FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Odd Verdure]

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

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

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

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

MondayHopscotch responds:

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

Bionic Commando was definitely an inspiration for this game :)

[Trust Issues]

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

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

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

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

Would definitely like to see this concept revisited!

MoeAnguish responds:

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

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

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

[twenty, in total]

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

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

BNTFryingPan responds:

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

[Re-Heart]

Hmm, this was a bit of a rough one for me!

On one hand, I thought the mechanics in this game, in particular the 'pillar summon' were pretty unique and interesting, and overall it provided some decent endless runner gameplay that keeps things exciting by constantly escalating the stakes with new obstacles. Despite the frustration I was dealing with, the fast-paced nature of the game and the insta-respawns made retrying actually rather addictive! But speaking of frustration...

As alluded to, the game was a very frustrating, and more importantly, unfair feeling experience. Instead of trying to get good at the levels, it felt more like I was trying to get good at controlling the character at a basic level: so many random dropped inputs and wonkiness made me feel utterly confused and not knowing what the hell the game wanted out of me. To add insult to injury, even when I did somehow master the controls, the levels came down more to trial-and-error memorization as the obstacles just come way too fast due to a combination of the camera not seeing far ahead enough and the base speed being very high that there's no way to react on your first time.

It certainly could be a rather nice endless runner, and the difficulty could be considered as intentional to create a 'rage game', but I feel like challenging precision platformers or rage games only work if the controls are polished enough so that a player's failures feel like their own fault, and with this, that unfortunately wasn't the case. Perhaps if it wasn't constrained to a game jam time limit, this could've had a bit more polish to make everything work! Would like to see a better version of this as that pillar summon was rather memorable!

ChalTheChalk responds:

THANK YOUUUUU!!! I do plan on making a revamp of this soon once im finished with a big nutty project i have in mind so yea, THANK YOU FOR YOUR AWESOME FEEDBACK!!! I hope you play more of my games soon in the future

[Beswitched]

Pretty cute puzzler with a really neat gameplay concept! For the most part, everything felt really intuitive and I enjoyed some of the mind-bending puzzles you setup based on this transference technique! Game also felt pretty smooth and nice in terms of visual appeal and game feel, what with the nice touches like puffs for walking and landing, the cool slow-mo effect for transferring, and so on. Very impressive overall for a game jam game in that it was very memorable!

It's definitely a little rough in some aspects though. For example, the controls can be a bit jank when it comes to special actions like trying to jump off of a jumping frog platform: many times my inputs were ignored for those. And I hated how sometimes when you transfer into a frog it'll force an immediate hop, mostly into spikes! But more so than any of those things, the biggest issue I had with the game was the level design, as while it started off pretty decent, it felt like it started to devolve. Not only did the levels start to feel out-of-order, with some really easy levels coming after very hard levels, but also a lot of the levels just had extraneous elements that had no bearing on the puzzle solution: if I were to be nice I'd say they were intentional red herrings, but it really felt sometimes that I was skipping the intended solution and the levels weren't constructed well enough to not realize this exploit.

Also, just as a nitpick on the side, I did feel like starting off the game with possessing moving platforms was a bit boring compared to possessing other living creatures like frogs and tanks and such, but it's fine. Oh and I would've loved a save/load feature as well since I had to leave half-way, and I dunno if I wanna work all that way back.

Frogrammer responds:

hey thank you so much for all the feedback! as always really appreciate it, the controls definitely could use a big improvement as most of the players have mentioned it too. the forced jump is a bug that we unfortunately didn't have the time to fix and as for level design I can see what you mean and with more time we definitely will be able to craft the structure more carefully for levels to feel intended but also not to limit the creativity. oh and you can skip levels with the button in the top right corner if you don't feel like going all the way back :)

[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.