FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Mr. Stretch and the Stolen Fortune DEMO]

Hmm, this was a bit of a mixed bag for me! I do feel like the game has a lot of promise and I want to love it: the whole stretching concept is kinda neat and reminds me of some of my classic favorites like Oil's Well, the game's presentation and polish is great and looks pretty cool, and the game did seem to be introducing a lot of new mechanics as the levels went on to keep things fresh.

But despite the game making a great first impression, it kind of fell flat for me, unfortunately, in a few different aspects.

*The controls of the game felt a bit frustrating at times: trying to make particular movements like sharp turns and such required getting used to the slight lag that the game had. The fact that retracting makes you completely lose control during the whole way back was a bit of a bummer too, as I would've loved being able to cancel halfway or something to pull off some slick moves.

*I felt like the retracting was way too slow: I don't mind it for during gameplay as that's part of the strategy, but I wish that retracting when you win a level or when you get hurt and so on would do it much faster: felt very boring to wait in those instances.

*Basic UI/Menus/etc were a bit awkward to traverse: it relies too much on buttons with unclear icons (would love if hovering over an icon would tell you what it does in words) and buttons can be placed in bad positions (you'd think the button to go to the next level after beating one would be big and placed in an obvious place like the lower center or lower right, but no, it's on the upper left, the last place I would think to look).

*Journals and tutorials and dialogue were way too wordy, in a tiny font, and filled with unnecessary details that just made my eyes glaze over. Recall the two magic phrases: "brevity is the soul of wit" and "a picture is worth a thousand words". I don't mind some optional lore for fun flavor on the side, but please reduce the words to the bare essentials when communicating mechanics, spread the words out over more pages/boxes to reduce density, and rely more on pictures overall. If you must keep your overindulgent word count, at least bold/highlight the important words so someone can get the gist at a glance.

*Level design and order felt outta whack at times with tons of weird difficulty spikes and difficulty valleys. For example, there was a really simple level with no obstacles after delivering several hard ghost-infested levels: felt really weird. The worst was the level that introduces crumbling blocks, which you'd think would start with a simple level to get you used to the concept of crumbling blocks, but no, it not only gives you crumbling blocks for the first time, but also conflates that with a really complicated layout that is incredibly boring to get through as you constantly need to wait for patrols to slip past, and you can screw yourself over if you crumble too many blocks to ruin your return trip: such a crazy difficulty spike outta nowhere!

*General design felt confused. On one hand, you've got levels that seem to reward you committing to a long stretch to get a high score point combo, and I found that a lot of fun to do while dodging obstacles and avoiding running into myself and such. But on the other hand, other levels don't allow you to stretch out due to an overabundance of ghosts and other obstacles which require you to stop-and-retract constantly, completely ruining any potential of combo scores in the first place. I can understand having some variety, but this just feels like it doesn't have a strong core identity.

Muketronics responds:

This is a demo, and it is the first game that we've made. Its still in it's drafting stages, especially when regarding dialog and journal entries.
We are working on improving controls, but its hard to find out exactly what makes them so difficult to use.

[Asgard's Fall]

Pretty nice little survivors-like! It's early in development, but I'd say you got a pretty solid foundation so far as I found the combat quite satisfying and addictive with how you'd setup the graphics, special effects, and impact/feedback for it, and I found the variety of weapons and enemies to fight to be very fun and interesting as well. Game overall has some pretty solid presentation for aspects like the title screen and menus and death animations too, so I like that attention has been made to aspects like these that are usually glossed over (though it'd be understandable if you left these for later on, but I like that you've done them as they help first impressions).

In terms of where to go from here, my feedback would be:

*While, as mentioned, the feel of combat itself is quite fun and exciting, the feel of progression aspects isn't quite up to snuff. Picking up currency is lacking that addictive 'ding-ding-ding' quality to it due to no sound effects and the currency itself being quite dull (I dunno what they even are, some sort of scrap metal?), and acquiring upgrades is lacking the fanfare that it deserves considering how important of an event it is (would love a more explosive level up effect, and picking an upgrade would be great if it played some sort of associated sound effect, like thunder for picking Thor abilities).

*Combat can get quite messy and chaotic and could use some elements to help visibility, particularly to help enemy ranged units and their bullets stick out more so getting hit by them wouldn't feel so sudden and unfair: perhaps a signal/telegraph for their attacks and outlining the units and their bullets would help them pop-up and have a consistent language to them.

*Could also use some other nice things, like a visible bar or cooldown timer for your dash, and perhaps making the upgrade progression bar bigger so increasing it is easier to see: the later levels come so slowly and it's made even worse but the small bar as it makes it look like you aren't even increasing it at all even more when the increments are so tiny.

