responds:

Your point on the saving/checkpoint system for the audio bug is a really good one. I tried a few different things to fix that audio bug but couldn’t for the life of me fix it. I’m thinking in my next game I’ll include a button which creates a suspend save so that you can refresh the page and jump right back in where you left off. That way if the bug sticks around (hopefully it won’t) theres a simple work around for players.