FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Space Order Mine]

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

In terms of feedback:

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

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

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

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

FluffyLotus responds:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brad-Games responds:

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

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

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

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

[Sandwich Stacker]

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

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

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

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

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

ElanMakesGames responds:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bleak-Creep responds:

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

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

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

[Newgrounds Ms-Paint Collab II]

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

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

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

SageIsReal responds:

I aint reading all dat

[They had to be pixels]

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

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

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

adriendittrick responds:

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

[Robot Factory]

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

In terms of feedback:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chris responds:

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

[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.