FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Maple's Maid Service]

What a cute game! I typically love my games to have a lot of action and guns and challenge and all that jazz, but this game made me really enjoy just wandering around helping all these nice characters.

I was really impressed in general with the game's cute graphics, nice characters and their dialogues, and wholesome premise, but even more so I was impressed at all the little touches that go into making the game feel charming and alive, like being able to bump into trees to make them shake and make leaves fall, being able to kick balls around and even into the water, giving head pats, and just being able to plop down on a tree stump or bench for a little sit whenever you like! In general I love the almost overwhelming sugary-sweetness that this game has: even if you clean your room and go to bed immediately, the game still treats you nicely in the ending screen even though I felt like I didn't deserve it, haha!

The only complaints I can think of at the moment is that it can be a bit confusing getting used to mapping the town at first: I had so much trouble figuring out where the pizza deliveries were supposed to go since they give street address style directions but there are no street signs or house numbers to help (I did like how you can go back and ask for directions though!) It's actually probably because I stumbled upon the pizza quest too early before I could map out the village and there's no way to opt out. Also there are some weird graphical annoyances, like how the broom sweep graphic is kinda lazy and can be layered really awkwardly, like it goes behind a fence you're standing in front of and such. There are some weird audio annoyances as well where music will just cut out or not play and you need to hard reset it by transitioning areas to get it back on track. Oh, and I would've loved even more emotes and character portraits for various emotions!

Overall though it's a lovely little adventure and I look forward to getting a full heart run! Gotta admit though, I wish there was a save/load function since its a lot to do is just one sitting!

EDIT: I spent way too long literally pushing the sheep to the barn without realizing that they were already set to follow me once I pat them.

EDIT 2: Woo, I finished all the tasks! Finally, proof that I'm a good person.

Peti responds:

I've been anxiously waiting for this review to come out, as soon as monthly voting began every notification made me incredibly nervous lol bc I didn't know when you'd finally see this. To hear that you enjoyed the game and was impressed by it means the world to me. Thank you, I can finally rest easy now! 🐇💕

The only thing I can add is that music not looping/not always playing is intentional, so that the player can listen to the ambience sounds. Similar to Stardew Valley or Minecraft.

Congratulations on finishing all the tasks, and thank you sm for the great review service as always! You ARE a good person!! 🙌🐇💕

[Toe II Toe]

The game does certainly impress with its sprite work and animation and gives a good first impression, but I found it very lacking in content and gameplay.

Compared to other simple-yet-deep fighting games like Divekick or Footsies, I felt like this game was only simple, with no hidden depth to speak of. I wanted to employ tactics like ducks and blocks and such but it just never felt like they could lead into anything since attacks come so fast and with no telegraphs or openings being made by defense: for example you'd think a well-timed duck would make a big right hand from your opponent whiff and leave them open to a counter, but no, they recover in time and I gain no advanage by the time I stand up (or even worse, I get hit by an already thrown punch when I'm in the middle of standing up from a duck). I'd regularly feel like I had better luck winning a fight by just mashing rather than playing in any sort of smart way: felt like the equivalent of rock-em-sock-em robots or something like that.

I'll admit that I only played the single player, so maybe I'm missing out on the ideal two player experience. But still, I feel like this game just doesn't have enough content to it to make it worthy of dragging someone around to huddle around the keyboard and play for a bit. I like the idea of a simple fighting game, but I don't agree with the execution here.

plazatin responds:

Hey man, thank you for playing my game and the honest feedback, appreciate it. Block actually can be timed to block both jab and hook, and it opens up a lot of opportunities to counter once you get hang of it. This is further emphasized when playing against another player. For the duck, however, I must admit, feedback has been the same across even those who loved the game--it can be timed especially against a hook, but isn't worth using because it is too risky and prone to punishment. Admittedly, the game requires further tweaking. Luckily I am getting feedback from you and other people too, so thank you detailing your thoughts instead of saying game sux or leaving one star.

Also, the game was, in fact, meant to be a digitial equivalent of rockem sockem. The initial plan was to to see if a 20 second fighting game (for a game jam) was feasible. I honestly didn't think people would have complicated strategies for a 20 second match other than mash buttons.

Because of the positive feedback, people have opened my eyes to the potential and given me suggestions to improve the game. Some of them are (1) ability to choose time beyond 20 seconds, because people found it too short for player vs player where people are strategizing instead of just spamming buttons (2) tweak the duck and add a counter (3) more characters for an arcade experience, and some more changes. Hopefully after I've applied the improvements, you can give the game another shot.