*The rune upgrades are a little lame compared to weapon upgrades as they largely seem to be tiny statistical upgrades that are confusing and unexplained (what the heck is ignite chance, for instance?)

SmaexGames responds:

Thank you! That is some solid feedback, really appreciated. For the rune upgrades I'm working on a more simplified but powerful version. For example all the confusing increasement stats (increased ignite damae and so on) are now only available in the skill tree, properly explained. Also I think about adding icons for faster recognition. So you have simpler stats like flat damage, piercing chance, more projectiles and stuff like that.

[Dinner For Mom!]

I definitely like the concept that this game is going for with its whole control-control Pikmin-esque or Tonight We Riot combat, and I do like the charming presentation and gross themes it plays with, but apart from the bare minimum I never quite felt like it introduced a unique hook, making the gameplay feel quite uninteresting.

Thoughout the game the combat just felt a bit brainless and tedious. I can understand that the civilians would be easy to take down, but once cops started to show up, I thought I would have to strategize in some way, like engaging carefully to single them out without alerting the others, micromanaging their movements to avoid taking damage, perhaps splitting them up to crowd-control, and so on, but it never got more complex than just sending all your people to dogpile them and the other cops would just stand around waiting for their beat-down.

The enemies never tried to attack me either so I didn't need to try and dodge while my minions wear them down or anything. The boss made some interesting moves like forcing my lumps to sleep which made me have to get close and engage to bring them back up, but it was too little too late as that was the end of the game and just a token effort of complexity. Other than that, there were the weapons like rocks, but I found it too annoying to have to order them to pick them up after use over and over, and the grenades were just a liability since I'm never sure when the grenade person will get ordered and he'll just blow all of my lumps up anyway.

I also just had a lot of weird bugs, like where a rock was forever un-pickupable because someone I told to pick it up died and he wouldn't give up the rights even after death, and for no reason I just suddenly insta-died at the start of the boss fight (and then felt weird that the game just gave me more lumps than I even had before, making the final tally/score pointless).

Obviously I understand that it's a game jam game so it's not going to be the most polished thing ever, but even with that understanding, I never felt like the minion controlling aspect did anything very unique or was something that felt good to utilize, so I don't feel like it's that intriguing as a prototype unfortunately. Certainly could be something nice with a bit more work: as I said it started to get a bit interesting with the boss fight mechanics, and I'd like to see if it evolves beyond that.

Sulfur-Cretin responds:

completely understandable, the game in general is very messy but due to it being a jam game, making updates can end up breaking the entire game. I do agree that the game only starts to get interesting near the end, but I'm glad that part was fun.

Also just to note about the game giving you a bunch of lumps after dying, when making a jam game you have to look through a very different lens when it comes to difficulty if you want people to see through your entire game. I made it so if you reached a check point early on with a ton of lumps (lets say 12) it will override any amount lower when you get to a check point. This made the game much easier and fair but I can understand if it was a bit strange, it could use some rebalancing.

Even though the game isn't the greatest, I'm still planning on making a content update in the coming weeks because it's had the best reception out of all my games so far, but I don't see it fixing the base mechanics of the game. Thanks for the review, I get REALLY nervous watching you playing all the front-paged games, but I appreciate you giving your honest and critical opinion.

[Train Journey]

Wow, quite surprised with this one!

I have to admit that my first impression of the game wasn't great. While the game had a rather professional feel for its presentation in terms of graphics and sound, the game seemed to be a rather unchallenging and standard platformer that felt rather directionless and confusing from the way it just plops you into the world. Even accepting it for what it is, I found myself constantly having my jump inputs ignored when I tried to jump from the edge of platforms, frustrating me to no end since falling is instant death, not just damage, and lots of progress was lost. The graphics, as nice as they were, could also be a bit overly busy to the point of confusion: there was a pitfall that was practically invisible between seats on the train in the section with the first heart upgrade you can get after the forest world, for example. The only thing keeping me going was the rather mysterious and intriguing feel the game had to it with its story (or lack thereof), but as I made my way through the forest picking through all these text logs and letters for unrelated stuff, I was worried it was just gonna be some sad artsy-fartsy crap, haha.

However, as I made it through the forest which slowly got more challenging and puzzle-like, had a rather impressive boss fight against a bear, marveled at how much the world was recontextualized with the pogo stick upgrade, and made my way through the bonus zone for a collectible, I was hooked and wanted to play more and more! It was a slow, rough start but I could finally see a glimpse of the gameplay loop and wanted to see what new worlds the train would take me too!

