FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Lily's Cafe in Nevada]

Man, I really liked the idea behind this. Having to manage a cafe that caters to deadly killers? What on earth could happen? Maybe you need to deliver food in the middle of a gunfight with bullets flying everywhere? Maybe you need to mop up blood from the constant fights in addition to food service? Maybe you need to keep everyone fed or else they start fighting? Maybe you join in on the fighting to calm them down? The possibilities had me excited for what was in store!

Unfortunately, what I found was rather underwhelming. I don't want to be mean, but how on earth can you have a food service game where customers have infinite patience, only come one at a time, and don't make orders and are satisfied with anything you give them? It goes against all logical expectations! The game is just so easily exploitable by filling up the plate with every single type of food and giving that to everyone for maximum points, because apparently you get 10 points per food. I quickly found myself losing interest as it all just felt so pointless.

I guess I got surprised by how the game turned out, but it wasn't a good surprise. It felt like a real nothingburger, if you pardon the pun. Please revisit this concept in the future and do it justice: I'm a big fan of cafe management games and I think one set in Madness is a novel idea!

TomaFokio responds:

We are currently working on a similar update. And I think your reasoning is pretty fair

[Deckerware - Eggbug Party Games]

Hmm, seems like a rather cute little Warioware-esque microgame collection you got here! Not too shabby, especially considering it was for a gamejam, but ultimately when taken out of that context, there not only isn't enough microgames on offer which makes it take no time at all for them to start feeling repetitive, but the microgames also don't speed up or have enough variety to them within themselves to keep things interesting for long. Basically it feels like a good rough draft or prototype in its current state, but not enough as a full-fledged game, which I would love to see if you continue work on it!

As a side note, I'm not familiar with this whole Decker interface: maybe it would be best if it was hidden to avoid confusion, thinking it's necessary to mess around with its controls? I also found it weird that the game starts with the music disabled: not sure why!

sysl responds:

Hey, I've left the controls visible so people can see how it works and play with it.

I would love it if more people played with decker.

[Landmine Cube]

Huh, this was a surprisingly cute and fun little Minesweeper-esque arcade game! I was worried it would be too trial-and-error, but it was rather fun to slowly and carefully go across the map and figure out where all the mines were while collecting all the trinkets: maybe I'm part robot, but something about combing levels over and over was somewhat meditative. Sometimes it can be a little frustrating when mines are too close together and you just have to take a gamble, but as long as you view the life counter as an allowance for error instead of something you don't want to lose, then it's ok. Yeah, just some simple but addictive fun to be had here!

If I were to have any feedback:

*It'd be nice if you could keep moving if you held down the key so you wouldn't need to constantly be pressing buttons to cover large areas. I understand that maybe it's intentional so players don't accidently wander too far into a mine, but perhaps you could make it so that holding down the key only works on ground you've already marked/covered to prevent that.

*It'd be nice if, similar to Minesweeper, you could mark tiles that you suspect have a mine in them with a flag, just to help you keep track of everything.

*I'd like it if there was a better scoring/grading system, like if you get a gold medal if you clear the level quickly and with a minimum amount of lives lost: would add a lot of replayability, I think.

Pitigamedev responds:

I'm glad you enjoyed my game, and thank you for your precious feedback as always. If I will decide to expand this game a little bit I will implement a "flag mechanics" similar to the one in Minesweeper!

[Face Down]

Interesting game you got here! Reminds me a lot of games like Buckshot Roulette and Inscryption, and I assume those were the direct inspirations. The presentation and atmosphere were pretty slick, and while it was a bit slow to start, I enjoyed the way it kept adding on new rules as the game went on to keep it exciting: in particular I thought that the rules were you can call out rule-breaking were neat and reminded me a lot of Liar's Dice and other deception-based games. The way the villain has dialogue and expressions that dynamically respond to your actions and how the game is going is neat too and keeps the tension up.

For the most part, I didn't have any major issues, just little nitpicks. I was a bit confused as to why whenever I moused over to the right that the drawer was being so fiddly and unresponsive, but that's because I didn't realize that I needed to mouse over the card piles specifically instead of just the general right side of the screen: perhaps a highlight when you hover over the card piles would've made this more obvious. And I will admit that as neat as the game is, sometimes it feels like it is just dragging on and on and I want it to end already: sometimes that might be due to the game just feeling random and up to the luck of the draw, other times it's probably just me being impatient and not wanting to count cards and all that jazz, haha!

prsaseta responds:

Buckshot Roulette release date: 28 December 2023
Face Down release date: 26 September 2022

[Tezcatlipoca Early Acces]

Huh, quite the promising survival horror game you have here!

For the most part, it feels like the game has good fundamentals: all the stuff you would expect, such as tank controls and fixed camera angles are presented and handled alright (though I'll admit I find it weird that pressing backwards has the character insta-turn instead of backpedaling). The visual style is pretty distinct, reminding me of something like Killer7, and the way it brightly highlighting interactables is rather striking. Atmosphere is alright too with neat lighting and ambient sound. I also thought it had some pretty neat aspects to the gameplay: in particular I liked some of the first-person segments, like the part where you have a maze to get through and you need to use audio cues to find the way out based on the clue given: that was pretty clever and felt like a good puzzle!