P.S. although the game fell short, thank you for comparing it to footsies and dive kick!

[Blam and Protect]

Cute little game, but unfortunately so shallow that it loses its appeal after a minute or so.

In general the construction of the game is decent with nice graphics, music and feel/feedback: I like seeing the various Newgrounds characters running around, and the core concept of blamming bad entries as P-Bot protecting the portal is quite novel. Certainly could work...

However, the gameplay just consists of holding down the fire button and aiming at the bad guys. It's pretty braindead, and there isn't much variation in enemies to force you to have to tackle them dynamically, like having some teleporter enemies, enemies that attack you, or slow but tough ones and fast but weak ones, or anything. As said, you only need to play for less than a minute to see all the game has to offer you: no interesting events or escalation of difficulty happens.

I really feel like the game missed a trick here: when I started, I initially thought that you were going to be like a sniper, accurately lining up shots to ensure you only take out the bad guys hiding in the line while not hitting any of the good submissions with friendly fire. That would actually breathe some much needed challenge and strategy into the game, since you'd need to carefully adjust and time your shots.

Would love to see this game come back in an improved state with more meat on it since, as I said, the idea behind it isn't bad at all. However, as it is now, you know what I'd say (apparently haha): this is like if nickleback was a game!

factzmachine responds:

HE SAW IT! HE SAW THE GAME OVER SCREEN!! ITS LIKE IF NICKELBACK WAS A GAME CONFIRMED!!!!! Fr tho Ty for playing futurecop, Tysm bro!

[SQUID ON ROAD]

Hmmm, bit of a weird love/hate relationship with this game! Ultimately I do think I very much enjoy this game, but boy do I feel like I have a lot of complaints about it, haha!

First, it was quite annoying that, despite using a mouse and keyboard, the game kept insisting I use touch controls and only showcased them in the tutorial. Eventually I discovered that I could hold the A and D to move left and right, and thank god for that because boy lemme tell you it was annoying to keep clicking left and right spots on the screen at first. Can't the game just detect my control scheme and display an appropriate tutorial?

While the boost mechanic in great and satisfying in theory, there were a lot of little things that made it much less so. First, even though the game says that killing enemies fills up the boost bar, I found that it felt like the boost bar filled up at the same agonizingly slow pace whether I killed enemies or not, making me feel silly for pushing myself to play aggressively since I wasn't being rewarded for it. Second, I hated that, no matter how many damage upgrades you get, the collateral damage from a boost always seemed to do 7 damage, which is 1 damage point away from the amount needed to get a kill: this made boosting very unsatisfying since no matter how much I tried to aim to ram as many people as possible and scatter them to the winds, the only target that would die is the main target and everyone else would immediately come back and shoot at me while I wait for the aforementioned slow boost charge.

A lot of the time it felt like dodging bullets felt completely up to luck. Yes, enemies do have telegraphs and the bullets move slow so it is possible to dodge them. But in execution, each enemy is moving to the beat of their own drum, so even if I try to time my attack after one enemy telegraph to avoid their attack, I can't track all of the others in the big crowd and one of them will plug me unavoidably when I'm dashing in. Additionally, even if I try to pull off a great attack move that will weave through bullets, sometimes the curving road will make enemies shift over which changes my trajectory into a bullet I wasn't going to hit at first. Argh, so annoying!

Despite all my gripes, though, I still found myself playing the game over and over: it's just a really fun and goofy concept with juicy, satisfying gameplay at its core. I'm not sure about the long term appeal since it was getting kind of repetitive going through the same events every replay, and the upgrades were a bit boring and samey, and I wasn't sure if there was a goal or ending to strive for, but for the most part, I'd say well done!

jefvel responds:

Thanks!! Great review as always!
I’m currently reworking a bunch of stuff in the game. In my previous games I could determine whether or not it was played using touch when first clicking the screen, but that info isn’t exposed by gamemaker sadly. I’m going to add a setting for it on first launch.

Also rethinking and working the way enemies and attack values work. Once I get in more enemy variation I’ll also make damage numbers go up significantly. Also yeah gotta do something about how bullets and the road curvature works. A goal is to make it work well using touch/keyboard+mouse/controller, which is a bit of a challenge!