That said, the issue with not being able to leave the game and come back to a checkpoint, only the start of the level from a train, was incredibly annoying when it first happened to me as I Iost a lot of progress to the point of considering quitting the game altogether since it seemed incredibly illogical and annoying, no matter the excuse.

I haven't beaten it yet, but I'm looking forward to coming back and seeing what else the game as to offer: I just need to find a good amount of time to set aside for this due to the whole save point issue!

EDIT: I've now made it through the temple level and got the shooty and all that. It was definitely another grand adventure, but I will admit it was quite exhausting and stressful and not in the best way. Through a combination of cramped corridors, limited space, spongy enemies, and so on, the game just seemed to be overly forcing you to deal with these encounters and traps with no wiggle room, and it made it very tedious. Many times a pack of slimes would be in my way and the only safe way to engage would be to tediously lead them back several paces until you could kill them: this tedium led to me just wanting to push back them and take the damage just so I could keep the pace up, for example. Not only that, there were a lot of traps like with the rotating turrets that didn't even seem possible to get through without taking damage, and it almost seemed like the game just gives you health items around the trap as an inelegant apology for recognizing that it just couldn't be designed well enough to let you not take damage at all. I'll still try and continue, but like I said, these design choices are really weighing me down and making me lose the will to go on.

Meivuu responds:

Thanks for the review! I'm not terribly good at optimizing pico-8 (it limits how much content you can actually implement, akin to retro consoles) so many of your gripes stem from that :)

If this was another engine I would absolutely be able to make the quality of life changes that fix the things you complained about, but at this point those things are deeply baked into the game and I don't have enough space in the game to change that (some of them were choices intentionally made so that the game could have more content). If you're wondering why I chose such a limited engine, it's because I was already fairly familiar with it and the limitations helped me actually finish the project and prevented it from getting too out of hand.

I think the pitfalls and other minor graphics tweaks like that can absolutely be changed though and I'll add that to my list of changes for the next release.

Among other challenges, the turrets are certainly dodgeable, in some cases it's just a little tricky to figure out how to get past them without getting hurt.

[The Wizard Ran: chapter 8]

Wow, what an amazing ending to this series! Feels like it encapsulated all of my favorite parts of this series, being the crazy time-travelling fourth-wall breaking mind-bending adventures, tons of weird secrets and references and callbacks, crazy puzzles and setpieces like getting stuck in the void, multiple endings, and a classic good ol' boss fight against god filled with fantastic spectacle. There's been some ups and some downs on this adventure, and I wasn't as committed as I'd like to get every single secret and ending on our way here in previous chapters, but I feel quite satisfied and found this whole experience incredibly memorable. Well done!

In terms of feedback:

I gotta admit, I was a little disappointed that the whole time-traveling adventures through previous chapters to collect lore for the final plan(s) wasn't done by actually going and playing the previous chapter's respective games, but I appreciate the convenience and momentum by doing it all in this game, so it's all good.

Had a weird softlock for a bit: I was going to do Shade's plan as I had already done the Run plan, but then got stuck in the void. I got out of the Boid, but then whenever I tried to start Shade's plan by refreshing the page to go back to the start, it would just take me back to the void again, where I would get out, try to start Shade's quest by refreshing, and loop back into the void over and over. Eventually I got out: not even quite sure what I did differently to break the loop! I was trying out minor things like reading the lore things, trying to do the Ran ending again, talking to people, and a lot didn't seem to have an effect until it did. Oh well!

Speaking of Shade's plan, it was a bit weird that I was able to initiate the boss fight but I still had a remaining empty pip for the plan? Bit odd, though I did go back and see that getting the remaining pip in the first world (or last world, technically) just tells you its pointless since it's too late and warps you to the fight, so whatev.

Loved all the music remixes! I always forget to shout out music and sound in my reviews, need to get better at doing so, haha.

Speaking of sound, I wonder what's being said when you die in New Mexico you die in real life. The world may never know.

adriendittrick responds:

Thanks as usual for your detailed review :) there are still many bugs in this one but finding them all will take much time and I need to move on to other projects X)
This whole series was a great gamedev experience for me, and I loved all the community interactions I had :)

[Hedgehog Dilemma For Robots]

Great little arcade game you got here!

For the most part, I have no major complaints as I feel like the game is a wonderful fusion of style and substance! For style, it's got a rather charming look and feel to it all with its cartoony graphics and some great juicy feedback and special effects, and for substance, it's got an addictive and exciting risk/reward gameplay loop through its proximity damage system and a great variety of enemies that force you to stay on top of things and improvise. I had a great time and it just feels so good to get in the thick of it with a bunch of enemies and blast them away!

