FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[CypherGrid]

Pretty well constructed and interesting game, but man did I get lost once it came to the priority stuff and ended up quitting in confusion.

Before I get to that, I do want to give the game a lot of props. I love that the tutorial isn't just a wall of text but is actually very visual, has extended details you can view on hover-over, and gives you great examples to work through to cement the various rules. Furthermore, I love that there are options to skip (to allow you to get to the game quickly on replays) and repeat (if you don't understand). Finally, I mean in general the presentation and construction of the game is really solid: graphics are very nice, menus are great and reactive, and so on. All of this gives a great first impression and made me really want to love the game!

Unfortunately, now I gotta get back to where I left off, in that I couldn't even get through the tutorial! Everything was going pretty well until it came to learning the priority system: while I think I do somewhat understand how priority works in terms of the row and column close, I'm still very unclear on why it is important and how we are supposed to utilize it. Like, it teaches you to calculate priority, but why do we need to use priority and what are we supposed to go for? It just felt so confusing: it seemed like it was trying to do a good job at teaching it but left out some crucial details. I think I eventually got it? Maybe? The second priority puzzle seemed to do a better job at teaching priority but I just got confused at why some matches didn't work. I never had a full grasp on it and I wouldn't blame a lot of people for quitting. There's got to be a better way to rephrase the instructions to be more concise and intuitive, like perhaps saying that you can't fill a square when a row/column already has a filled square within it, and display that priority field that showcases you need to look for matches starting in the top left and work to the bottom right? Maybe the way it tried to explain was just overcomplicating things. But then the grouped numbers happen and auuuughh!

There are also some other complaints like how the life system tries to prevent brute-forcing, but ultimately it is still possible to just brute-force it as the puzzles do have a set solution and aren't changed up on retry, so while it might be tedious to keep clicking the tiles over and over from the start as the puzzle resets over and over, it's still possible to learn it that way, so it might be a bit pointless and not the best solution?

Again, seems like an interesting game, and it's doing its best to teach it so I want to give it the benefit of the doubt, but despite all that I still found myself floundering! I'll give my brain a break and try to process it later on.

EDIT: Ok, once I actually figured out how the rules worked and all that after some sleep and experimentation, I actually had a lot of fun with this game! I really liked how, despite just doing the same puzzles essentially, it kept things feeling fresh by contextualizing all of the puzzles into the spy aesthetic to give them an air of importance and style. I was also super pumped with the last section where we needed to do the puzzles under pressure and with distractions: what a great final test of skill! Would've loved even more levels. Raising my score for this game since I gotta give it credit that I felt like, while the tutorial didn't work out, it nevertheless made me want to keep giving the game another go since the game seemed to try its hardest and put a lot of effort into it to make me want to love and understand it.

Veinom responds:

Thank you for the detailed review. I currently rework on the tutorial, and I will try to finish it and update the game as soon as I can. Your feedback helped me greatly, and I think I know how to make the tutorial more clear.

[LUMbA: HANGOVER DEMO]

Feels like it's trying to be a Hotline Miami clone, but it spent all of its budget and effort on the superficial stuff like trippy visuals and a grim, pretentious story instead of the actual gameplay, making it feel very shoddy in its construction and just not fun to play (and it didn't even pull of the superficial stuff that well either, unfortunately).

First and foremost, the game just seems really buggy and clunkily constructed. Camera keeps jumping around awkwardly, moving into the walls as a player has you strangely slow down and jitter around, you've got enemies spawning outside of the walls or glitching into them, you've got text that's so tiny and awkwardly scaled down that it gets all pixelated and hard to read, and it's just really difficult to parse what the game wants and how it works: for example I have no idea how to win the helicopter boss fight since its bullets don't seem to hurt me until they randomly do, among other things. In general the game feels like it is barely holding itself together: I'd like to say its a cool intentional extension of the story's crazy world infecting you as a player to feel crazy as well, but no, it just feels bad.