Hopefully I’ll have these things figured out in a future version, I’ll do my best! Thanks again 🙂

[Franco Fox in Fairyland DEMO]

It ain't bad but...it's not that great either? Basically, the game reminds me very much of those memes where they're like "that game sure was a game" or something akin to that, haha.

Again, it's not a bad game, heck, I'd even say it's a good game. Certainly does make a good impression with its cute intro, and overall the game has a solid sense of craft to it in all respects: graphics, sound, music and retro aesthetic. Couldn't see any major complaints with the movement or anything either, other than it was a little confusing that the bounce you get from an enemy goes higher than the bounce from a box (maybe you shouldn't even bounce that much from a box in the first place, if at all). So yeah, all in all, it was good.

But in general, while it was "good," I just found the game to be very plain and bog-standard, and therefore not very fun. It pretty much just felt like a basic platformer or Mario clone without any unique mechanics or ideas of its own, leading me to questioning why I should even bother playing it. Not only did it not seem to have a hook or anything like that, the game was also in general very unchallenging and thus not very engaging, and any bonuses to strive for that might've engaged such as those big stars were both very simple to get and ultimately pointless as I was unsure what their purpose was.

There are also some slight bugs like how you can fire the weapons as fast as you can press the button: feel like that should be limited to a locked fire rate, otherwise it is an unfair advantage for people with faster fingers to cheese certain parts of the game by absolutely blasting them away.

Might just be a case of the game being a slow burn: the bonus level does showcase some more challenging late game levels that we might see in a full release, but even then the overly simple movement and lack of juicy effects or some sort of unique style made it still feel less than impressive. Furthermore, even if the game is a slow burn, I'd still argue that the game should step up the pace and hook us with something early to keep us interested and all that, but despite my complaints, I am looking forward to seeing the final version of this eventually since it is promising and shows effort, so best of luck!

LuckyDingoStudios responds:

Thank you for your thorough review! I wanted this game to be relatively simple and basic so it would be easy for anyone to pick up and play, but I can see how it being too standard would make it feel like it's nothing special. I don't think I will be changing the core mechanics to be more complex at this point, but I will try to add more unique elements that will hopefully help the game form more of its own identity and to be more engaging to play.

The unlimited fire rate on the weapons was intentional because I thought it would be fun to spam it, but most players seem to think it was an oversight or makes things too easy, so I most likely will limit the fire rate in the full game based on the feedback I have gotten.

[Gappy's Playground]

Alright, you know the deal, it's a really cool game and in general it feels great and I'm looking forward to seeing more, very impressive, yadda yadda yadda. Let's get right to business and give proper feedback since you're looking for opinions on the movement, which I've listed in severity:

Dragon Tier Level Issues-

*I find it incredibly unintuitive that wall jumps put you into a committed uncontrollable jump arc, like something out of NES Castlevania. Feels very inconsistent and confusing since in general the rest of your jumps have very generous mid-air control, and indeed if you use a double-jump after a wall-jump you get control back, so why is the wall jump so rigid? I don't mind if wall-jumps give you a powerful directional impulse that you can only slightly adjust against, but being completely rigidly stuck in an arc without being able to influence with directions at all feels awful.

*Had a few times where I swear I jumped right at the edge of a platform, only for it to either eat my input entirely and I fell like a log, or for it to use my double-jump instead. Feel like some coyote-time input forgiveness might be in order.

*If you jump off a wall and hold back towards the wall and double-jump, you will as expected double-jump back towards the wall. However, if you jump off a wall and hold back towards the wall and dive, you will confusingly dive away from the wall, completely disrespecting your directional command.

Tiger Tier Level Issues-

*I found it confusing that I couldn't Mega Man X/Meat Boy jump up a wall by wall-jumping and holding towards the wall: instead I have to use a double-jump after the wall-jump to change my direction to go back towards the wall and proceed up. Not too bad since it felt kinda good to get skilled at remembering it, but still, very awkward and against common practice. If the more primary issue with wall-jumps above were fixed, I wouldn't mind if you still couldn't climb with just wall-jumps and you had to use double-jumps to gain height.

*Similar to wall-jumps committing you to an hard-coded arc, if felt a little bit bad that dives also hard-commit you into an arc without being able to influence it slightly. It doesn't feel as bad as wall-jumps and kinda makes more sense, but still, a bit of influence would feel nice (but I deem this a lower threat since it feels more acceptable).

