FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Comatoast: Unjammed]

Hmmm, this was an odd one for me, but I could chalk it up to be being an old fuddy-duddy, I suppose, haha.

On one hand, despite the rather seemingly juvenile art and presentation, I felt like the game has a real charm to the way it was constructed and showed a lot of hidden depth and effort. The game is certainly unique with all sorts of weird events and levels coming up to keep things interesting. There are a lot of cool subtle touches like the way you character slowly gets ripped apart with the more times you die and get closer to game over. I definitely loved the weird warp zone bonus levels as well: gave me a real Super Meat Boy 8-Bit levels vibe. Overall, it is certainly quite the unique and weird trip.

The game can definitely be pretty janky though. Hitboxes for spikes felt really unfair and difficult to determine, and movement and physics felt really weird as well, possibly due to the way the graphics (especially the player) kept wiggling around and changing shapes so you could never get a clear read. For example, I actually thought my character kept sliding across the ground like ice, but it was just the weird idle animation and the way it shifts sidewise a bit as it loops. While the levels could be quite interesting at times, a lot of them would sometimes be incredibly boring and having nothing of interest. The combat was also lacking any satisfying feedback or strategy to it. The descriptions for item pick-ups would come and go so fast without me being being able to read them, and there wasn't a way I could click on my inventory items to see what abilities they had as reference either. Just made for a really confusing time.

And this is the tough part for me but, the game just felt super cringe, with the voice acting being the primary culprit. I know, I know, it's supposed to be intentional and all that, with the way the character keeps taking a gasp so he can continue his run-on gabbing and the way everyone is being all goofy, but I was straight into that menu and cranking the voice volume to zero pronto. I wouldn't mind if the voices would appear here and there at notable events, but it was a constant audio onslaught with voices and sound effects and other voices overlapping each other and making everything just a garbled mess and difficult to parse. It can work, but it just needs some construction to it, I feel: less is more.

crow-seeds responds:

Thank you so much for the feedback!

Haha, as a developer it's kinda hard to tell if something feels jank or weird when you've played the game for so long that you've gotten numb to the weirdness. If it's causing you too much trouble, the wiggling doodle effect can be turned off in the main menu settings!

The combat does feel a bit lack luster. Tried to add a combo system where you whack and then click stab to launch an enemy further (or the other way around for a different effect). Wanted to make it simple and easy to use to put more emphasis on the platforming, but I guess it still feels two dimensional. Maybe some more audio and visual feedback is in order? The levels in the beginning chapters are made to be simple to teach the player the mechanics, the later ones are much more interesting I promise!

Anyways, I wanted to say I appreciate long comments like these, I'll try to implement some of these changes in future updates!

Edit: Just realized the slippy moving back and forth and jankiness is due to frame rate and lag! Working on a fix, thanks for letting me know, testing on my lower end devices rn. This was not intentional and the janky hitbox was a result of this. Working on this asap

[Gappy 3]

Wow, great little game!

Not much to say about it, it's just some good ol' classic Gappy fun but in a GameBoy flavor and I had a good time playing it without any major complaints. Presentation was charming, music was cool, levels were fun and challenging, love the way the mechanics were varied in each world, jumping felt good and I didn't have any botched jumps due to bad inputs or anything like that, and so on: it's all that and a bag of chips!

If I had to search myself for some sort of complaint, it'd probably just be that the difficulty curve can be a little awkward: I definitely felt like the space gravity world should be switched with the circus world in terms of order, and some levels here-and-there were serious spikes in challenge. I also wish there was a save/load: I know it can be a short game technically but still, a continue is always a nice thing to have. Oh, I also felt like the special effects were lacking in some departments: for example I was surprised there was no water splash when you fell into water. Also thought it was kinda weird that you don't jump with space considering the game gives such credence to it, but eh, it was easy to figure out.

Anyway, overall well done!

LeviRamirez responds:

Thank you!

I usually always just give a passing reaction to your reviews as I just expect to see them every month but I just wanna say thank you, if my memory serves me right I believe you reviewed every game in the Gappy NG trilogy and it's crazy to think a game I made in 8th grade, remade 2 times, and uploaded in highschool would follow me all the way up to a junior in college. It's just mind-blowing, and you do an amazing work with all of these, always look forward to monthly reviews and I no I'm not the only one!

