FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[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!

[Fruity Tower]

Overall I'm incredibly impressed at the amount of polish and professional construction put into this game. Every little thing in this game is absolutely bursting with juice: the title screen with its buttons that react on hover and explode on click, the satisfying way shooting has gibs fly out of enemies and screenshake to subtly signal kill confirmation, the shop menu with its sliding out tabs and shopkeeper interactions, the way money flies up to the money counter and flips the digits, the great music and how it transitions when combat is over, and so much more than I could list! The game itself is also very charming with a very cute story concept that bleeds into many facets, such as the weaponry named with all sorts of fruit puns and the various fruit-based enemies. Really, really cool stuff!

However, at the end of the day, the core gameplay really didn't excite me that much and I easily found myself getting bored and struggling to continue despite how good it looked. Don't get me wrong, it starts out pretty good what with its decent shooting against various enemies to fight, and I was excited to get to the top of the tower. But in the end it really just felt like a repetitive slog: the players moveset is very simple with no chance for unique expression, the enemies were pretty generic and unchallenging, there were no fun midway challenges like bosses, the combat rooms felt really cramped with no space for moving around, all of the guns were functionally boring and only differed in forced numerical advantages meaning that even slightly fun guns had to be unfortunately left behind due to lackluster damage, and so on.

I think the big killer for me was just how forced the metaprogression felt. It never felt like I was jumping from the balcony to get back to the store because it was getting too hard: it was more that the enemies were becoming too frustratingly spongy and thus I needed a new gun to make the time-to-kill feel less like a slog. But then I'd hate doing that since going back to buy guns would mean that now I'm cashless I have to climb all the way back through the previous floors to get back to where I was because I can't purchase a skip (and even if I could pay to skip a bit, do I want to risk going into debt instead of playing it safe?) Yes, climbing back with a new gun can be a bit nice since you can flex on earlier enemies with your numerical advantage, taking them out in one shot, but I felt that feeling didn't counteract the overall feeling of having to go through it all again to get back, especially since there wasn't any sort of randomization or special events to perhaps freshen things up on a return trip. I just hated having to deal with money and the debt mechanic and so on: it just added so much stress and paranoia that made me optimize the fun out of the game, playing safe to keep money but in doing so making the game so repetitive through backtracking.

There were also other slight annoyances with the game, such as how the gun is, instead of being more logically offset to where their hand is, is centered right on top of our player, meaning that we can't even see our cute lil' guy, and that combat could sometimes be obscured due to the sheer amount of visual flair the game was, what with the overall monochromatic theme, tons of blood, screen-shake, unnecessary limited field of view, and so on. Also I kind of hated whenever I had to buy multiple things from the shopkeeper as it meant watching their animation play out for each item without being able to skip it: little annoyances like that where the juiciness of the game was maybe a bit too indulgent. The tilted geometry of the game could be a bit confusing at well in terms of where collision boxes are, too.

Again, overall I think it's a great game and has some super professional polish to it all, but the gameplay was a bit of a miss for me due to how simple and repetitive it can be and how numerical it all felt. It's still fun and interesting enough that I still plan on trying to make my way to the top though!

EDIT: Made it through and beat the final boss! Boss fight was a bit of a letdown as it was very simple and just one phase, but I did appreciate what a spectacle it was, especially the intro and outro. You'll laugh, but I totally goofed in the outro: after I won the fight and was carrying him over to the balcony, I threw him, only for him to stop short of falling off. I then walked over to pick him up but got a bit too close to the edge and unintentionally jumped off! Luckily I was immediately able to buy my way back to the top and properly throw him off without even having to fight him again, haha! (oh it looks like there is an achiveo for this, so it was actually intended as a possibility, wow)

Prox276 responds:

Very insightful and thorough review as always! I always look forward to these! <3
I'll definitely be working on all of these things in my future games. Specifically creating a more exciting and deep gameplay loop. Kinda went style over substance with this one, I agree. :P