Even if we try to move past the buggy and shoddily constructed nature of the game, the actual gameplay isn't anything to write home about in its current state. Levels are incredibly bland and boring corridors with no variance in objectives or layout, enemies are braindead and unsatisfying to kill and have annoying zero-telegraph attacks, and in general the gameplay just devolves into running forward and holding down the fire button: there's no compelling hook or cool fast-paced strategic design to the gameplay!

That's not to say that everything is bad. I do think the story and visuals are quite interesting and trippy, there is a decent variety in how the levels are staged (but not played), there are some nice touches like the various ways enemies gorily blow up upon death, and while I don't think the execution was great, I was impressed at the very unique design concept for the helicopter fight! Also I thought that the title screen was pretty cool which was surprising considering how shoddy the game felt and how developers usually skimp on such things (though the volume meter on the title screen did not reflect what the volume is actually set to on initial load). Certainly has potential and does make me intrigued to see what a final polished version of this would be.

I just feel that this game didn't take the time to create a solid code/engine foundation or a interesting gameplay loop and instead raced ahead to focus too much on superficial things. I understand you probably got a really cool and deep story in your head with all sorts of crazy events you want the player to experience, but the game is so badly constructed to deliver those effectively as it stands. There is potential in this game, and if you were to polish everything up and make some better designed combat, I think it could be pretty neat. Best of luck!

TeamLumba responds:

Thanks for the giant review! We'll be using this to refine the game for the full release.

[The Whicher]

Heh, quite the amusing little adventure! Love that old-school Flash art style, love the goofy running animation, and in general I laughed at a lot of the jokes, including the subtle ones like the ever-changing name of Syldevin and the game misinterpreting options, like telling the King to run away with the gold when you'd think the option implies that it would be the Whicher running away with it.

The stat requirements always being one point higher than you have is a funny joke as well, though it did have the unfortunate side effect of bumming me out that there was less replay value than I thought! That was probably the biggest disappointment, in that a lot of the choices were 'but thou must' choices with no actual variance, so repeat playthroughs didn't leave much to be discovered. Bit conflicted: I feel not having a choice and not being able to make a difference is part of the humor, but still, it does make it less of a game.

Overall it was a short and sweet adventure that got a chuckle out of me, but couldn't help but feel that I wanted more out of it: take that as a compliment that it hooked me, I suppose! I'm probably taking it a bit too seriously considering it's probably supposed to just be a little joke instead of a full-fledged game.

Joeyag responds:

Thanks a lot! I started making this on mid to late march, and it was supposed to be just a short story, really. The initial idea was something similar to Super PSTW Action RPG - i'm pretty sure you're familiar with xD - with just the one storyline depicting the frustration when we are mislead by a choice in a game. I thought about expanding it with the non frustrating choices, but that would bring me two problems: animating it all would take a lot of time; and if the player picked all the non frustrating choices, they wouldn't get the point of the game. Maybe if i were smart and started making the game when FFJ23 was announced, i would have been able to find better solutions for this, but i opted to make it simpler rather than more complex due to time. All of that are definitely somethings to learn for the future.
Thank you so much for the helpful review!

[Pixel Dash 2]

Hmmm, bit of a mixed bag here, I feel! Some of the modes are pretty decent, but some of the other modes feel rather bad and actually contribute to giving a bad first impression, so I would nix them altogether, ideally, and just keep what works.

Classic mode is pretty much the worst of the bunch and contributes to the terrible first impression that I was talking about. Once you've seen one classic mode level, you've pretty much seen them all as there's really no way to significantly scale them up or diversify them in any meaningful way, and the levels reflect that by just changing up the green area size or adding pre-built boxes which is incredibly shallow (how the hell is a level with pre-placed boxes considered a new level? I could make that level by just playing the first level and putting the blocks in myself, and it's pointless anyway because I can just click the boxes away as if I placed them! Was that intentional, or a bug?) The levels in Classic mode aren't tests of skill or wits, they are just tests of patience as it is a foregone conclusion to eventually win by just filling everything in bit-by-bit.

