FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Clocks of the BBS 2023]

Hmm, a cute little collab, but felt really lackluster not only due to a lack of content, but also a very generic slideshow presentation which felt like the bare minimum you can get away with for these type of things. At least the author's name is delivered in this stylish diagonal layout, I suppose. Also lacks the typical functionality I want from collabs, such as being able to click on user names to go to their Newgrounds profile, as well as a gallery view and zoom function and so on.

Compared to the 2022 entry, and other more creative entries like the BBS Awards which had a unique presentation through a fake Windows OS, this felt like a severe downgrade in effort and creativity: really missing the usual creative layouts and easter eggs/achievos and such that I'd expect from a Little-Rena entry.

I suppose it might be intentional as it's clock crew and they're kind of synonymous with this low-effort schtick, but I dunno: even shitposts, while seemingly lacking effort, only float to the top because they have a hidden charming high-effort to their low-effort facade, if that makes sense.

PachkaNG responds:

Yknow I wish we could’ve gotten more people for this, but it seems the supporter forum is as dead as general so yeah

[GROBLIN SURVIVORS]

Jeez, I hate to say it, but I had an incredibly rough time with this game. Practically my entire playtime just felt like an absolute mess where I went from utter confusion to boring dissatisfaction. I'd like to think this has potential but it's quite difficult to see it in its current state.

As said, the initial impression was spent in confusion trying to learn the rules of the game and what the heck is going on. So many questions kept being asked:

Why is the only menu that is labeled the upgrade and exit: what do the other menu options do and why aren't they labeled? What is this tutorial trying to teach me? I like that it keeps things simple, but this is a case of being TOO simple! What is this menu that just popped up with a ballista button: is this a level up screen or something? Why do I keep getting goddamn interrupted every two seconds with this selection: I haven't even filled up the scrap gauge yet? Why when I chose a tower that time it wiped the entire map of enemies: you're not even gonna let me get the satisfaction of killing them myself? What's the damn point then? Why does only the starter ballista have this auto-target circle while the other similar ones don't? Am I even killing anything: it all just feels like a disconnected chaotic mess? Wait, why did the game just end with a goblin laughing: did I win? Did I lose? I don't think I got hit, so what happened?

And so on and so forth.

There's almost so much to point out that could be improved that it's difficult to decide what to say or where to start, but I'll try to limit it to a few key points for now:

1) Put more labeling and instructions and tooltips around to help guide players. Don't overdo it with walls of text or anything like that: less is more, but you want more than none, which is all you have currently. For example, put labels over the modes in the main menu, have the level up/upgrade screen be labeled at the top and put some instructions like 'pick a tower to add to your inventory'.

2) Have the level up/upgrade screen grey out the rest of the screen to make it more indicative that it has paused gameplay and is awaiting your selection. Also, have it appear with a bit more fanfare, like some sparkles or a literal fanfare sound effect, to make it feel like a nice event and separate the moment from regular gameplay.

3) Have more satisfying feedback for your towers damaging enemies: you know, sound effects and blood splats and stuff like that. In general the gameplay just felt so weird, like I wasn't feeling the satisfaction you're supposed to get from blasting enemies yourself. It's partly because its the towers killing them, but I think it's also because you can barely see your own bullets or hear/feel them hitting enemies, making it all feel so disconnected. I understand you're trying to make the screen less cluttered by muting your own bullets, but perhaps you could approach it differently, such as with colors/outlines to make things pop, especially since the game overall has a very dark palette.

4) Find a better way to introduce the whole aspect of only being able to aim certain towers in certain directions: the arrows do a pretty good job but it'd be nice if it could go a step further. It'd also be nice if this information was available in the tooltips in the level up/upgrade screen.

While I did have a really bad time, I don't think the concept is without merit: the twist of having to construct towers with certain powers and limitations could be cool as long as the game continues to get built up, I believe, so if you do continue, I'd like to see it in its final state.

FishDev responds:

Thanks for the feedback! I wasn't able to implement it all, but I've done some work and will be uploading a new build soon. From your feedback, I immediately added text to the menu options -- you were definitely right. More feedback on hitting was actually something I'd already been working on, more specifically damage text, though I like your ideas on adding things like bloodsplats and I'll see what I can do (without making the game run even worse on html lol).

As for the tutorial, I'm well aware it's bad and I'm actually working on improving it right now, though I don't think it'll be done for a little bit. I've never done an actual tutorial before so I wanna make sure it's actually, y'know. Good, lol. (EDIT: Done! The tutorial should be up-to-par, it still isn't very great but it should actually succeed at teaching players the ropes)

The fanfare's a good idea, in hindsight that's probably something I should have added even before release.