Anyways yup, that's the end of the Gappy NG Trilogy, notice I said trilogy and not series... Cause Gappy's got something just on the horizon and I hope to see you there :-)

[Faces Of 2022 Collab]

Wow, definitely a really cool idea for an art collab! Man, I was really hoping I would do well on this game but I really sucked: didn't expect the questions to be so hard as I thought it would just be matching faces to names, and that's hard enough as it is with the faces being done in a different art style! Still, I had to appreciate the cool trivia and enjoyed picking up whatever points I could gather.

Unfortunately, while I do think it is pretty cool, I did find myself having a lot of issues and minor complaints:

*The cursor is just an absolute pain to work with. Maybe it's built for mobile or something and it works there, but playing this with a regular mouse, I don't understand why I can't just move the screen around and click on things normally with the mouse cursor instead of the weird crosshair and the way it makes things awkwardly slide around like it's on ice. Please make it recognize that I'm using the mouse and change the controls to an appropriate scheme accordingly.

*Bummed out that there is no ability to click on people and have their Newgrounds profile pop-up: would love to be able to quickly compare the faces to their real faces, or be able to see their works and follow them.

*I would've loved if, when you get something wrong (or right), if it would display the person that was correct, and maybe even allow you to click on them to see more about them before continuing with the game. For example, if I get a question about someone's famous movie or whatever and I guess wrong, I would've loved if it would tell me who it was and link to them so I could see their famous movie. Instead, I just need to live with my error and never figure out who it was or see their art.

*It can get really tiring having to go through all of the faces for every single question: even if I was a wizard and knew everyone perfectly, it's still so much busy work to look for them (especially with the annoying controls as mentioned before). Would love if maybe each question chose a random assortment of, I dunno, 15 people or something, just enough to fit on the screen without needing to scroll, and you pick from them. Feels like that would keep the pace up much better. You know, still have everyone in a big gallery in study mode, but game mode, limit the potential answers.

Still, nice work putting this together, and wonderful work from all of the artists that took part!

Bountyspecialtist responds:

Longest comment I have seen on newgrounds lol.

[Dream Medicine]

Huh, pretty interesting game! Something about the music, visuals, and theming gave the game this really somber, chill, melancholy feel to it: in particular I found the ending, despite not necessarily understanding it, very reminiscent of some of my favorite moments in other games like Drakengard or Nier with their somber weapon stories or text adventure events. So, I think you succeeded in making a cool "art-y" game here. I do like that it's not all just navel-gazey art-y art but it actually was a pretty interesting game to try and figure out, and was chock full of hidden little events that can pop-up and add a lot of variety, like the phone fixing and shoplifter.

I found the whole ingredient system a bit confusing to decipher, so I never really felt like I could get in the zone, but I imagine that might be the whole point of it, to be mysterious and illogical and have fun(?) experimenting. If I were to guess, I think the system is that everyone needs one certain ingredient to solve their issue, and you can either risk giving them a single ingredient which gives you bonus points for getting it perfectly right, or you can give them a mix of ingredients which lessens the risk since you get points for at least having the right ingredient in the mix, but you'll never get a perfect bonus by doing that. Wonder if that's close at all, but again, might not be the point.

There are some janky aspects to the game here and there. The biggest one I experienced was that if I dragged items a certain way they would suddenly be dropped: this made it so that I needed to drag items in illogical ways just to make them survive the trip.

I'm not quite sure if I fully understand the game, but it has a cool mood to it, gives some food for thought, and kept me wanting to explore it, so it was a nice and nifty little experience.

Jojo responds:

I'm very glad you enjoyed the music. Thank you. Dungeonation's visuals really helped in getting my inspiration for the score.

[Parallelogram Man Orders Takeout!]

Hey, nice stuff! I love me a boss rush, and this delivers on that quite excellently along with some very goofy presentation and humor that reminds me very much of a @tombdude game. The concept of killing your opponents not by attacking them, but rather by demonstrating how ineffective their attacks are by styling through them to the point of embarrassing them to death is some really creative stuff: love how it promotes diving head-first into danger, similar to games like Doom or Burnout. Some of the bosses are a bit cheeseable here and there and it can be frustrating at times which can be bad since it promotes boring play, but for the most part I felt like they all had very interesting patterns to battle through and I had a blast.