Wolf Tier Level Issues-

*Felt like the wall stickiness was too much: I don't mind the stickiness since it allows people to more easily hold away from the wall and pressing jump to wall-jump without falling off of it too quickly and using their double-jump instead, but in general it felt hard to disengage from a wall when you're trying to rush through a level and accidently graze one, and also it felt like you just slide too slowly: perhaps you should slide down at a fixed rate instead of this awkward increasing speed.

*Wish when you're sticking to a wall it would have some puffs of smoke or a nice sliding sound effect: feels very bland and static compared to all of the other juicy effects for jumping and the like.

*Feels like the run doesn't do much, takes too long to start up, and might just be unnecessary? The basic movement already feels fast and fun enough. Maybe if running gave you a faster initial boost and a satisfying puff of smoke instead of slowly accelerating (like in Kirby, I think?): boosts are more fun than runs.

LeviRamirez responds:

Thank you for the feedback! I'm gonna try and tackle all of your teirs of concerns because a lot of work has already been done in the background on this project!

=Dragon Teir=
- Coyote timing has been tweaked & being able to dive in the direction you are holding on the fly either from a wall-jump or in general has been added! Those were just mistakes I didn't account for in time for the demo and those 2 have specifically been addressed! As for the jump arch from the wall-jump, this is something that I'll talk about in the next tier but I want to jump off the wall to feel "realistic" I guess. When kicking off the wall I want the player to be repeled entirely in the opposite direction of the wall, and the double jump is there for players to be able to some degree to do it with the double jump. This is a dumb hill to die on but I like this feature a lot. However, it has / will be continually tweaked as the project progresses. In this prototype you are able to repel forward or be idle and not move with no deceleration. Now, As of writing this response you can do the repel against the wall or hold back / no key control and be in a less strict arch (I.e Holding back lets you slowly come back towards the wall) I hope that makes sense, it's the best way I can describe it.

=Tiger Tier=
In this game I wanted my wall jumps to NOT be like the Mega Man X and Meat Boy wall jump style. I know it's popular and I know people like it but I don't want that to be in this game, I just don't. Also, the dive arch being in a committed arch is also important as it's a trade-off for the speed and extra air time on top of double jumping. (You can break out of a dive from a double jump if you haven't done one yet.)

=Wolf Tier=
One of the most common complaints was the wall stickiness, and that was fixed very quickly! It isn't in the demo but in the continual development, the walls are much less sticky! Also acceleration and movement will be tweaked in tandum with the game so by the final product hopefully, the game feels even better!

I'm glad you liked the game and took the time to write a very strong list of issues you had with the game! I would say 9/10 of the things you brought up have already been addressed!!!!

[Charles, the Bee [Beta]]

It's a cute little game, but it definitely felt pretty rough (which is understandable given its a game jam game, but still, rough is rough and this ain't the game jam site).

While I enjoyed the juxtaposition and sudden twist of going from a harvesting game to a dancing game (I imagine in my head that the bee is supposed to give the pollen to the hive but through cooking the books is able to hide it from auditors to use for his personal illegal dancing), doing the same thing over and over without any big changes to them started to turn stale, especially since the harvesting game felt like the weakest of the two and most repetitive since the amount gets larger and larger.

It's certainly impressive that we get two games for one, but in this case, I would prefer quality over quantity: one strong game rather than two weak games. The harvesting game was pretty generic and lacking any sort of unique elements to it, and the dancing game, while the most interesting, felt really lacking in several factors: the note charts didn't feel sequenced to the beat properly, the feedback from hitting or missing notes was missing and made it difficult to tell how you're doing, the opponent isn't involved in the dance-off during so it feels less thrilling, scoring was too lenient, and so on and so forth.

It's cute and could be an interesting adventure, but it felt so unpolished that it really made the journey less than ideal: would love to perhaps see a more finalized version of this if this is indeed version 0.1 and not version 1.0.

BluePinGames responds:

Wow! Thanks so much for taking the time to help us make the game better :D

Whether it's 0.1 or 1.0, we intend to make many, many changes. Your feedback will certainly help us get to a more fun place with this game. We are already working on improving both the harvesting and rhythm sections.

The latter is definitely easier to improve, but we're committed to making both experiences great. Again, thanks for the nuanced feedback!