Breakable mode is just Classic mode with a bit of time-pressure: it still suffers the same dilemma as Classic mode where every level is functionally the same and is therefore quite boring, but at least it has something to encourage the player to play quickly and therefore be a bit more engaged. It's a step up, but I would still consider this a mode that should probably be removed.

The Precise and Bad Pixels modes is where the game starts to have some decent ideas. I still don't think it's that fun necessarily, but at the very least there is actually some manner of skill and decision-making required from the player to reach a solution, and the levels actually start to diversify themselves in interesting ways, such as having multiple green zones with their own count requirements. It's here that the game actually has something slightly interesting to it, and I feel that these should be the only two modes the game has: better to showcase the best part of the game than risk the player getting bored from the other modes which are given top billing and could lead to them quitting before the good stuff. At the very most, you could maybe combine these two modes with the breakable rules as well to create the best of all worlds (though the breakable rules might be a bit annoying when having to manage everything else).

Oh, and I do like how you can click and drag to put down multiple blocks in a row: helps avoid flaring up my carpal tunnel from having to click every individual square, so thanks for that!

blit-blat responds:

The pre-placed boxes are intentional. If you're playing on a mobile device (which the game was designed primarily for) the best tactic is to immediately draw a square around the win zone. By having pre-placed blocks you'll actually be removing them if your drag your fingers in too wide an area, thus harming your progress, forcing you to be less erratic and more precise in your swipes. Playing with a mouse offers more precision by default, so this aspect is probably lost on desktop.

Breakable originally wasn't a standalone mode, but a feature of certain levels as per your suggestion. But as you also rightly suggested, this just became frustrating (and not in a fun way!) when combined with other mechanics - especially the multiple win zones - so was moved into it's own category.

Other ideas that were tested an scrapped were being able to place a limited number of bricks, bricks not being removable once placed and "paintable" pixels (you'd have to get bad pixels into a paint zone to turn them good and then into the win zone). These were ultimately rejected for being too annoying or too puzzley.

This isn't meant to be a puzzle game, it's meant to be frantic and fast paced (hence the dash). It's meant to be a test of speed and reactions, rather than necessarily skill, although I guess this doesn't really come through clearly enough. Perhaps each level should have a star rating, based on time. Although this would require a lot more play testing to find the right balance, and ain't nobody got time for that! :D

[RedNapkin]

Interesting little game! Pretty much feels like a very stylish and professional recreation of those samurai/cowboy-themed dueling minigames in Kirby, but where those were just minigames, this is the entire game, so while it was a feast for the eyes for a bit, I can't help but feel that there isn't much meat to it.

Now, that's not to say that this game is bad or lazy or anything like that: the game has a very stylish presentation to it all that not only was very impressive to look at and witness what with its great animation and camera framing and great little touches like how the faces get angrier for higher difficulties, but was something which I found very intriguing and mysterious. It's silly, but while I did find the gameplay rather short-lived in its appeal, I actually found the process of learning how the game operated to be very fun: deciphering the weird names given to the modes and difficulties, figuring out what buttons do what, and so on was a puzzle in itself.

Having said that, I'm unsure whether the mysterious and indecipherable nature of the game was intentional, and even if it was, I'm not sure if it was the best idea, as I did spend a considerable amount of time confused on certain facets which should be much more intuitive. For example, I had no idea that you had to press the button for the character to slash for them: for me it felt more intuitive to use a button like the space bar, and for the longest time it was difficult to tell whether I was pressing the wrong button or just losing by pressing too late since the game is very vague and mysterious with its feedback. There were other confusing design decisions like how you can skip the intro cutscene with the space bar, but only if you press it right at the very start for some weird reason, otherwise it forces you to run the whole way through. While I understand it might hurt the whole minimalist presentation which I think is cool, the game could maybe stand to have some pop-ups or tutorials or something to explain certain elements, and it'd also be great to get some other feedback like the amount of milliseconds it took your input to register and so on.

