FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Underboard: Omen]

Wow, solid game you got here! I was a bit worried at the start that it would be way too confusing and opaque due to the 'help' menu that is just a wall of boring text with no visual examples or such, but I was glad to see that the 'help' was just essentially a bonus glossary you can reference for more in-depth technical parts of the game, while Meno does a great job at walking you through the essentials.

Indeed, while the game might seem overwhelming to start, not only does it have a solid step-by-step tutorial through Meno, but the game is also very friendly with having every element of the HUD be hoverable to get tooltips. Due to this impressive design achievement, it didn't take long for me to get comfortable with all of the systems as any question I could possibly have could be answered by simply hovering over it! Want to know what unit another unit will target? Hover over it and see what gets highlighted red! Want to know the range of a unit? Hover over them and see what tiles get bordered! Want to know what the spell or item does? Hover over it! And so on and so forth.

With all that out of the way, I found the game quite fun to build up a party and get them through the dungeon through a combination of setting up formations, giving them all sorts of items to turn them into some crazy cross-class abomination, finding the right time to cast spells to turn the tide, and all sorts of other strategic elements. Very addictive and fun all-around!

In terms of points that bother me:

While the game is quite informative with all sorts of tooltips and icons and such, it's not always showcased in the best way, such as how many icons are so tiny you can barely see them: for example, I didn't notice the icons for how many exp potions you need to level someone up, or the icon above the reroll button indicating you can use a potion as currency for that action.

I couldn't shake the paranoia and fear that the game would screw me over with RNG at some point, like not giving me good balanced party, and I really don't like the idea of sacrificing experience points to reroll, as interesting as that might seem on paper.

Furthermore, I found it incredibly disappointing that there doesn't look to be any sort of save/load or checkpoint system in play as runs can be pretty long and I don't necessarily always have the time to do it all in one sitting.

To add onto that, it was really annoying to have the game always treat me as if I'm starting for the very first time with all the tutorial messages and such: as cute as Meno is, you'd think those would go away on a second run (or at least offer the option to skip).

Overall great stuff!

chazmuco responds:

Hey dude amazing feedback! We will consider those things for the Steam release, thanks a lot!

[ARFENHOUSE SHOPPING RAMPAGE]

Unfortunately I'm not familiar with Arfenhouse so, since it seems like this game is just a goofy tribute game for some nostalgic laughs, it doesn't really do much for me.

Moving past that, I do like to see if a game is constructed well enough so that, despite not getting the references, it still holds up and is fun, but that unfortunately didn't feel like it was the case here, as the game felt incredibly shallow and even more so confusing due to the unclear collision hitboxes and completely illogical distinction between things you should and shouldn't run into. And that's not even getting into the absolute painful chaos that is the audio of this game...

Ultimately it's just a tribute game for fans so I'm not the target audience and therefore my feedback doesn't mean much. I will admit it piqued my interest into figuring out what Arfenhouse is since the game exudes a lot of energy and charm in its strange and alluring little way, so at least kudos in that respect!

NevaZ0r responds:

Thankies for your review!

[Pico's Boss Run!]

Wow, incredible stuff here! I'm a sucker for a good boss rush so I'm probably bias, but I feel like because I love 'em so much I'm very critical on them, and this happily delivers a wonderfully well-crafted experience! Everything about the experience is great: love the graphics and lively animations, love the varied and challenging boss patterns with very fair telegraphs, love how juicy and impactful everything feels, love the strategy of the risk/reward nature of dodging or parrying to build up special, love the scoring system to encourage me to go back for perfects, and I also love some of the wonderful touches the game has, like the way you ragdoll bounce around when you die, and the way the parry has a cooldown so you can't spam it, except when you successfully parry which refreshes the cooldown to allow another instant use. Everything just feels great!

My only major complaints are that the game didn't have a tutorial so it took me a moment to learn some aspects like parrying and specials: you don't necessarily need a tutorial, but I would've loved some more design changes to make things more intuitive, like if the special bar was a bit larger to draw attention, and if you try to use a special without having full bar if it would respond/signal you in some way to let you know it's not ready yet and you need to parry more. Furthermore, with no way to hold down the trigger to fire, this game flares up my carpal tunnel incredibly fast with the way I need to mash bullets: at least for Alucard I could rest in between his invincible states, but with Hanzo forward there's no breaks! Also I don't know why the game has both Pico and Darnell on the board mirroring my movements despite me wanting to play single player: if there was an option to select coop that'd be one thing, but I'm not seeing it, and I find it confusing to try and juggle both of them and I don't know whether it's intentional or a bug. Most of the time I just immediately run left so Darnell is overlapping behind me, making us essentially one character and therefore a non-issue, but why is this happening in the first place?