In spite of this, though, I had to admit that I had a tough time getting immersed into the game and taking it seriously. My feedback would be thus:

First there were a lot of weird technical issues. For some reason the game defaults the SFX volume to zero which is bizarre as it can make you miss a lot of audio cues, even important ones such as your father screaming. Whenever a tutorial would pop-up to explain controls, the place where an icon is supposed to be wouldn't render properly. I crashed the game when I tried to crouch through the gap in the bus because it involves pressing ctrl+W and that is a shortcut that closes the browser window. The SFX of the game also felt like stock sounds that didn't fit the theme, especially the menu sounds. Finally in general there were just a lot of weird micro-stutters and times were the controls became unresponsive for no reason I could tell: I think it would happen when the game would load those wandering ghosts in?

When it wasn't technical issues, I just felt like the game wasn't appropriately building horror and dread. A lot of stuff just felt really goofy and unthreatening with the way they were presented, especially the dumb enemies which are so easily avoided due to their slow speed and attacks: seriously, I can't see how you would ever be hit by these guys unless you wanted to die. The way events were setup were silly too, like the way the game interrupts you with a blatant 'Flee!' prompt instead of something more subtle, like a musical sting or just letting the enemy appear and scare the player naturally. There's plenty other stuff but it's rather subtle and hard to describe exactly what it was doing wrong: it's just the vibes weren't fitting, I suppose.

As said, I definitely think there is something here, so I hope you keep working on it and I get to see the final version sometime soon!

BecSantus responds:

Thank you very much for the review! I’m still working hard to make this game the best it can be. I'll address as many of the issues as possible, though some are unfortunately tied to the limitations of the HTML version. I recommend playing the executable file available on itch.io for a better experience.

As for the crouch feature, it’s a toggle that automatically deactivates when you start running, so there's no need to keep holding Ctrl. I'll try to upload a fix for the SFX issue soon, as I'm currently working on finishing the rest of the town.

[A Quiet Winter Walk Home]

Pretty cute and chill game you got here! I'll admit I'm not always much for chill, low-stakes games like this, being an action junkie, but I do enjoy examining and interacting with everything I can in my point-n-click adventures or survival horrors, so likewise I very much enjoyed finding all of the amusing gags, dialogue and references that were strewn about this little town! It was a nice little adventure and I was impressed at the cute and stylish presentation!

In terms of feedback:

*Maybe it's against the spirit of the game, but I do wish the game had some sort of tasks or quests you could get involved in. For example, maybe you help a family out with, say, clearing the snow out of their shop, upon which they reward you with a leftover carrot as a snack, which you instead take to a snowman you met earlier who has lost their nose, and so on and so forth. I know the game is giving you points for interacting with stuff, but I just wish there was something more that required a little bit of brainwork or involvement.

*Found it a bit odd that when you are given a few options to select in a dialogue, you aren't able to use WASD to select options but instead need to utilize the arrow keys. I constantly kept getting confused when the options weren't responding, only to remember to switch to the arrows, over and over.

*Would be nice if you could press a button when text is filling out to have it fast-forward to immediately fill out completely.

*For some reason when you move diagonally into a wall, you move much quicker than if you were to just move straight forward. Perhaps it's some sort of hidden tech for speedrunners to take advantage of?

sysl responds:

Hey, this was my first port to godot so the movement was a result of not adjusting for that.

Thank you for playing!

[The South Park Collab 2]

Decent art collab you got here: it presents everything stylishly, has a grid gallery view to complement its slideshow view, has links to the artist profiles, and of course, has some nice art to view! It's not necessarily blowing me away or anything, but it does the job and is not too shabby at all!

In terms of feedback:

*While it does have a 'select' grid view as a different way of seeing the art and that's nice, it's kind of half-assed because when you click on an art piece in the grid, it will take you to its slide, but then you're no longer in the 'select' context and locked into the standard 'gallery' view, if that makes sense. When you click on a art piece within the 'select' grid, it should let you go back to the 'select' grid immediately by clicking the back arrow or X to select another one, instead of having to back out to the main menu and then click 'select' again to get there.

*I do wish the art was displayed a bit more creatively instead of within the rather common and standard slideshow presentation. I'm not even asking you to do anything crazy, just maybe take the fact that everyone has drawn characters and make a big collage of them, like a Where's Waldo drawing where all the characters are placed together in a big crowd like they are standing around in South Park and you can hover over them for a detailed view of the art and artist.

A-Ovelha responds:

Thanks!

[Bullet Dodger]

You know, I wasn't sure what to think about this at first since it seemed rather simplistic in terms of gameplay and presentation, but I'm glad I gave it a try because it's a pretty neat little arcade game! I was impressed at the escalation of difficulty as the game goes on and had a lot of fun trying to dodge the patterns however I could, even using wall-jumps and such, and the game has a neat sense of style and energy to it. Simple but fun!