If I were to have any complaints, is that I do find the metaprogression of the game to be a bit odd, in that it'll slowly dole out new abilities like blasting and such, but then eventually you just have everything from the very start and suddenly the game starts off harder: just feels a bit weird that, as a high score game, it's a bit unfair as the progressively different starting conditions and higher power you get make the scoring a bit compromised and unfair? Like whistlers are a big problem initially, but post-tutorial runs are much easier due to your higher firepower. I would almost expect that every run has you collecting the powerups to get more powerful to keep it consistent, though maybe that's not ideal. Oh, and the screen is so vertical that I find it impossible to fit the whole screen on a desktop computer.

Also, as a minor bit of confusion, I have no idea what the purpose of the 'draw' menu is supposed to be about. I guess it's a nice bonus? I was kind of expecting that whatever we draw would be added to the background play area, but it just gets deleted once you're done?

ClayGodLordThing responds:

Hey there! Thank you and I'm glad you like the game! The idea of the progression system is so that people don't have to experience the slower parts of the early game again once they get a bunch of the powerups. The early game can be a bit frustration/boring after a bunch of replaying so that was our solution. The draw room was something I just made for fun, you can share it around by screenshotting whatever you made or got as your score. That draw screen however runs better on the downloadable windows version.

[Days Without]

Hrmm, this is a rough one for me. The game does remind me a lot of cool 2D survival horror games like Lone Survivor, and when this game works, I think it is quite well-designed with some solid art, exploration, combat, and an intriguing story. Was impressed at some of the little touches it did for events, and that it was even going so far to include multiple endings!

It's quite the buggy game though! Here are a few examples:

I had one time where I saved at a dog, fell down a hole, then was sent all the way back to the start when I started the game despite me saving, and that felt really unfair (especially when it let me go back to the save point for other deaths/endings).

The worst issue was that there seems to be a really weird problem the game has with performance where it is constantly stuttering, perhaps due to it forcefully redrawing the inventory HUD over and over when you go past interactables?

Speaking of the inventory HUD, I had it remain on the screen even when I died and went back to the title screen and it was blocking text behind it, so there's definitely something funny going on with that.

There were also a lot of weird interactions where confusing options will be present (why is there an option to pet donut and pet buddy, aren't they the same?) and where you can walk around after petting a dog and after a brief delay you'll be frozen in place for the response (why not just keep us still for the whole interaction so it feels less awkward?)

Apart from bugs, the game is also a bit oddly designed. Felt like it was more of an action game than a survival horror game with the way it kept dumping me in huge loads of ammo, both from pickups found during searching and from killing enemies: would much prefer if the game limited your resources more to push stealth or avoidance as strategies, since being able to easily blow all of the enemies away just makes it too easy to the point of boredom.

It's certainly quite the interesting game and I want to love it, but the bugs, choppy performance, and lack of difficulty really kind of bring it down for me. It's a bummer because I think it could really shine if it just had some more polish to it!

Elv13s responds:

Hi!

Thanks for trying out the game, the game was made within a game jam limit so some bugs and the length were pretty much inevitable, tho Ill try and fix them [already fixed some] in the future when this game is expanded.

The HUD bug is new to me, if you like to elaborate on how and when it happened, ill try and fix this issue, thank u for finding it out, and sorry it happened to u.

the saving dog is different from Job's old dog, Buddy. It kinda implies in the story that he had one before the events of the game occurred.

yeah, the moving while some interactions can be quite the jarring experience, ill keep the player still when those happen. I just figured players may want to skip fights/dialogues for speedrun sake [also as this I a jam game, I wanted people to have to play the game faster as there were many entries to play through]

multiple endings are a last addition, so bugs can occur there, ill go back into this game and fix them. really thanks for the feed back and for playing

[Bando's Comic Wizard]

Quite the nice little application you've got here! Certainly nice to have something to help people display their comics in a simple and intuitive page flip format, and I had no problem following the instructions from cute widdle Bando to do a sample upload (though some of the instructions could stand to be spaced out a bit more so it's not just a big wall of text, such as putting the instruction to unzip the file for personal webpage uploads in a separate paragraph so users don't get confused as they should keep it as a zip for newgrounds uploads).

If I were to have some feedback, I'd say that the viewer is a bit too minimalist for its own good and while it'd be nice to have the option to view just the image with no clutter as it does now, I'd love if there were some additions such as:

It'd be nice if, when you hover over the right side of the page, a right arrow would pop-up to indicate that you'll flip to the next page if you click, and vice versa for the left side: it would make it less confusing as to what action is about to happen.