I'm still only at Hanzo because, as said, this game cramps up my hand too fast, but I'm hoping to come back and get to the end soon after a rest!

JalenBrah responds:

Thanks for the review!

The Co op is a controller bug, it slipped through the cracks despite me testing the full game in multiplayer and single player on HTML5 and EXE. The gamepad code is checking the same controller twice for some reason but I'm not sure why. I'll figure it out and patch it up by the next major update though, which should hopefully be soon!

[Pico Untamed]

Hrmm, got a bit of a mixed impression on this one. In general I like what this game was going for and thought it had a lot of cool ideas and some nice touches, but many parts of it just felt unfinished or confused, giving a bad impression.

As said, I think it does a decent job at attempting to be a Pico's School style game. The story is an interesting exploration of the themes of Pico with all the various choices to make, the presentation and animations are very nice, the point n click adventure is decent with all the necessary elements of exploration and inventory management in place, the boss battles have a great variety of interesting patterns, and I love some of the little flavorful touches like boyfriend getting scared if you fire off some shots around him: you didn't have to add that but you did and it adds so much life and humor to the world!

But while all the ingredients are there in theory, so much of it felt really badly executed:

*The adventure felt a bit too linear, scripted, and easy for my tastes: would've loved a greater sense of exploration and problem solving, but the game world is just too tiny that it ends up leading you straight to solutions without even having to engage your brain. All of the little minigames like hiding and sneak attacking the guard felt so token and handholdy instead of being an interesting system to engage with: would've loved if the guards were more like Nemesis stalking you and you need to randomly react to their appearances in time.

*While some people might defend it, I didn't like how the game didn't highlight interactables when you hover over them (besides the obvious arrows) which made it confusing to determine what you can click on.

*The boss battles felt so terrible: without any sort of blood splatters or reactions from Pico and the boss when taking damage, without any sort of telegraph from the bosses for when they make an attack, without clear hitboxes for explosions and attacks, without any sort of strategic limitation to fire rate or ammo and being able to just spam-click until your ears blow out from the repetitive noise, it all just comes together feeling like a confusing, lifeless, dull mess.

And so on and so forth. Definitely feels like this had a great design and passion that could've came out great, but might not have had enough time to fully solidify the execution, leaving it ultimately feeling unfinished and lackluster. While that is a bummer, I think the hearts in the right place, I didn't completely hate my time with it, and it shows a great deal of potential: would love a more polished version of this or at the very least, would love to see future games from you!

TrickWithATwist responds:

First off I just want to say thank you so much for playing the game and leaving a detailed and thoughtful review. I'm sorry that your experience was mixed and you have brought up a lot of valid points. I really wish I could have properly fleshed the game out and make it more dynamic but due to tight time constraints and attending university a lot had to be scrapped. I really appreciate your feedback and I'll definitely keep this in mind once I work on future projects. :)

[Package Man]

Hrmm, not much to say unfortunately. Once you've played the game for a few seconds, you've seen pretty much all it has to offer, and while you can derive some minor pleasure from running around and throwing boxes and watching them bounce around, I didn't feel like the delivery mechanics were exciting enough to make me compelled to go for a high score, especially since the whole scoring system is comprised by random box variations that can give you an unfair lucky advantage (two people could play just as skillfully as one another, but one could have a lucky run where they get some +1 boxes).

I think the concept does have some merit: trying to deliver packages rapidly by having to both plot a course through a complex environment and manage precise/risky manuevers like throws could certainly be fun. The execution to me at the moment feels rather halfbaked and insubstantial: maybe if it had more interesting levels/geometry to get through (maybe even changing the terrain every delivery so you need to constantly react and replot your path), some fun risk/reward mechanics (like maybe being able to damage the box with bad throws), and altogether just had a bit more pizazz, it could be nice! As it is, though, I'm not seeing a great hook to make it a memorable experience.

CaperCube responds:

I think most of your points are right on and are things I'd much like to address if / when I come back to this project.