In terms of feedback, there's the obvious one that the tutorial can be a bit confusing in that, while it does technically explain all you need to do, it is still nevertheless confusing and I wouldn't blame some people for dropping it thinking it's just a joke you can't pass (though I imagine I'm wasting my breath since that's probably a badge of honor for you, haha). Similarly there are some typos as well (some that even bizarrely auto-correct themselves as it goes) but I imagine those are intentional as they add to the humor. Other minor complaints are that I wish text and cutscenes and such would move forward at my own pace and be able to be skippable instead of just auto-playing. A larger complaint is that I do wish this game had a save/load feature: it can be a bit of a doozy and it'd be great to not have to do everything over if you run out of gas on the later harder bosses. Oh and it never saved my score despite me finally beating it!

Anyway, great stuff! I almost chopped my keyboard in half facing perfect circle man but eventually I got into the zone and it felt ecstatic to finally put him down. And if that isn't the ideal experience for a boss rush, I dunno what is, so kudos on that!

LeviRamirez responds:

Thanks for the feedback! A lot of the minor stuff could be fixed but I’m kinda just done with this game. It’s whatever it is now and I like it, it’s supposed to be a game you beat once in one go, it’s frustrating I know but it’s no sweat off my back.

I’m glad you liked it though, this game was very experimental for me and I took a huge page out of the @Tombdude and @Plufmot book and made something wild! We’re all buds so I assume we all just rub off on each other :-)

Anyways, thanks!

[Magirune 2 - Demo]

Hmm, bit of a mixed bag that's a bit rough at the moment, but that is the point of a demo, so hopefully I can give some feedback to make it better!

*Overall I found the game to be pretty bland and lifeless in all aspects. The story was pretty drab and unexciting with no real big goal (though walking outside to see how desolate the world is was pretty neat), there was no animations or cutscenes which made events like dad falling down or the mayor running away confusing since they just vanish, there was barely any music or exciting sounds or effects, and the directions were pretty vague with no journal or anything to help keep track (don't get me wrong, I don't want a line or marker to follow as I like exploring, but sometimes it wasn't clear what's going on).

*There were plenty of typos and odd phrasing: felt like the script was badly translated from another language and could use a proof-reading pass.

*Controller controls were pretty bad: I had no idea how to navigate the inventory menu with the control and access other tabs. Felt like I was forced to use the mouse to access things like inventory tabs when everything should be possible with just controller. Perhaps it was because I'm using a Playstation controller: some games aren't built for it.

*I didn't even realize that I was being hurt when engaging in combat because, unlike the enemies which have good feedback to being hit by shaking and the slash mark effect, the player stands stock still and doesn't react. Even disregarding effects, though, combat was pretty boring and devoid of strategy (though it was kinda cool to get flashy kills when you level up enough to one-shot them).

*I felt like the whole way that enemies respawn when you reenter a screen was really annoying and punishing. I felt like the game could have a survival horror aspect to it where you really gotta plan whether fighting is worth it, but plenty of times I was forced to fight without knowing I'd end up going the wrong way, and it felt frustrating to go back and refight everything, especially considering I don't get exp from it. Just feels like it leaves too much up to trial and error and luck.

I certainly think that it has some interesting ideas and could shape up to become a grand adventure, so hopefully my feedback can help somewhat!

FluffyLotus responds:

Thanks, there's some good feedback in there. This will make me focus some of my time in directions that I wasn't thinking to much about.

[Pixel Dash]

Huh, this felt a little half-baked and lacking in content for me. It reminds me a lot of the game Qix where you keep drawing lines to form squares and in doing so you fill out the board bit-by-bit, with the challenge being that you have to be careful of bouncing balls on the board colliding with the lines while you're drawing. The problem with this is that while there is a challenge and strategy to Qix, this game has none of that. I found that I could easily just place blocks whenever and wherever I wanted: I didn't need to time my placement or anything like that as the bouncing balls avoid getting caught, and even when they do, it's a non-issue to free them with no penalty. Without needing to be careful with how you place blocks, and with a way too generous time limit, winning is a foregone conclusion in this and it just becomes an incredibly repetitive affair of placing blocks as fast as you can to get a pointless high score. It's a bummer for me especially since you need to click on each block instead of being able to hold click and drag, and that easily flares up my carpal tunnel. Even worse is that there's only a single level: I was really hoping that the first level was just a tutorial and it would keep adding new challenges and such, like maybe a level with multiple green zones where you need to catch a certain amount of balls within them, so you need to strategize and time splitting the herd up and such. It certainly could be promising, but this is barely even a prototype in its current state for me.

blit-blat responds:

Sorry to hear about your carpal tunnel man, the click & drag method sounds interesting, though I think that would just make it even easier to be honest! I am working on a follow up with more levels & challenges so watch this space!