Again, I think it's very cool and bold to go for this mysterious and minimalist presentation, but I did feel like the actual game itself did not have much to offer and almost felt bad or guilty in how short-lived it is compared to the amount of effort that was put in for all these great animations. It's quite the mixed impression: on one hand I feel like it's style over substance, and on the other hand I want to applaud the bravery and commitment in putting so much effort into such a compact experience. Quite the memorable experience nonetheless!

NeoD-ray responds:

Boy am I glad to know that someone with actual sense of criticism exists in Newgrounds' review section. Thank you comrade.

Anyway, I can confirm you that the "mysterious and indecipherable" nature of the ""game"" was indeed intentional, and pretty much the main target of it. Mainly to make it stylish, but also because I wanted to see how intuitive it could have been without the cliché popups and tutorials.
Sure it couldn't have been perfectly intuitive (that's why I still added the info the description) but it was worth a try. For curiosity sake.

RedNapkin, as a concept, has always been a simple re-imagination of a minigame (Kirby's Duel Minigame). And since such minigame was very simple and limited, I couldn't really find a way to expand it, thus blocking me from making the project too ambitious.
Plus, I've never considered it to be an actual game myself, but rather a quick and stupid way of dueling in the simplest way possible.

Since I couldn't expand the gameplay and content, I decided to just go ALL IN with the style, appeal and art, until I decided that the point of it was just to "stand out", rather than being an actual game. An interactive artwork if you will.

With all this being said, I agree on everything you said, and I deeply appreciate your review. Seriously, these things are pretty much what I crave for.
Thank you again comrade.

[64 Bits - Kirby and the Forgotten Land Demake for NES]

Wow, amazed to see your demakes go from videos to games, and for a first outing, I found this to be very nice and enjoyable! I'm a sucker for demakes since they can be a great showcase of creativity in how the game is compressed into a new form, and this was a great example of that.

Not only does this demake capture the graphical touches of Kirby very well in practically every aspect (most especially for me in the cute level intro cinematic), I found the most important aspect of gameplay and gamefeel to be captured as well and deliver a very authentic experience (I'd argue that the controls could be a bit stiff at times, but perhaps as a convenient excuse, I'd say this helps the authenticity)!

The combination of Kirby with City Connection driving controls was a novel idea and allowed for some challenging gameplay in having to manage Kirby's now ever-forward momentum, though the world was designed to work with this for the most part so it didn't feel unfair (though perhaps the world could've been a bit better to allow room to stretch). Overall a fun short and sweet experience that even had some nice little bonus challenges and secrets to go for!

Not many complaints I can think of that I haven't already touched slightly, other than the easy complaint of it being too short and leaving me hungry for more levels (and future demakes)!

64bitsanimation responds:

Appreceate the long review! Thank you for the feedback!

[You Will Fall]

Quite the challenging and funny little game! Apart from the annoying narrator who is annoying on purpose, of course, I really loved my experience with this game: loved the really intuitive and fluid feel of controlling balance, loved the huge variety of crazy events that can happen that not only change your balance but also change your mental faculties (such as the error screen, door knocks, discord sounds and the best of all, the mouse control trick), and loved just how crazy difficult it was and kept amping up! And yes, I was just joking, I loved the whole narrator adversary relationship as well, haha.