Watching your video review, I noticed that you picked up on this being an Ludum Dare game. tbh, we 100% could have done a better job with this project, but we missed most of the jam an only had 8 hours to put this thing together. I was surprised when we got FP'ed here, but I'm glad a bunch of people were able to have fun with it!

Thanks again for playing and reviewing!

[Witch's Familiar]

It's a decent concept that shows some good promise, but at the moment it feels a bit underwhelming due to a lack of content/progression and the presence of bugs.

I enjoyed the basic premise of picking up and dropping objects, but it really didn't evolve in any significant way to keep my interest: many of the levels do the same pattern of 'drop package on switch to get rock to put on switch instead of package' and it was only the very last level that finally changed things up with a few interesting tricks before it was over and left me feeling unsatisfied. Would've loved if there were more mechanics to deal with or really brainy puzzles that took advantage of the premise more: as it is, it's ok, but quite boring and doesn't feel unique or memorable.

The game was also quite buggy, with the major bug being that the objects like packages and rocks don't have their rotations locked, meaning that they can actually tip over if you place on the edges of platforms. This can create very glitchy behavior where, if you pick up a rotated rock and then drop it, you can end up blasting away from each other, most likely because your hitboxes are intersecting upon drop off since it isn't giving enough clearance between the two (since it expects the objects to be flat rectangles in their original positions) and the physics engine tries to rectify it by moving them away from each other. There are other minor bugs like how the 'z to drop' message doesn't disappear if you place a cog in a switch, and the animation of the bird freezes if you walk on the ground.

It's understandable since it was made in such a short time frame, I suppose, and like I said I did have a decent time and it does show promise if it was further developed, but I wanted to give my opinion on it lacking as a full game since, after all, this has been submitted on newgrounds, not the game jam site, so I think the context is fair. Would love to see an enhanced version with more meat on its bones!

nion-ne responds:

Thanks for the coverage and the lengthy feedback, especially impressive after playing so many games. I mainly kept the rotating and janky physics because it was funny in a kind of half life 2 sort of way, but definitely agree that a polished version would need to be predictable.

More mechanics would be nice. A struggle during the jam was thinking of mechanics that wouldn't be too contrived or difficult to implement reliably in the short time available. For instance a "draw string" that powers machines for a short time while pulled. But ultimately I decided on being short, simple, and easy so that most ludum dare players would be able to complete it.

A more complete version is something I'd love to do after my current project. There's a number of ideas I'd love to implement, both narrative and mechanical.

As for submitting to Newgrounds, it's mainly because they were advertising for the game jam, that being said these are all points I will take into account if I take this project further.
Thanks again :)

[Genokids DEMO]

Wow, wonderful to see this game on Newgrounds! Been following it for a long time and I'm glad to see that the game played as well as it looked on twitter and other such places. In general the game feels great in practically all aspects: not only is it very charming and stylish from a presentation and construction side of things, but it gets a lot of the sweet science of character-action/beat-em-ups/hack-and-slashes/whatever you wanna call it, like that wonderfully subtle but generous usage of auto-correction magnetism that ensures that your combos fluidily connect from many different avenues of attack (even when not using lock-on), input buffering and such that ensured no awkward input drops, and the wonderful use of hit-freeze and sparks for great impact to attacks.

Now, I'm going to deliver a whole bunch of feedback that is going to severely dwarf the amount of praise I just gave, but please realize that I am still incredibly positive on the game: I'm just a bit crazy for these types of games and just want to give as much thoughts that I can offer to help you think about your game and hopefully make it even better in future! Ok, here goes:

*I found the default controls a bit odd: most important, I'd expect the light attack button and the dodge button to be swapped as that would more closely match common setups, and it created a very awkward first impression where I struggled to get used to it. I know, I know, it's probably rebindable and there are some games out there that do match this setup so it's just a preference thing, but I still think it's worth pointing out since it can make a really weird first impression and some people just don't have much patience and might leave without giving it a shot. Even with rebinds being available, I'm typically wanting to follow the default controls since I trust that the developer did it for a good reason and don't want to screw myself from changing it (for example, I like how you setup the flow moves to consistently match the regular moves, like how the flow move you do with the launcher button is set to a launcher-esque move), but I just wasn't sure if there was a good reason in this case.