[Creature Collab 2022]

Pretty decent collab! For what it is, this collab does a decent job at making it a bit better than your bog-standard slideshow, as it uses a rather stylish shelf display layout. Other niceties in place are things like being able to click on the artist's name to go to their profile and achievements. There are some little things I'd liked fixing up, like hiding the up/down arrows when there isn't anything to go up/down to, making the arrows react to hover, and fixing the weird glitch where scrolling to the next screen auto-selects the creature in the same position as you previously selected last screen, but it's for the most part put together alright.

I kind of wish it had a bit more to it: when I heard it was a creature collab, I kind of envisioned being able to see the creatures move about and such in a fish tank or ant farm environment, or even see them locked up in test tubes like some SCP lab you can explore, but that's on me for expecting way too much. Having said that, though, I was really surprised to see that hidden easter egg: hiding it after a few shelves of empty space, the glitchy name with the secret youtube link, what a cool little treat! Bit of a bummer that I feel that most might not make it that far to see it, but on the other side, it does take some chutzpah to create such a cool thing that not everything might end up seeing, so kudos on that!

Thetageist responds:

That’s what I thought was going to happen for the final version too (it would’ve been so cool!) But I know OneDude had some trouble trying to find a programmer and, after the first guy couldn’t do it anymore, finding another one. So I’m happy it still made it to the final product after all!

[MemMento]

Hah, not too shabby! It's definitely a bit shallow in terms of gameplay, of course, but accepting it for what it is, it's a funny enough experience with some goofy presentation and moments that I enjoyed. Reminds me a lot of @plufmot style games. I also am probably not the intended audience as I haven't seen Memento before, but I at least knew enough about the premise to gather the broad strokes: I wonder if I can consider myself as having watched it after this?

adriendittrick responds:

Thanks for playing, I always enjoy your reviews :)
I'll have to check plufmot then!
And yup, you've definitely understood and remembered everything about the original movie :p

[SUPER BATTLE CITY]

Hmmm, this was a rough one for me. Had some interesting stuff going on that surprised me, but it didn't nail the landing.

Definitely was not impressed at the start, as the tank gameplay was incredibly boring. Controls were stiff, AI was brainless, objectives were unclear, feedback was unsatisfying with enemies just disappearing without nary a poof: all came together feeling like an incredibly amateurish 'my first game' project. Construction of the game was very shoddy: I'd sometimes have bullets whizz right through me or through an enemy without hitting, I'd have enemies spawn camp and make it impossible to respawn after dying, and enemies didn't even seem to try and go for the home base at the bottom. I wouldn't blame people for immediately dropping the game and not continuing onwards to see the more interesting stuff. Speaking of...

As said, then the game surprised me with a sudden twist intermission and then it suddenly dumps you in a black void where eventually you find the dripping blood as you proceed. Despite the games initial shoddiness, it had me hooked now as I really love these hidden twists and wanted to see more. And indeed, it made a good showing with the disturbing/cursed imagery and distorted music/sounds that kept me on my toes. Some nice creepypasta vibes going here.

Unfortunately, at the end of the day, all the game was doing was just shallowly guilt tripping me: "oooooo how dare you kill people in a video game about killing people ooooo you bad man, why didn't you just turn the game off ooooo." Maybe this twist was novel years ago but nowadays its been done to death. Not to say it couldn't work but there wasn't sufficient enough build-up to immerse me and make this moral twist work: the short playtime combined with the shallow and broken gameplay made it comical to say the least. Speaking of, then it tries to lampshade the whole thing with "floppa, lol". At least try and say something instead of running away under some shield of irony!

At the end of the day, this game just reminded me of those games that have the audacity to have a sewer level but try to justify it by having the protagonist mug at the camera and say 'lol sewer levels amirite' while winking. It doesn't work because you're still in a shitty sewer level! It's style over substance, trying to disguise a bad game with some intrigue but not combining the two well enough together. Basically I think this was a novel attempt, but it's just too short and shallow and shoddily constructed to get its twist across. Play Duloga instead which did this premise way better in my opinion: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/757605

MoeAnguish responds:

I appreciate your feedback, however, this game is just a shit post with floppa. It wasn't a serious project by any means. So i didn't "try too hard" with it. And the guilt tripping and everything was part of that. This entire thing is one bad joke that i thought was funny, basically.