[MS Paint Collab 2023]

Hey, pretty cool collab! I always appreciate when a collab goes above and beyond the typical slide show, and creating this whole virtual 3D art gallery with fun little gags and so on is great! Really turns it into a fun little adventure that I believe gets more people to check out all the art and spread the love, so the effort is much appreciated.

The only complaint I can think of is that there's no way to click on the artwork to see the art on Newgrounds (where you could vote on it) and no way to click on the artist name to go to their page and follow them: I know you can find 'em in the credits but convenience is key to get people the attention they deserve. Oh, and it's weird that the game doesn't just automatically lock your cursor in since it's necessary, but at least there is the option. Nice work all around, and man, it's amazing what people can do in MS Paint nowadays!

Frosty responds:

the reason why it doesn't auto-lock the cursor is that it doesn't work unless it's attached to a physical button, as far as I'm aware. I'm glad you liked the collab : P

also yes ms paint is a surprisingly strong software for what it's worth

[The Wizard Ran: Chapter 6]

Goddamn you Albatross! I was on track to collecting all of the orbs and you just had to go a-murderin' the two hunters and lock me into another ending I wasn't going for! Now I gotta do minesweeper all over again! Arrrghh!

Anyway, another fun chapter in this thrilling adventure! So far I've got three endings: murdering by Albatross (goddamn you Albatross, I'm trying to avoid killing those two since it plays the sad music), story ending with jumping into the tear (didn't expect the game to actually put important stuff into the main ending as a lot of it is contingent on doing additional endings from previous games, and you've had a pattern so far of the main ending being the ignorant 'run away' ending, so I'm interested to see where it goes as it was pretty epic) and the 3 orb ending (which, as silly and low-effort as that boss fight was, it was actually pretty intense haha). Had a blast getting all of these and will see how many others I can get.

(Little bug I found: if you go to the south wall of the research room you can peer into the blue dimension? Probably just some malfunctioning collision, but you never know with this game, haha)

adriendittrick responds:

thanks for playing :)
The blue dimension was indeed initially a bug but I've discovered it and put a bunch of respawn demons in it (the ones that appear when you press R) so now it's a feature :p

[Gutcorp]

This one was a real oddball for me: it looks like it should be cool, what with its flashy graphics and presentation, crazy shooting action with neat enemy telegraphs and effects, interesting body part management system, and so on, but I found it to be very bad to actually play.

The combat of the game just felt very limp and unsatisfying: despite there being some visual feedback for attacks like screenshake and the enemies flashing and sparking, it just felt incredibly lackluster, especially due to the lack of sound. Speaking of sound, the lack of music or some sort of background track was a real bummer as well: why do you have music for the equipment room but not actual combat? In general the audio was a huge let down with so many elements being completely silent, such as the aforementioned lack of a 'enemy hit' sound.

The game was also just very confusing with me having no idea what was going on and what the objective was. I know I had to fight, and eventually I figured out I had to stand in these circles for body parts to spawn, but so many elements were unclear. How does it determine what body part gets hurt, and can they get hurt from usage like durability wear-down? What is the energy bar, and why is it not filling up when I'm picking up energy? Why do I lose a body part I've swapped out in a previous round instead of putting in my inventory for later use?

There are also just so many little nitpicks that drag the game down, such as the fact you still make footprints when you jump, the screen wonks out every time there is a transition, and certain guns don't work as you would explain (like the knife not reflecting projectiles like it says).

It's very promising, and it's understandable from a game jam game, but it's definitely in a very rough state: feels like maybe the visuals of the game were put first and foremost without a smooth, core gameplay. At the very least, I'd love to see a finalized version of this game that is polished up and builds on the interesting body concept: there definitely are a lot of good things in there that I'd hate to see go to waste, but right now it's like a writhing mass of muscle and skin with no skeleton.

Frogrammer responds:

hey! thank you so much for the feedback i have now watched the video and can answer. i agree with literally everything you said, it's fairly a bad game with big potential and great work from the art team and the composer, unfortunately we couldn't fix the bug in the web but there is a main track for the game that has a chance of not playing, and it sucks cuz its a banger track. anw yeah the visuals were pretty much of a focus at first (the body getting procedurally animated), and then i had to recode a lot of stuff as we were changing the design of the game throughout the jam and with scope this big, that obviously affected the quality of everything so it turned out to be a very messy wrap. no tutorial, no clear telegraphing simply cuz we had no time. thank you so much for being this straightforward, i appreciate your honesty and time :)