*I had a lot of trouble with the 'chase' mechanic, most especially with world traversal as the lock-on logic felt very inconsistent. For example, on the very first pole in the game: I chased to it, jumped off of it to gain some air and hit the button to chase to the next pole, only for my character to chase right back to the pole I just jumped off of a few inches behind them! I didn't even have the camera pointed that direction, so how the hell did that happen? There were some weird chase behavior going on with the wall-run to where suddenly I've be running the opposite direction or something weird. Definitely feel that it needs a review: methinks it's currently only working for 'best-case' scenarios and doesn't account for all the little deviations that players can have (for example, me jumping off before chasing to the next thing instead of just chaining-chases).

*I had a lot of difficulty keeping track of resources like flow and health and hype and all that since the bars for them are all crammed in the corner of the screen in a very perhaps too-stylish-and-small-and-therefore-difficult-to-parse ensemble and I'm busy focusing on my character in the center. A lot of times I'd hit the buttons for a flow move I want and nothing would come out, making me feel very silly. Would love if I could get more feedback when I do a move that I don't have resources for, like an error sound and maybe something pop-ups above my character with my current flow and how much is needed, like 2/3 or whatever. In fact, I'd love if maybe we have a little mini-HUD right by our character that displays health and flow and such, or at least maybe we can get signals for important events, like have our character glow or play a sound when flow or hype is full, and maybe have a red health bar appear above their head when low on health, perhaps!

*The world felt a bit barren. I'm not talking about the literal fact that the world is all crumbling and barren and bombed-out and such, it's more the general feel of the world being a bit lifeless. This is going to be a bit tricky since I'm not sure of the exact cause as it's just a subtle feel to it all, but it just felt like the world had a lot of too big and boring open and empty spaces that added a lot of boring travel time between fights and a weird sense of mismatched scale that makes us and the enemies look so tiny and insignificant. As stylish as the world looks, it just felt off and a bit too gamey, like it's one step away from being a gray box dev level what with all the silly placed traps that stood out like a sore thumb. Didn't have much of a sense of progress being made either as I just kept seeing the same type of stuff and not many landmarks or changes. I dunno, I might be being silly as perhaps this level is just a showcase demo level built to show all this stuff and so perhaps it is off since it's cobbled together. At the very least, could stand to have more interesting fighting places, perhaps with a lot of clutter to chop up or throw at enemies (there was an attempt with the bumper car, but that did not offer enough damage or abilities that I ended up ditching it fast since it just slowed down the fun).

*There were a few things I had difficulty accepting, like the inability to be able to recovery from knockback with the jump or dodge button, instead being forced to use the character swap button. There were some other things like how some flow moves would pierce past/through enemies instead of stopping in front of them (though maybe that's on purpose since chase already serves that purpose). It's all something I can get used to but it definitely felt a bit unintuitive at times, but nothing major.

*Little nitpick, but there were some occasions where the camera is showcasing something cinematic but I can still move around instead of being temporarily locked: could lead to bad things like someone running into a pit during the cutscene or just messing around and making goofy noises, haha.

*While it's nice and all and that could certainly be enough, I wasn't fully sold on a unique hook and feel for the combat. For example, I think there could be a strong hook with the character swapping mechanics, but at the moment they didn't have enough defining and differing strengths/weaknesses to make me want to utilize them in a strategic/synergistic way. For example, perhaps one of them could be good at guard-breaking blocking enemies so you'd feel compelled to swap to them for those, but in general the characters all feel generally competent at everything. At the very least, if each character had their own health bar you might want to switch if one gets low, but since it's a shared health bar, there's little incentive to stray away from your favorite. In a similar vein, enemies didn't offer enough resistance or abilities to promote interesting play either and they all just felt like pathetic punching bags at times: fun at first to style on but loses its appeal. This might just be a case of not being deep enough in the game yet as perhaps later enemies and synergies and such will become more apparent, but I wanted to point it out nonetheless. It could also just be a developer preference: some games want to force you into stylish play with big design incentives, and some games are content with stylish play being an optional challenge or a flex that isn't required.

Very happy to see that the Kickstarter worked out: it is very well deserved based off of this demo and I look forward to the future release (and hopefully I'll have helped in some small way!) Stay motivated!

NukefistStudio responds:

That's lengthy!

Some of that feedback can't be done now, other has already been noticed and will be taken into account in the future.

The defaults may be changed in the future, but for now only the CTRL modifier on this web version has been changed, to avoid more people closing the tab by accident. It's been many people already who found Square and Circle swapped, though there was other people that wanted even more exotic mappings, which means we will have to wait and test more to see what the best default mapping is, understanding that not everyone will like it.

