FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[ENA: Decimation Journey (Demo)]

Ok, this was a bit of a trip.

First and foremost, this is one of the difficult times I've had just trying to start a game. The amount of roadblocks it threw to try and stop me was ridiculous. I had the browser pop-up a message twice that it thought that the game was frozen and made me think it crashed and was unplayable: yes, I know you say it takes a long time to load in the description, but please, if there is some way you can help the load times or put a message in the game itself by the loading bar, it would help immensely. As a game developer, I understand the difficulty and you have my sympathies, but don't expect the general public to be sympathetic: they will just assume the game is busted and leave, and it would be completely justified. Even after the load times, however, I had no idea how to start the game on the main menu: I tried enter, space, the arrow keys, WASD, Z/X, ctrl, and all other common controls and nothing worked. Only later I realized that the game wanted Q to start the game: what other game in this world uses Q for confirmation!? If anything, E would've been slightly acceptable, but still, these are some crazy uncommon controls and again, it would be helpful if there was a prompt in the game to guide.

Ok, moving past that and starting up the game, the game is somewhat cool. Definitely gives me heavy Shin Megami vibes with its maze-like levels and use of the elemental press turn system (except it takes it a bit easier by only rewarding you for hitting weaknesses and not punishing you for hitting resists). I actually thought it was a horror game at first where someone is chasing you because of the warning meter, only later realizing it was a random encounter meter as seen in other games like Etrian Odyssey and such. Certainly an impressive game that seems to have a lot of potential.

Having said that, I easily found myself getting bored and dropping off. The maze was incredibly boring and repetitive with no notable landmarks and barely any fun interactions, and the map was useless because it was too zoomed in and I couldn't find any way to see the full map. Combat was just a rehash of Shin Megami combat as said before with nothing new to it, without any of the niceties that modern Persona combat has (such as previously hit weakness hints) and with barely any SP to allow you to engage in the elemental system without immediately running out. Definitely feels like there needs to be something cool and fresh in the game to serve as a hook, like a bit of story or characters or a more interesting world/maze to explore: I just felt lost and quit due to boredom and frustration quickly.

Again, it certainly does seem to have an impressive Shin Megami RPG-esque engine in place that could be used for great things: I'm hoping that this feedback, as rough as it is, can serve to help this game become something great and exciting in the future.

[Reel Deep]

Pretty cool game! Delivers some nice addictive arcadey fun and certainly has an interesting take on the fishing game with the inclusion of having to get your rewards all the way back up: usually all you need to worry is hooking good stuff in the first place. Adds a whole element of risk/reward to the process that I both loved and...hated, haha. While the game could be frustratingly difficult at times, the upgrade process and the fact that the game is so juicy (such as the great impact from hooking things) made it quite addictive and have a professional feel to it all. The only thing missing would be a bit more of a guide to the game: I had no idea there was a treasure chest as an end goal, for example (though I did feel naturally inclined to go deeper because of the record markers, though that might've led me to go too deep too early).

I gotta say though, that as much as I loved this game in theory, I found it incredibly frustrating and just plain annoying to play at times, especially at the beginning. As much as I think the whole reeling up sequence is interesting, the frustration from losing your already gathered loot was palpable and made me want to rage quit constantly. It was just so annoying how incredibly aggressive fish could be once they get the slightest whiff and how the only way to reel up faster is to put yourself at the edge of the screen where you easily get hit by enemies you can't react to in time (so what's the damn point). Eventually by sticking with it and getting upgrades it became a bit easier to deal with, but I could easily see me and maybe others not willing to put up with that initial annoyance.

Maybe something can be done to help bad first impressions like that from happening: for example, I felt compelled to try and go deep for better rewards, but maybe the game should to guide you away from that until you get upgraded somehow with like a story or missions or something. Also maybe the game shouldn't change the speed based on your position on the screen so you can feel free to use the whole real estate without screwing yourself. It was also a bit annoying that you could contend with obstacles that weren't in your way on the way down during your return trip (felt annoyed that I passed a coin on the way up that I didn't on the way down). You could also get rid of the whole aspect of having to take everything back up and potentially lose it, but I guess that would hurt the core identity of this game too much.