In terms of feedback and potential improvements:

1) I don't think the whole strategy of holding W to move faster works considering the rules in this setup, and is currently just pointless. Ideally, I believe W should be a way for the player to add some extra risk to their run but in doing so, be able to strategically reduce the amount of events that happen. This only works, however, if the events come out based on time, which it looks like they don't, as they look to come out based on distance. This means that holding W doesn't net you anything as you still need to go through just as many events, except you'll be doing them with smaller rest periods in-between and also you're more likely get screwed over because by rushing, you're actually going faster than the narrator can keep up and thus you won't be signaled by the narrator when an event is happening since he could still be yapping about the last event (ideally the narrator should probably interrupt himself to start talking about new things immediately, instead of queueing them up and getting to them eventually).

2) I think the game should force full-screen and force a cursor-lock to prevent the mouse from drifting off-screen and losing control, which can happen not just from the player doing so manually, but also unfairly from the game when it steals your mouse control.

3) Narrator can get a bit annoying with the sheer amount of repeated lines (perhaps intentional and unavoidable, but it'd be great if there were more line variations to reduce repeats) and the randomization is a bit weird: I feel like I've got the error popup event waaaaay more often than the teleport popup event and I'm not sure whether this is just luck or perhaps intentionally it is a rarer event.

4) I was actually a bit surprised at the inclusion of easy mode: at first I assumed it was a trick where the narrator will berate you or make your game insta-fail if you use it, but it seems to be an actual option for realsies, which is weird since it seems to go against the nature of the challenge. Ideally I think the game shouldn't have difficulty modes: just draw a line in the sand and have their only be one difficulty mode that people have to get through. I do think, though, as bad as this makes me look considering what I just said, that the default and only difficulty probably should be what you have currently as the easy mode, though, because it's already hard enough haha (though if you were to make the default the current normal mode, I'd be on board)!

Anyway, back to trying to see if I can make it all the way! So far I'm only at the 2nd trip phase on easy mode, but I'll get there eventually!

YaenGames responds:

Heyhey thank you very much for the in-depth feedback and for sticking with the game, even with its difficulty. I'm gonna respond to some of your points, here we go!

1) The intention of W is not that it gives new players any benefit or to make getting through it faster. The point of this feature is to make the experience less repetitive in the first half for advanced players who want to get to the point they failed last time again, but more quickly while still keeping up a real challenge for them. And then there's of course the added risk-reward for those few REALLY advanced players who might wanna speedrun the game and beat the fastest times on the leaderboards.

2) I don't think we can force fullscreen on webgl due to browser safety restrictions. On the downloadable version, the game runs in fullscreen. I always recommend fullscreen to those who have a good enough PC to render the game in fullscreen as it gives you more space to move your mouse and thus finer control over the balance. The cursor lock idea is interesting, however, I'm not sure how complex it is to implement regarding some of our unusual mouse-features. Would be something to investigate!

3) We already added quite a few more lines for the earlier parts of the game in this version but yeah more is always better here. In the original version it repeated the same exact line every time you restarted and that got really infuriating very fast lol. The teleport popup is rarer than the other one and also requires you to have beaten the first half of the game at least once to show up. This has two reasons: 1 - it's technically the "easier" one because it's easier to close and half-transparent, so we're throwing it in as a random lucky choice. 2 - we wanted to add some new things in that only appear even after you have already been playing for a while.

4) I know an easy mode is sometimes a contentious topic in games that are meant to be difficult like this one. I do still believe that its inclusion was a good choice since a lot more people managed to see the grand finale at the end which we put weeks of effort into. The normal mode is the way it played in the original version and we still wanted to keep that as the ultimate challenge. So far, only 3 people are confirmed to have beaten it, including me. Some players won't even choose easy mode out of pride even though it's right there and they could do it. I wouldn't hold choosing easy mode against anyone though. I realize different people have different abilities and skill levels and that's fine. That being said, if you want to have two of the medals that give the highest amount of points, you'll have to actually get through it in normal mode. I hope my reasoning for the inclusion of both modes makes some sense to you ^^

I'd be so hyped to see you succeed and make it to the very end. It's a tough journey, but many who have made it said that the ending made it worth it :)

Regardless, thanks for playing and thanks for the kind rating!