The chase has been improved already (when there's a "next" chase target, the previous one won't be that prioritized, plus it now takes into account where you are looking, like with the enemies. Parkour is less fleshed out than combat right now, it's a difficult thing (well, the whole game is difficult, it's a lot of knobs to tune and a lot of stuff to try and maybe add, or remove).

We are considering having non-intrusive UI close to the center of the screen to show the flow meter, we already have some ideas but they won't land on this demo. It's been a problem with many as it requires a lot of playtime to get used to knowing how much flow specials cost and how much flow you have. At some point you end up getting a ton of flow, but until that point is reached (and even at that point) it could be helpful to have the flow on the UI closed to the center of the screen. We don't think health and hype need to be on the center of the screen, though, as it's not that time sensitive.

World needs more love, yes. It's a difficult feedback, as you say one possible reason is the apparent scale of the world vs the scale of the characters. Ultimately, we will need to spend more time on it figuring out what makes it work the best. The thing we have worked the most on, with difference, is on the combat, so that left the map behind.

We like being able to move while the camera is in cinematic mode. The solution for this will be being invincible instead of removing this "feature". Some people have already taken damage due to this, but again won't be solved in this demo.

About the combat feedback, sadly, I hate to write this but not only because of our gameplay, but also from seeing many others play (after trying the demo many times, none on the first try) it already has a lot to combine, be stylish, and there's reasons to be stylish not explained in the turorial (for example, the highest your rank, the highest the amount of flow you get, plus switching after dealing damage will give flow. There's a lot of hidden mechanics, only hidden because we can't shove more tutorials into the demo, it already feels like there's a lot of them. The full game will have time to explain stuff and in a better way).

You have helped, thank you. The most helpful thing, I think, was pointing out the possible discrepancy in scales. It's not the only problem with the maps (we are limited with how much we can improve them as we are only 2 and time is limited, but we will improve them).

[Cargo Truck Racer]

I love the concept behind this game, and while I did have a decent amount of fun, the execution of it felt a bit strange and a bit of a missed opportunity.

As said, the concept is so simple yet so brilliant, being an amusing twist to the standard racing game where you drive a very uncommon race car, being a cargo truck, and not only have to make it to the end of the course at a fast pace, but you have to do so without spilling your cargo out! The concept is very comical and a great hook, and in general the feel of driving is fun. Tons of potential here! It's like Initial D meets Death Stranding!

However, there were a bunch of issues that got in the way of the fun:

Crash detection was very weird and way too sensitive: I'd barrel straight into a cone and not have an issue, but if the side of my truck lightly grazes a tree or barrier as I pass by I'd suddenly explode! In reality, I don't think the explosions from object collisions are even necessary, as crashing into something would already punish you by having your cargo pop out naturally, so there's no need to add salt to the wound (though I'll grant you the explosions are amusing in theory).

Movement of the truck felt a bit wonky, and the physics for the cargo in the back felt random and inconsistent: sometimes I'd be driving so carefully and it'd suddenly just spill out for no reason I could tell. Would help if maybe there was more fine control you could impose, or a rework of the physics system, as without it, it could feel very unfair.

I was also getting some performance/stuttering issues and other weird bugs in the later levels.

Finally, the design of the game might like a real missed opportunity:

For a game about deliveries, I found it very odd that there is not a time limit to the courses, or at least a par time to beat. You've got this whole boost mechanic that could be used in conjunction with the time limit to pressure the player to have to take risks and get good at driving quick and dangerously while preserving the cargo. But since there is no time limit, you may as well ignore the boost mechanic since it can only get you into trouble, and instead just drive safely and have a boring risk-free time.

I am befuddled as to why the stars on the course are randomized when the rest of the course remains the same. You'd think that the stars would be placed in a specific way to make the player have to pull off difficult moves that they wouldn't normally do when getting through the course as an extra challenge. Since they're randomly placed, though, it's completely random as to whether you'll have stars placed in a very easy spot or put in a practically impossible spot like right in front of a barrier (which happened to me!) This totally ruins the challenge as its up to luck and not player skill.

Similar to the stars mentioned above, I felt like the game should have some sort of three-tiered reward system based on the objectives of 1) beating the par time 2) preserving all cargo and 3) collecting all stars. It'd be fun if you go from bronze to silver to gold depending on whether you're able to beat the course with all three: newbies could have fun just beating the level, while experts would go back to beat it while accomplishing all three. However, currently it only rewards you for stars collected, which as mentioned above are completely random. Without some sort of reward system like this, I just didn't feel compelled to retry levels or even continue as I could easily exploit the system for easy wins.