Frenchie14 responds:

Awesome review! I agree - this game turned out to be much more of a "rage game" than originally intended. I think you have some good suggestions on how to reduce the rage. Some other things I thought of were adding upgrades for an indicator for off screen enemies and a few slots of "permanent" inventory that wouldn't get knocked off. I never added them because I underestimated how frustrating the game could be and at this point I'm ready to just call the game done in spite of this one big flaw.

Thanks a lot for playing and reviewing!

[Realm Raiders: [DEMO] Ep. 1]

Pretty cool beat-em-up! Definitely feels like it's got a pretty solid start in the right direction: in general the combat felt quite nice and satisfyingly impactful, and the graphics and animations were smooth. Loved how the enemies had great telegraphs for their attacks. There was a bit of confusion at the start for me since usually 2.5D beat-em-ups like this are very horizontal-focused, but this game had so many vertical and diagonal attacks that typically aren't done in those games (are you sure you're not trying to make a top-down game instead? that type of camera might be more intuitive, but whatever) Anyway, here's what feedback I could offer:

1) While the game did seem to offer some amount of input buffering, it didn't feel sufficient and there were a lot of times where an attack or a roll wouldn't come out mid-combo despite me putting the input in for it (yes, you could say that I put it in too early, but still, really felt like the game was just dropping some inputs, so perhaps experiment with making it more forgiving)

2) For some reason, I couldn't attack to the lower-left: unlike any other direction, if I tried to attack while moving down-left, it wouldn't come out (which was unfortunate since so many enemies spawn that way!)

3) Tutorial is incorrectly in staying that A,A,W is a combo (only A,A,A,W is a combo)

4) Not sure of what the purpose of the W attack is: could use more explanation (maybe it has invincibility frames or something like a shoryuken?). Also game didn't even explain any of the other buttons like Q and S.

5) Didn't like how easily enemies could insta-switch directions: felt really unfair when I'd see the club goblins charge up their upper attack and I'd roll behind them, only for them to insta-turn around and smack me with their upper. Feels like they should have to commit to their initial direction more.

6) Similar to above, hated how fast the archer could nock an arrow and shoot at me: sometimes he'd be able to shoot an arrow at me when I'm hitting him mid-combo for crying out loud! Long-range units should be a bit slower in general, I feel.

7) Feels like, especially for a demo and a first level, the enemies are a bit overly fast, aggressive spammy and hard to lock-down. I feel like I'd only see this sort of behavior on a game's hard difficulty, heck, maybe mania difficulty: for now, I'd make it so that the fodder enemies are a bit more passive, pacing around, taunting and such, instead of beelining directly for the player.

8) Swear it feels like the 2nd hit of the basic combo misses so many times and enemies just get out for free: dunno if it's just got a bad hitbox or enemies have some weird recovery invincibility where they dodge it and get out for free or what. Definitely fix the hit box and maybe add a lot more stun on hits to make it easier to combo/stunlock.

Definitely a lot of good potential here: looking forward to seeing a great beat-em-up in future!

Tyler responds:

Thanks for such an in-depth review.

I agree completely with the 2nd combo attack comment completely.

As for the W (uppercut attack) button - it instantly knockbacks an enemy. However, contrasted with the A (light attack) button which only does damage. A,A,W,W can lead into uppercut mid-air downward lunge attack. Im not sure how many people actually realized there are mid-air attacks (A does a midair strike and W does a risky downward plunge that launches you on hit or gets stuck in the ground on miss) but we didnt explain that. Ep. 2 shows off a more aerial focused character so we’ll teach that better then

I also agree that the tutorial needs some work

Thanks again for the thoughtful input :)

[What Makes You a Man?]

Hmmm, bit of mixed feelings on this one. I feel like my initial impression wasn't that great:

While the climbing mechanics were intriguing and I liked the whole 'single player but coop' concept, I felt like the whole 'jump up then the person below jumps and you jump off them mid-jump' was unnecessarily awkward to have to utilize, the rope mechanic was really janky and mashy to deal with, and the game didn't really introduce any significantly new mechanics or level layouts as it went out, just minor differences.

The story also felt super lazy with tons of parts that could've been utilized to flesh out the characters or introduce some subtle hooks or just have some flavor/fun, were instead just replaced with filler like "talking on the way to the mountain" or "shows picture of sister" (why not actually show a picture?) until the game just last-minute dumps the moral on you at the end in a very cliche and almost comical way, like a cheesy after-school special or something. Heart's in the right place and maybe it's a good thing that it's so chill about it instead of being dramatic or whatever, but yeah, it was pretty cheesy.