[Hank: Straightjacket]

Quite the short but sweet point and click adventure! It's unfortunately a bit short, especially if you just knock the book over and hit the button immediately (like I did on my first try) but the game does have a great amount of depth to it with a huge amount of dialogue and other interactables that intrigued me and made me want to go back and see what other routes and information there was to discover. Couple that huge amount of depth with the stylish presentation and interesting use of the rewind mechanic as a diegetic superpower of our character (or so it seems to imply), and I think this does a wonderful job at serving as a demo/prototype for the main game: consider me intrigued and wanting to see how this shapes up in the end!

In terms of feedback and potential improvements:

1) If you hover the cursor over the book on the right hand side, you can't read the pop-up text to 'pick up' or 'examine' since it's to the right of the cursor and it therefore spills off the screen. Hopefully it can be updated to make it so that text is always visible, perhaps aligning to the left if the cursor is close to the right side of the screen.

2) Might just be me being dumb, but some of the visuals were a bit too dark or confusing for me to tell what was going on. I didn't even realize there was a pit at first, and I don't know exactly what the bookshelf is doing by knocking it over: it says it is making a bridge but it doesn't look to be going across the whole pit, only half of it, so I don't know why it isn't sliding down into it or something akin to that. Also couldn't parse what was going on when Hank hits the button and the cinematic plays: looks to me like he just lands in the pit and the bookshelf bridge is nowhere to be seen. Also, how the heck are we throwing the book and such if we're in a straightjacket?

3) It might be asking too much, but there were some silly inconsistencies in the dialogue if you interact with it at weird times that I'd love to be addressed. For example, if you decide to ask about the gun after you've already knocked the bookshelf over, the villain says something akin to it being an insurance policy if you find a way out of the pit, but by knocking the bookshelf over, he's already acknowledged that you've found a way out of the pit by doing so. Maybe lock that dialogue interaction from happening if you're knocked the shelf over, or update the dialogue for the two different times you can ask it during? It's a lot, but it'd be a great touch to have that amount of reactivity and consistency.

Emptygoddess responds:

Blame the programmer/director! He cut out like 40% of my amazing words!

[Recontra]

Quite the fun short and sweet adventure! The game was pretty basic in a sense, being a simple shooter with powerups, but due to being short and keeping the pace up with lots of interesting twists and story beats, I loved every second of it! Seriously, the way the dialogue was worded and paced, and the way the story switched to a boss fight with a cockroach was very amusing. Also thought some of the bonus achievements were quite funny. That's not to say that the story was the only good thing: the gameplay, while basic, was definitely solid shooting action that escalates quickly with a good variety of enemy types and an alright boss fight pattern, and I liked the little touches here and there like the way enemy bodies ragdoll on death and can end up being juggled with further gunfire or even fall into the water. Would've loved a bit more, such as a second phase to the cockroach boss fight, but it's alright with what we got: better a game keeps it short and leaves you wanting more instead of being overly long and boring you!

streq responds:

Thank you for the review!! It's always appreciated! :)

[Shinigami Run]

Neat game! I certainly like the stylish art and characters and the simple arcade fun, and laughed at its amusing way of teaching that the player has a double jump when it wasn't obvious, but have to admit that the game feels rather shallow: once you've played about 5 seconds of it, you've seen everything the game has to offer as the game doesn't increase in difficulty or introduce new mechanics to add complexity (beyond a simple speed powerup that appears randomly). I hoped that when I unlocked the other character that the game would do something to change things up like having the new character have different abilities like swapping gravity instead of jumping or maybe having different objectives like dodging souls and smashing spikes instead, but it seemed like it was purely a cosmetic change with no gameplay difference, unfortunately.

rotcivsette responds:

I wish you gave me those ideas earlier! haha
I dabbled with character abilities, but got stuck with no ideas.
And those were really cool ones, thank you for your feedback!