I find that if I turn off my brain and just drive while imposing fun challenges upon myself, there's a good time that can be had, but I feel it's a missed opportunity that the game itself doesn't provide these potential fun challenges, as by not doing so, the player can play the game in a very safe and unfun way. This should be the next Crazy Taxi, but without an incentive system, it's unfortunately not.

MrNannings responds:

Thanks for your long review. It's always interesting to read what your thoughts of a game is.

Looing forward to you monthly video reviews!

[Slasher Click]

Hmm, this was a bit of mixed bag! On first glance, it's easy to get an impression of this game feeling unfinished due to the lackluster presentation and simplistic, repetitive gameplay that just plops you into the world with no story or goal or anything, and indeed, I do think it would be understandable for a lot of people to not even give this game a chance.

The game's design can be a bit odd at times: instead of the world feeling curated to provide progressively stronger challenges that are custom-built like a story, the fact that enemies can randomly change makes it feel like it's just up to dumb luck. For example, there was one narrow path early on with tough monsters guarding it that overlapped each other that I felt was too hard and intended to be done by going back and getting the sandstorm ability to blind one of them to force a one-on-one. Imagine my surprise when I came back and suddenly the monsters were weaker and no longer overlapping: I felt really let-down that all my smart planning was pointless and that the game was just going to be arbitrary! There were plenty of other slight annoyances too like how the stats aren't quite well explained: yes, it does say that strength increases critical chance, for example, but by how much? Without numbers, I don't know whether I'm getting big returns for my investment or if it's just barely anything (and speaking of numbers, what's up with stat points adding +2 for most stats except endurance is your health instead of the stat and so on, weird inconsistency).

In spite of all of that, however, the game does have a rather addictive old-school RPG appeal to it, where you go out, grind some monsters for exp and gold, go back to buy some new equipment and new moves, and so on, getting deeper and deeper as you go. There's also a surprisingly deep level of strategy to the game: time only moves when you move, moves have a lot of properties to consider like uses and ranges and time commitment, enemy attacks are modeled as bullets which can be skillfully baited and dodged, status ailments like blind can be used to shrink enemy ranges to let you sneak by or prevent getting double-teamed by overlap, and so on! It rides that fine line of being simple enough that you can kinda zone out, but being active enough to keep you not feeling bored and quitting.

While the game didn't appeal to me enough for a full playthrough, I did think some of the combat design and retro grindy nature of it were quite memorable, so not too shabby! I know it might seem superficial and I do think that the game engine is more important to get solid first and foremost in development (so kudos on doing so), but some graphical improvements and special effects would've been much appreciated to sell it better!

Kwing responds:

Thanks for the really thorough review!

I was really on the fence about how much of a story I wanted to give this game. I didn't want to over-scope, but I didn't want to flesh out a premise that was shallow and cliche, either, so I basically didn't explain anything beyond the villagers complaining about whatever boss monster was the next objective. Still, it's no excuse to not have some kind of intro.

The enemies spawning was intentional. I liked the idea that the player might make different decisions based on the luck of the draw. For instance, if an area makes the player choose between two easy enemies and one hard enemy, that choice might be a bit different if by luck an easier or harder monster spawns in, or if you encounter a rare enemy color that you haven't collected yet. On the other hand, scenarios like what you describe with Sandstorm are also possible, and I see how that could be frustrating.

The stats couldn't be simpler. Your strength is the percent chance of a critical hit. 50 strength equals a 50% chance to crit. Endurance is your maximum health. This was an intentional decision as I find complicated damage formulas can often alienate the player and dissuade them from understanding the mechanics, and I wanted something that made immediate and intuitive sense.

I find it interesting that you called the game grindy, as I actually made a conscious choice for the game not to feel that way. Sure, you can always level up and increase your stats, but given that the stats are mostly only percent chances for certain events to occur, you can never just increase your damage output to the point where you can power through enemies, and this was an intentional way to make the underlying strategy remain relevant no matter how much level grinding the player did.

I do think for a sequel I would want the game to feature at least a bit more of a story (bare minimum have the different bosses be related to a common cause,) and perhaps an entire area dedicated to tutorializing the basic gameplay. Thanks again for the review!