The game was also lacking some critical elements like a quick restart or anything like that to get out of unwinnable stuck situations. The awkward way the game would squish when you get separated, while funny, was really glitchy and should've probably just caused a restart or something instead. Also what's the point of showing L/R below a character when it just gets lost in the graphics of the ground?

Having said all that, though, I did, for some reason, find myself going back to this to finish the game. Something about wanting to see what happens at the end and actually getting used to and having fun with the climbing controls after the initial awkwardness of it: not sure exactly what. So yeah, something about it hooked me in some way: not nearly as professionally as I think it could've done, but I came back and had some fun, so credit where it's due.

plufmot responds:

Cheers! I agree with most of this, I just wanted to try doing everything myself and the writing ended up being super difficult to do. I'm not used to writing more serious stuff like this. Although I strongly disagree about the "filler", I think it worked better to leave some stuff up to the player's imagination. All in all, we're on the same page though aha and I'm glad you liked it! Can't wait to watch you play it in your video ahaha.

[The 1000]

Hmm, it feels like an interesting concept, but unfortunately felt really underbaked to me.

I think there is a lot of cool stuff going on in this game. It certainly is quite a spectacle to see these big mob fights happen, and there's a little bit of strategy to it where you try to get in there and fight but keep yourself safe at the same time by dodging bullets and keeping a human wall between you and the melee units. I also appreciate the nice little touch of integrating NG avatars onto the characters. There's also a bit of fun progression in getting new upgrades and weapons and such every fight.

Unfortunately I felt like the game lost me rather quickly. The tutorial was confusing: it went past a lot of the tips before I could finish reading them and even had some tooltips overlapping each other which made them impossible to read. While there is some minor strategy to the combat as I spoke of before, in the end it really felt super mindless and repetitive due to the lack of abilities or direct control, lack of enemy variety, lack of a story or some goal to go for, and lack of satisfying feedback for attacks and damage and such. It didn't help that stuff that could help pep things up, like skills, were gated behind large amounts of money being required that I wasn't willing to grind to acquire. All in all, the game just felt bleh: combat was vague and unsatisfying as everything got lost in the crowd and the sense of progression or a goal was not there to keep me wanting to grind.

Would love to see something like this improved upon: I think the concept of these big mob fights can be fun and it's certainly a neat prototype, but this just had so little content to it at the moment for me.

jefvel responds:

Thanks for the thorough review! I agree with you on all points, there’s a lot more I wanted to have fixed in the game, but sadly just didn’t have the time to do it.

[The Life and Death of Boe]

Cute little game! Certainly a lot of fun animations and crazy deaths to go through: found myself getting addicted to see what new sequence (and new art style from another animator) would how up next.

The flow of the game is a little awkward though at times. I was kind of expecting it to be like, I dunno, Henry Stickman, where there's an overall sense of progression as you try to get to a goal, where you select the death responses until you get a good one and then proceed to the next set of choices, but here you just exhaust the choices which all end in death and then go to the next set for...some reason...to get to some unclear goal.

Speaking of, the animations can be really confusing and uneven at times: some of them make sense and have deaths involving the object in question and are short and sweet, but some of them are overly long and go on weird non-sensical tangents. But then again, some of those weird tangents were amusing in their strangeness, so it's not like it's all bad that it went weird places like that: certainly kept things interesting!

Phaox05 responds:

Maybe one of the no sense is mine, and I also noticed that the message didn't come up well, what I wanted to show is that you cannot brush your teeth and drink orange juice because of some chemicals mixing in your body but with exaggeration, doing that doesn't kill you irl

[Rampster!]

Not too shabby! Pretty cool busy game that, despite the simple graphics, does a pretty good job at intuitively teaching the mechanics through how it shades everything (while still having some cute animations for victory, haha). Apart from my brain always trying to get on stairs sideways and failing (I know, I know, that's my fault, but I couldn't help but keep trying) I got pretty addicted to this game and how challenging the puzzles could be. Felt like it wasn't afraid to ramp things up quite quickly and seriously, compared to most puzzlers nowadays which increase very slowly.

