FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Mother's Sword - Web Demo]

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

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

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

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

MonsiStudios responds:

Thanks for your feedback! :)

[Mighty Tanker Power Wankers]

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

Fish125 responds:

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

[GhoulScrapers - Prototype]

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

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

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

ShortCakeCafe responds:

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

[Jeri Tower!]

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

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

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

succojones responds:

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

[Death To The Humans!]

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

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

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

blit-blat responds:

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

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

[JOKE, PLEASE]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Frogrammer responds:

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

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

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

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


thanks again!

[Dino Time]

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

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

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

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

NattoSumi responds:

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

[Dungeon Deli]

Jeez, I hate to say this, but I had a really rough time with this game and found it very difficult to stick with it, eventually having to quit to preserve my sanity.

At its core, the game is quite the interesting experiment. Similar to games like Necrodancer, it is attempting to change up the typical dungeon formula with a mechanical twist, being not only rotating directional attacks, but also constantly shifting modes that affect the field. It changes typically straightforward combat and navigation into a improvizational puzzler that keeps you on your toes and has you dance around in a bizarre, but intriguing way. It's definitely unique and it piqued my interest!

However, while the mechanics are interesting in theory and ideally should make a fun puzzle dungeon, the more I played, the more I got aggravated with the huge side-effect of tedium that the mechanics wrought:

*It's just so damn annoying that each step you take has to shoot out a bullet, and you need to wait for that bullet to go and hit a wall (which can be very far away at times) before you can take another step. Over and over and over, it adds so much time and turns movement into such a chore, especially if the room is already clear of enemies: why wouldn't you make it so that the player has to decide when to shoot, or at least turn off the auto-shooting when the room is clear? I'd also turn off the modes when a room is clear too: it's all such pointless tedium!

*I also didn't find the whole rotating bullet aspect to be that fun. Ideally, I'd like it to be that you'd be dancing around an enemy to try and always keep your gun pointed at them, but there's just no way to do that, meaning that all you can do is just try to keep them on one side of you and stall until your gun rotates all the way back around. With that, it's just turned into basic kiting but with more steps: not that exciting at all.

*To add to all of this, the game is rather dry in terms of pizazz and juice. For example, killing enemies just has them instantly poof away instead of giving some sort of satisfying feedback. I understand it's a dungeon crawler so I'm not expecting big explosions and fireworks, but something would be better than nothing.

*There were also a couple of bugs here and there, like how an enemy moved during my shooting when they aren't typically allowed to do that.

As said, I appreciate the experiment as I think the idea behind this has merit, but the current execution of said idea is not my cup of tea.

EvanMMO responds:

Thanks for playing. Looking forward to the vid!

[Planet Invasion BETA]

Hmm, bit mixed on this one, unfortunately.

Game definitely had a pretty good first impression with the very humorous and animated opening cutscene. The concept of protecting your planet from incoming planets with a unique planet-clashing mechanic was quite novel, considering you could've easily opted for the more traditional turret shooting mechanic instead. Also, there was certainly an attempt at keeping things interesting by always upping the ante with bosses and larger planets to contend with. There's certainly a lot of potential here!

However, I just overall found the gameplay to be rather unsatisfying and dry, despite the attempts made. Few points to consider:

*The core mechanic of crashing planets into other planets by dragging them just didn't feel that great: there was no sort of fun feedback or physicality to be had, both due to the simplicity of such an action and the lackluster special effects. Would've loved a more interesting and challenging core mechanic, such as maybe being able to fling or flick planets into each other, either directly or perhaps indirectly by spawning gravity wells that change their trajectory.

*The game was confusing from lacking feedback for elements like your current experience points and how far you are from your next upgrade, as well as the cooldown timers for your laser/missiles/etc and where they are being pointed.

*It felt like so many times I would run out of ammo through no fault of mine and be unable to contend with a boss or a planet about to crash into me. It was also weird that we aren't able to grab the tiny space debris, considering we are able to grab small planets that are bigger than it: I guess I can understand why you did it to compel you to play differently, but it still feels illogical.

*Powerups were confusing at times: for example there is a bigger cursor powerup which I thought might've let me be able to grab the next biggest tier of planets, but no luck. Would've really helped with the above issue as well if it were the case.

veeh1ve responds:

Thanks a lot for the feedback! I've already started rewriting and tweaking some things, but you did bring up some things I haven't considered. I'll certainly look into them.

[Y.O.F.F.]

Oh man, this is a rough one. The concept that you're going for is solid and there are glimpses of greatness in here, but the execution felt incredibly ham-handed and unfinished.

As said, this has the makings of a great speedrunner game in the likes of Mirrors Edge, Neon White, and so on. When the game is firing on all cylinders, it can be a load of fun as the courses turn into very exciting rollercoaster rides where you're dashing and jumping with style through all sorts of clever designs. I quite enjoyed trying to clear some of the more challenging aspects, like this part where you need to triangle jump upwards between two platforms!

But overall, the game felt incredibly janky and awkward to play:

*Not being able to strafe is a strange design choice, and movement in general felt way too slippery and strange, especially as there's a weird sideways adjustment you make upon stopping that I see no reason for.

*I didn't like how your gauge is instantly killed if you let go of forward for even a nano-second, as it made it so overly delicate and didn't let you do stuff like drifting.

*There's no coyote time so I was constantly having my jump inputs ignored when jumping from the edge of platforms.

*There were loads of missing sounds and feedback, such as when you get a feather: without feedback, I had no idea whether I got it or missed it.

*The game doesn't even get simple things right, like how it doesn't even update your facing upon death or level transition.

As said, there's definitely potential here, and I really, really want to love this: it just needed more time in the oven!

Kunishiro responds:

Thank you for the review!