[Portal Defenders: Fast Break!]

NOTE: this review comes from someone who only played singleplayer, and doesn't fancy sports games that much beyond NBA Jam or NFL Blitz.

Hrmm, this was surprisingly a really, really rough one for me! I want to give this game a lot of props as it does a lot of things right, but there were some pretty severe annoyances with my experience that really soured me on it, making it feel like an unfortunately style-over-substance situation!

As said, I think there's a lot of good things to say about this game. In fact, there's so much right it's almost difficult to even describe as the list would just go on and on and I don't wanna bore you to tears. The entire game itself just feels immaculate and professionally put together in practically every aspect. It just exudes charm, and I'm not even talking about just the superficial things like graphics and music (which are great), as the professional touch even extends to the game feel of playing basketball and navigating the menus and reading inputs and so on and so forth. I also appreciate that the game mixes things up in the levels as you go on, as if it were just the same game of basketball but with new characters, I could imagine it getting boring very quickly.

But I unexpectedly spent a lot of my time playing the game feeling very lost and confused. As much as the game teaches you how to shoot with a nice little tutorial, and it does tell you the buttons you have to work with, it leaves a lot up in the air. For example, I didn't know why I wasn't able to attack people anymore until I eventually noticed it was controlled by a bar: why is this the case and how do I get bar back? Plus, even despite teaching me to shoot, I could never tell if I was doing the timing right or wrong as it just felt random when it decided to go in and I didn't know whether that was on me or RNG or other factors I'm not considering. Same for blocking: I kept trying over and over to block people but nothing would work despite my best efforts (maybe it's because with such small collision between players it's difficult to judge where to stand to be in front of them and, well, block them?) I kinda wish Referee Tom would actually give some actual gameplay hints instead of just talking about their cat: I like a good joke, but I'm lost here and could use some actual help! I know I'm probably just supposed to follow instincts and treat it as a party game and accept that RNG is involved to make the game work, but I had a tough time doing that: I'll accept that part of that might be on me.

Moving on from that, there were a lot of confusing and annoying design decisions. Whenever I passed to my partner, I would've much preferred if I was able to automatically swap to control my partner: the fact that they remain as a CPU even then felt very awkward and they'd generally do some dumb stuff like just pass it right back to me: made it feel pointless and unable to pull off any strategy through passing. Likewise, it was super frustrating that I couldn't swap to my partner at any time either in general: so many times they'd be closer to where the ball is and I'd be far away and unable to do anything and just feel so helpless. I spoke previously about having difficulty blocking, well, that was only because I was trying to properly block, as once I started goaltending, blocking was a breeze! There's a reason goaltending is illegal and I can't believe this game doesn't prevent that, as it completely breaks the difficulty of the game in half! Speaking of breaking the difficulty, I feel like the 'on fire' buff (which I don't even know how it happens) is way too overpowered as it just seems to last indefinitely and makes every shot 100% guaranteed: there's just no way for the enemy to come back from that! There were also just some weird glitches like the ball teleporting for some reason.

I could go on with other issues, but I'll admit that in spite of it all, the game is still pretty fun, albeit maybe not quite fun enough to make me go through the entire story campaign as while it does make an effort to mix things up every level, it's not quite enough especially considering how simple the gameplay is. I still think the game is something to be proud of and a very impressive endeavor overall: just had a bit of a rocky first impression that left both a powerful positive and negative impression!

As a side note! I loved the feel of attacking players and it gave nice flashbacks to games of the past: maybe make a beat-em-up in future? Haha!

BoMToons responds:

Good review! We've actually made a few beatemups in the past, you should check our profiles! In fact, this is a sequel to a beatemup called "Portal Defenders" from the early 2000s!

Tom's quotes cycle and he does have good hints in there about how "on fire" works and "turbo" usage. But we've heard the feedback from you and many others about the need for a better tutorial, so we're working on that. Stay tuned!

In single player mode, I'll also see how easy it would be to swap control when you pass... should be possible!

Shooting accuracy is actually affected by a few things:
1. The "base" accuracy of your player
2. How close you get to "releasing" your shot at the exact apex of your shot
3. If turbo is being held down while shooting (and you have turbo to use)
4. If you're "on fire" your accuracy goes way up, but it's not "perfect"
5. Your distance from the basket

If you can capture the ball disappearing in a video, please send it over. I thought I had squashed the bugs around that in the latest versions, but there might be more bugs lingering.