Speaking of that difficulty curve: it was a bit of a mixed blessing. I gotta say, while I like a challenge, I got really stumped at level 6 because I did not realize the game had the chops to simulate a box rolling down stairs by itself: most likely something about the simple graphics made my brain hesitant to ever believe it would have that level of physics simulated. In that way, figuring that out finally felt less like a "eureka" moment and more like a "wait, what? bullshit!" moment. Might've been nice if there was a level before that could've taught that in a more easier-to-see way, somehow: but I did figure it out eventually, so hey, it still works alright (but I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people dropped off there)!

Pjorg responds:

Thank you for this thorough review! It seems like you really "got" what I was going for here so I appreciate you sharing that experience.

Level 6's fatal flaw is that in trying to make it fit to the strict scale of the level maps (9x9 tiles) the space is not used as efficiently as it could be. The earliest version of level 6 was only 5x5, and looked like this. (Pretend the hamster and the cheeses are elevated)

🟦🟦⏫🟦🟦
🧀🟦⬛⏫🟦
⬛📦📦⬛⬛
🐹⬛⬛⬛🧀
⏫🟦🟦🟦🟦

This compact and more clear design was ultimately sacrificed so I could make all the levels a consistent size. Why do I put such arbitrary constraints on my levels? I don't know. I guess I just kind of prefer the way they look and feel. Did you also notice that the hamster begins each level where the previous one ended? Similar story there, it's mainly my own aesthetic satisfaction. I suppose I could have boxed the original level 6 off in a more obvious cage or something and fill the remaining 9x9 with empty space, but I used something akin to that motif in level 5 and level 7 and I think I was worried about it getting stale. Were these the right trade-offs to make? All the reviews telling me "I got stuck on level 6" suggest it wasn't. Then again, there's no telling. Maybe making level 6 more clear would have just resulted in a dozen reviewers saying they got stuck on level 7! Ah well. It is what it is.

Oh- and to your earlier point about having to get your brain into the habit of reading the map correctly- the overhead perspective certainly takes a moment for everyone to wrap their heads around. I have been thinking about what sort of opportunities could be had if I had the option of using three dimensional art... I could have the hamster run under archways for example without being hidden. Perhaps a spiritual successor someday in the future?

[quest of for the epic!]

Cute little goofy adventure! Well, I should probably just keep it as that: it looks like it's a troll/joke game not meant to be taken seriously, so I don't think any super criticism is needed and I'm just supposed to be "it's ebic" and all that. Still, though, while it was a funny little game, I have to admit that I did find myself disappointed: I actually was hoping that the game was gonna be something big in the veins of Battle Kid, I Wanna Be The Guy, or other similar trial-and-error trap games, but other than a few little traps and some precise jumps, the game ended in two screens (not counting the cat screen, lol). What a shame: I always like to be surprised and appreciate a game that looks low-effort but hides an actual high-effort game within, but for this, unfortunately, it is what it is. Maybe if you feel like it, it would be cool to see a more fleshed-out version of this!

Though maybe I'm just missing something? I haven't found the 'yum apple' achievo...

SomeApe responds:

cool

[Buggy & Snuggy's BIG DIG]

Cute little game! Seems like it could make for some fun 2-player hijinks as you compete to harvest while other getting in the way of others: the multi-use of the tools to both grow/harvest while also building pitfall traps and such is quite interesting. The graphics were especially very cute and I liked the hidden emote/taunt feature: one of those nice little touches that might need be necessary, but adds a little spice to it all.

Unfortunately, I only have myself to play it with (sadge) and while the game does offer a 1-player mode, I almost wish it didn't because it doesn't serve a useful purpose: without at least an AI bot to compete against, it really puts a bad light on the game. I know maybe you were trying to be nice by including it for soloers like me, but if you don't go all the way in its implementation, I feel like it's better left-out as the game definitely seems intended for 2-player: a half-measure pleases no one, prefer you stand strong with the intention.

Moving beyond that, there were also some confusing aspects to it. For having such wonderful sprites, I was surprised that the interaction was limited to just shoveling: you'd think that when they water the plant, they'd use a watering can, and when they harvest they'd just grab with their hands or use a sickle. Not having these different sprites made the gameplay really confusing, especially considering how many clicks you need to get things done (why do you have to dig twice just to get things started? maybe if they dug first and then showed the sprite planting next, it'd make sense to have those extra steps). There were also some minor glitches like the score not resetting on a new game and the movement/interactions feeling stiff and unsatisfying.