However, while it is a rather promising game, I didn't stick with it for too long as I found it a bit janky and odd with some of its design decisions. In terms of feedback:

*I feel like the damage feedback is too muted as I could barely tell when I was taking damage. The only way to tell is to see your health bar go red, and that only lasts so long because when you're low on health it stays red all the time. I would very much like if a sound effect played when you took damage and maybe your character reacts by flashing red or blinking or whatever.

*I didn't like how when you're riding a platform, you don't ride along with it naturally, instead needing to keep shuffling to the side to stay on. It's especially frustrating and finicky to stay on the tiny platforms because of this, and my hands quickly got tired from this repetition.

*I felt like the shield was an unnecessary inclusion and hurts the game. The way the levels are built feels like a direct response to trying to work around your inclusion of the shield: the early levels are too easy where you can just stay in one place and use the shield to block everything, while the later levels bombard you with way too many bullets that you're forced into using the shield as it's impossible to dodge otherwise. I would much prefer if the game kept its purity by just having the player dodging the bullets: it's called 'bullet dodger' after all, not 'bullet absorber'!

errorerratum responds:

Thank you for your review!
1) The damage being too muted was a stylistic decision to not bother the player with too much information during the gameplay, but I realize now that with the health bar turning red at low health would be misleading for a player. I was worried that adding noise for every bullet strike would be too annoying for a player.
2) Not being able to ride with the platform seems to be a pretty common critique of this game. I did it because I felt that the player character moving with the platform made the game far too easy, but I can see why people don't like that feature.
3) Interesting view of the shield mechanic - everyone else seems to like the shield. Trying to make the early game reasonably easy and the end game hard was always a challenge, and I did want to make playing the game for a very long time to be very difficult. I felt that shield helped with balancing the game as much as I could while still making the late stages very difficult.

[DYNAMITEHEAD TNTSON (The Toxic Demo)]

Yowza, what a cool beat-em-up you got here! It's seriously impressive how absolutely bursting with style and energy this game is: love all the crazy animations, transitions, and juicy touches that this game has not only to the main gameplay, but to other elements like the menus and title screen! I'm a big fan of beat-em-ups and this game provided a nice bit of button-mashy punchy fun and demonstrated some pretty solid fundamentals to make the hits feel satisfying, vary the enemies, and have a cool boss fight to top it off. Solid work!

That being said, by being a huge fan of beat-em-ups, I am also very critical of them, so if you wouldn't mind, here is some potential feedback you can use (or not):

*It did feel like the play area could easily get overcrowded and cramped, leading to messy and confusing gameplay: perhaps you could stand to zoom-out the camera and increase the arena size to assist with this. I think it would also have a knock-on effect of allowing for more room to fight and maneuver, bringing more strategic designs from that.

*While the feedback of hitting opponents was pretty solid thanks to factors like screenshake and so on, I do think the game could stand to have a bit more to it, specifically some hitstop/freeze. I love it when your punches get that extra bit of slowness when hitting people to differentiate just swinging in the air!

*I found it really odd that you can't use the mash move when you have full TNT meter: you'd think that as long as you press instead of hold you could still use it instead of going for the explosion, but for some reason it is not allowed.

*Wish there was a bit more clarity on what the power-ups do: couldn't tell whether power-ups were giving me health, TNT meter, or both.

*While the moveset has a lot of moves to utilize such as an uppercut, slide, sweep, jump slam, and so on, they don't seem to have clearly defined purposes for any of them: they pretty much all are just some flavor of quick knockdown. Wish they each had something special to them to allow for more strategic play. For example, maybe the uppercut could juggle enemies and allow you to get bigger combos at the cost of higher commitment leaving you open to interruption, while the sweep can hit grounded enemies instead of having to wait for them to get back up, and maybe the slide can get under enemy blocks, and so on.

*As alluded to above, the game feels overly simplistic at the moment and feels like a brainless button-masher: while this can be fun in the short-term, it's lacking depth to allow for skillful and strategic play and this hurts long-term satisfaction. Not only was I really disappointed I couldn't juggle combo enemies launched from a uppercut or jump slam among other things, but also I felt like the enemies are too simplistic in their AI patterns, both in the way they attack and in the way they never attempt to surround the player or juke them out.

Anyway, sorry for the rambling: there's some serious potential in this and I look forward to seeing how it develops!

swackyGCF responds:

This is a REALLY good review. You've provided some great points here. Things like being able to mash through enemies at full blast and having a better moveset are considered! After all this is my first attempt at making a beat-em-up, like, ever. It'll get better in later demos!

[Newgrounds Wii Art Collab]

Hey, pretty cool art collab! Judging from the thumbnail and name, I expected an art gallery akin to the Wii menu, and I got what exactly that, so no complaints there! Indeed, the Wii menu vibes are recreated pretty immaculately and I found the interface not only contained everything you would want, such as links to the artists, but it was very charming as well, especially when the art really resembled an actual game preview, such as Moopers. Nice work!

If I were to have any feedback, it'd be that it might be nice to have side arrows so you can go straight to the next art piece instead of having to back out to the menu and then click on the next one. Also there were some weird performance issues with some of the animated art pieces for some reason. Finally, it would be nice if there was an options menu where you could perhaps change the music or turn it down or other features like that.

AlexToolStudio responds:

Told you it a huge improvement