Your feedback was INCREDIBLY insightful, thank you so much!! Would it be alright if you added me on Discord so I could refer to you for future playtesting? If so, my Discord is @fartfish

[Hyperlight Survivor]

Despite its rather simple graphical fidelity and basic automated gameplay, this game does a lot to make everything feel exciting with tons of juice and nice touches! Alongside that, the game also did a decent job at having various enemy types each with their own AI patterns (instead of the usual boring survivors-style dummies that just chase you), lots of weapon upgrades, some events that pop up, and different arenas which make you improvise how best to survive. I think there's certainly a lot of potential here and overall the game feels fun.

However, one of my biggest issues with the game was its pacing. It just felt like it was really repetitive and took way too long to get to a decent level of difficulty to make me engaged. On my first playthrough, when it came to around 100 kills and I was still fighting the same boring mooks, I was seriously considering quitting and not looking back. Eventually yes, it does introduce more enemy types and events to makes things more exciting, but they felt like they were spaced out too far and kept recycling before moving on.

It didn't help either that the game felt a bit directionless and pointless. Yes, there is a ranking system and I'm getting points and such, but it just felt like it was doing the same ol' same ol' and didn't really entice me to play again, especially considering I've have to go through that slow start again. I feel like if it had more unique events like the bomb event happen more frequently, and perhaps if it forced you to go to new arenas on a timer instead of on pickup and they got progressively more intense instead of random, and if you faced mini or final bosses and they unlocked higher difficulty modes or checkpoints or whatever, I'd be more inclined to play since it would feel like I can gauge my progression and it would keep things spicy.

There were also some other slight annoyances like how the arenas just feel so bloody claustrophobic and the enemies get so dense that it just feels silly and doesn't allow for much movement or space for player expression. Also the Ultra takes so long to charge up that it makes me want to not use it, and considering how powerful it is, I'm surprised it doesn't treat it with more reverence like having a special gauge that goes all rainbowy when its fully charged or something: having it just be some boring numbers in the corner makes me forget I even have it.

In addition to all the gameplay-related stuff above, I did find it odd that, despite the game being played with the keyboard, the menu navigation is done with the mouse, which isn't use in game. I would expect to be able to do things like hit enter to start the game and use the arrow keys to select ships: feels weird to be forced to use a whole other control scheme and then switch back when the game starts.

I do think the game is pretty solidly put-together and juicy and has good potential, but it's rough because, well, you can't escape the fact that it is inevitably going against so many other Survivors games on the market like Holocure and Halls of Torment and even Picayune Dreams and so on, and this, while nice, just doesn't quite have the amount of variety in its content, addictive sense of progression, or any other special selling point like a story or whatever that those games have to set it apart. Still had a good time with it while it lasted, but I just can't see me sticking with it without a more powerful hook.

WittGames responds:

Hello! Thank you very much for the exhaustive review. I'm going to release very soon the last update for the web version of the game before the final release on Steam. The new update will include a new type of "starter" enemy to make the start of each run less tedious. It will also include a new Event and an entire Card System to upgrade power-ups and weapons. Also, the full version will have more Events, an Upgrade System for spaceships and much more to give the player a better sense of progression. However, thank you so much again for the feedback!

["Loss" Collab!]

Heh, interesting little art collab! Very amusing to see so many different takes on Loss: had a lot of fun going through and seeing how closely or how loosely the artists stuck with the theme.

While it's all very nice, I do wish the collab presentation was a bit more unique and had a bit more effort put into it, as what we have here is what I'd consider the boring 'default' slideshow presentation: considering it's based off of a webcomic, it'd be nice if the presentation was done in a more creative comic-esque format, at the very least. I'm sure you guys could think up something way more creative than that, and it'd be worth the effort as I think it would get a lot more people engaged and sticking around to see all the pieces.

Moving on from that, I do wish this gallery had a bit more features. For one, it'd be great to have some sort of zoom function as a lot of the pieces are very tiny, which makes it difficult to see some of the more intricate details. Also, I'd love it if you could click on a user's name to go to their page, as well as being able to click on the art piece to see it's page on Newgrounds: by doing this and making it so easy, more people would potentially follow or engage with artists they like, which I think should be the primary goal for these collabs in the first place.

Anyway, putting all that aside, your hearts in the right place, and it's always wonderful to see collabs like this!

B^U

RustiTank responds:

i aint reading allat

[Odd Verdure]

Wow, considering how often GB games feel so janky and stuttery to me, I was really surprised at how incredibly smooth and fluid this game felt! Not only did the game feel so nice, the gameplay was really cool as well: I'm always a sucker for grapple-based games, and this was a nice plant-based Bionic Commando that I really enjoyed getting more skilled at pulling off complex grapple manuevers!

It was a little awkward to get used to the game initially. At first I thought the game was similar to something like Dustforce or Mario 64 where you collect flies to open up doors to levels, but then it was a bit awkward to find that within those doors was just more of the same instead of something different. Furthermore, it was a bit frustrating with how easy it was for the plant to bump into things and then get stuck in this looooong stunned state where all you can do is fall: wish there was just a bit more wiggle-room to get close to things without being stunned.