I feel like you should allow someone to press anywhere on the side of the screen to flip the page, instead of being constrained to only clicking directly on the sides of the image itself.

Would love if there were more utilities for viewing the page, such as being able to click on a magnifying glass to zoom in/out, or being able to choose whether to view pages through a fit width, fit height, original size, and so on.

Would love if there were more options for viewing pages, like maybe a gallery view where you can see all the pages as thumbnails to click on, or a dropdown where you can select a number page to go to, and so on.

I could go on with other additions that'd be great for different formats such as when you want the option for double-spreads or vertical comics, but I'll cut it off there since I could go on and on. Essentially the viewer is nice, but it is incredibly barebones and while that's nice for a minimalist impression and perfectly fine, it does make it a bit lackluster. It's still a nice gizmo though that I hope helps some people publish their comics in nice ways!

As a side note, I just wanted to say that I found the credits on the bottom page very amusing: reminded me of those hacked in rom credits you can see around, haha!

KittyhawkMontrose responds:

Thanks for the detailed feedback FuturecopLGF! It's super awesome to know that you found using the app as simple as we had hoped (formatting issues aside, which we will fix).

This first version we were concentrating on getting an "end to end" experience that worked well with NG (ie, streams images etc), but your suggestions for features are right on. The plan is to collect feedback like yours, see how we can best complement the new art portal when it comes out, and iterate towards something more in line with existing stand alone readers.

Also, super happy you picked up the "keygen vibes" we were putting down. :)

[Bundle Beeline]

Oh jeez, this was a really rough one for me! I really want to like this game as I find it incredibly charming and wonderful from a presentation perspective: almost every single element of the game, even the boring stuff that most devs don't pay attention to like menus and score results and such, is very elegantly polished and brimming with so much life! I also love package delivery games like this when they incorporate skillful platforming and throwing as a risk/reward, so it should've been a match made in heaven!

But good god, despite how great the game looks, I could not stand how it actually played! Through a combination of a camera that is too zoomed in which makes it feel so cramped and difficult to see ahead, general movement that feels so awkward and slippery due to strange momentum physics, incredibly annoying enemies that feel way too powerful/unfair and too tedious to work around, illogical and inconsistent throwing controls that put the package down when I want to throw it and throw it when I want to put it down despite my best efforts...all this and so much more made every movement I tried to make felt so taxing and stressful to deal with.

Even if I were to disregard the various minutiae of the movement mechanics, the game as a whole also felt quite shallow. The map is so tiny and you only have 3 destinations, so it only takes a few packages before you get the gist of everything and it just feels so repetitive to keep running the same routes over and over. I found it very stressful that the game didn't pause to allow me to read the recipient's reactions, instead pushing me to keep delivering despite them talking it out: would much prefer if it would pause and allow me the choice of whether to read or skip the dialogue. Finally, it didn't feel like there was a time limit or a target goal to hit either, so the game just felt pointless: even if you're great and go for a big high score, without a goal to hit, the game inevitably ends only when you run out of patience and get a game over of your character wallowing in failure despite your efforts.

As a side note, I had no idea you could throw packages at enemies to damage them. I think I never realized I could do this through a combination of 1) tutorial never explaining it as an option 2) aforementioned difficulty in throwing controls 3) game is very cute in general so why would I hurt a cute little animal 4) why would I risk damaging the package, especially when hitting an enemy doesn't seem to prevent damage as a potential bonus.

I definitely applaud the team on this for some wonderful polished visuals and such, but unfortunately in my case it felt like a style over substance thing where maybe more effort should've been put into more interesting and varied content alongside smoother gameplay mechanics.

squidly responds:

I think you need to realize this was done in 3 days, man. Getting it all together was a miracle in itself.

[Handle With Care]

Wow, this one really surprised me! It's very complicated and overwhelming to learn what you're even doing, let alone all the crazy ins-and-outs of construction, but after sticking with it, I felt like a genius once I built a little vehicle that could take that egg all the way to the finish for a 3-star delivery!

It's certainly an interesting little game, like some twisted combination of Kerbal Space Program, Trials Fusion, Tears of the Kingdom, and those high school egg drop/racecar derby contests. Yes, it's a little clunky and confusing and unwieldly (could maybe stand to have more builder tools through maybe mouse usage to increase the pace and the ability to snap to certain angles for consistency) so it can be frustrating, but in terms of a game jam game, I feel like this is a great success since it is very memorable and makes my brain explode with anticipation for how a fully fledged version of this prototype would turn out. Would love to see more of this!

Frogrammer responds:

hey thank you! means a lot coming from you haha