I do like the game, but I had to admit that it was starting to feel quite repetitive and a bit draining. My favorite parts was when I was pulling off some really challenging grapple moves that required skill and timing to get flies, but those moments were very far and few between: most of the time flies were easy to get and just required plodding across the large map, and what flies were actually difficult could be skipped due to not needing to get them all. There was just so much backtracking or dead ends as well that exhausted me: I wish the game felt more like a classic linear level with obstacles and pits instead of this open world, because at least when I fall into a pit I'll just respawn in front of the obstacle, whereas here I have to awkwardly trudge my way back to try again. Basically I was looking for sprints but this game was cross-country: still ok but not quite what I wanted, and that's fine.

EDIT: Went back and enjoyed my playthrough with a bit more practice, and was really pleased to see the challenge rooms afterwards! Just what I wanted!

MondayHopscotch responds:

Thanks for taking the time to write a detailed review! In our own playtesting during dev, I think if you try to improve your completion time, you may find more situations that appeal to your enjoyment of challenging grapple moves. A lot of the most complicated movement options really show up when attempting to optimize speed runs. But I also understand that not everyone wants to come at it from a speedrun direction.

Bionic Commando was definitely an inspiration for this game :)

[Trust Issues]

Hmm, to me this really feels like a case of a great game concept, but executed in a rather unsatisfying, frustrating and confusing manner.

As said, I really like the idea of being in this awkward mexican standoff with a bunch of people who could or could not draw and start shooting at you at any moment. Moving around near yellows while trying to keep some cover between you and them, ready to fire off when they turn red, makes for some tense reactive scenarios. Reminds me a lot of things like various SWAT/police games where you need to make sure you only shoot if lethal force is warranted, or Watchdogs with its minigame where you have to time your superhero entrance to catch criminals in the act: not too early and not too late.

However, the gameplay was awkward on several levels. First, a lot of the game felt very clunky to control: shoot-outs with red guys almost always ended with my bullets going into walls that they shouldn't have collided with, or hitting two people standing nearby each other leading to unfair deductions, and/or with me taking unavoidable damage unless I tried to awkwardly snipe them from across the room. I can understand the game making the player slow and having to stand still to aim in a tactical sense, but it just felt so stifling and led to gunfights where it just feels up to luck: there needs to be a better way to intuit or react to reds, I feel.

Secondly, the rules/design of the game was confusing as well. You'd think that people would only turn yellow/red if they've got their eyes on you and are in close proximity, but no, they'll do it despite being on the opposite side of the level, making it just feel random and silly and prime for 'laming it out' by waiting out-of-sight to determine who is red and only popping out to snipe them safely. Taking this into account, you'd think that you could reasonably use the fact that someone has turned red once to treat them as red forever, even if they turn back to grey, similar to sussing out an impostor in Among Us, but no, if you try to shoot someone who was red but has gone grey again, they won't take damage for some reason, and if they're yellow, they could be treated as 'innocent' despite them being red before! I suppose you could argue that I'm misinterpreting the rules, that it's not good enough to shoot them based on their previous intentions, but only if you catch them red-handed in the moment, but it just felt really unintuitive. Are reds a pre-determined set of people within the crowd, or does anyone in the crowd have the potential to turn red? I just didn't know.

Would definitely like to see this concept revisited!

MoeAnguish responds:

Thanks for your feedback!
Like some other people have commented, the "Mexican standoff" thing can be pretty difficult especially in crowded levels, and to me personally it felt like an interesting concept, but i understand it isn't for everyone.

As for the reds turning grey again, i actually tried to keep them red. But the difficulty increased a lot to the point where it's almost unbeatable since you might have like 5 reds in one area preventing you from going to certain places or finding cover. And as for them turning yellow again, i thought it should be something that should keep you alert but you can't trust that it WILL mean they'll attack you, to make things a bit more tense.

At this point i might actually revise this game and make another installment of it with the feedback i got. But for now, i thank you and everyone else who offered constructive criticism and feedback on the game!

[twenty, in total]

Cute little adventure! Made me think of those time-loop-gather-info-till-final-speedrun games like Majora's Mask, Deathloop, or most precisely Minit, but in a much shorter form: perhaps it should be called Secint? After all, I'm not even sure what the title was referring to.

Overall the game was nice: decent bit of variety in the puzzles for each key, cute graphics, polished presentation/gamefeel, nice dev room reward, and so on. Only negative aspects I could think of was that the box-pushing puzzle could be unfairly hard because of the awkward physics, and that, as mentioned before, the game was incredibly short and couldn't help but feel unsatisfied and wish there were even more worlds and puzzles to do! If only the twenty in total was the amount of keys to collect!

BNTFryingPan responds:

The twenty refers to the starting time (17 seconds) plus the number of keys (3)

[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!

ChalTheChalkyOne 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 :)