FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Let's Make Television]

Huh, quite the interesting game! Certainly starts out with a strong first impression as the game has a real sense of showmanship with all the fancy presentation techniques it shows off, and I was really intrigued to see how it plays out! While it's a bit controversial, I thought the experimentation with AI was interesting as well and how it influenced chatting and the minigames, among other things.

Overall I was pretty impressed, but there definitely were some rough aspects to it, so here's some feedback in regards to that:

*I thought the chat sequences were pretty neat at first because it was cool to see how they respond to all manner of questions. I started off with some natural chit-chat about the game itself and who they were and they always seemed to respond appropriately for the most part, apart from the very eccentric NPCs, of course. The magic started to wear off though once I realized that chit-chat wasn't going to help me befriend them: instead it seemed like the optimal thing to do was just spam compliments and it just made everything feel like a superficial, annoying slog. Honestly, I'd prefer it if was just minigames instead and get rid of these chat parts.

*While the AI responded appropriately in most cases, there were times I felt like I couldn't trust them, or that it was all just hollow and pointless and I couldn't take it seriously. For example, some of the answers they gave in the pictionary minigame were just nuts and made no sense, and made me unsure if I would get screwed over later on through no fault of my own.

*I found the menus pretty weird and inconsistent in how they were controlled: sometimes you can select stuff with the mouse and keyboard, other times you're forced into using the mouse for some reason. Just made it a bit awkward to figure out what the game wants at times.

*Game was rather glitchy and janky at times, with the most prominent glitch being that when I disengage from a conversation, sometimes the camera would stay locked and zoomed-in on the NPC instead of unlocking and zooming out.

*Would be nice if there was some sort of save/load option as the game can get quite long to do in one sitting.

So yeah, kind of rough at the moment, but I like its experimental nature and that you're exploring new designs, so kudos on that!

xtrarare responds:

thank you for the thoughtful feedback!

[An idle nightmare]

Wow, this game sucked me in more than I thought! I'm not really much for idle/clicker games, but something about this with its whole horror themed elements and creepy graphical design compelled me to keep going. In essence, it tricked me as it didn't feel like an idle/clicker game, but more like a mysterious adventure! I feel kind of silly letting these superficial elements deceive me like smoke and mirrors, but hey, that's the magic of video game design, so well done on that!

So far I've played the game to completion and gotten the first ending, and I did so by playing it as you'd expect where I stay safe and cautious. I'm assuming that in order to get the second ending, I'll need to intentionally mess up by staying in the corridors too long or torturing the cultists too much to build up trauma points so I can unlock those tomes in the basement. Again, I'm surprised at myself for actually wanting to go through and do this since it is a dumb clicker game and I'm sure it'll be bad times all around for the people in the story, but this game has its hooks in me! Having said that, I need to wait a bit to do so because my wrist and fingers are in pain, haha!

adriendittrick responds:

sorry for your fingers, and thanks for the well thought out review as always :)

[The Funnel]

Hah, pretty interesting game! I really like the vibes and presentation as they gave off a heck of an amusing first impression: I just loved how weird the world seemed and loved all the charming touches like the diegetic instructions you get to read and the HUD where you need to manually reload and watch the player's eyes dart around. The thing that let me down was the gameplay though: it starts off ok and I wanted to keep going, but it doesn't take long for it to just feel tedious with the way it's just the same enemies over and over but more of them, and the power-ups never get more interesting either in a way that would freshen things up.

BingoWaders responds:

Thanks for the review! I will try to build on it in the future

[Type For Your Life]

Hmm, I certainly like typing games and this is not bad as a foundation for that type of game, having some niceties like the text highlights for direction, but the execution left me a bit bored.

Every enemy seemed to just be more of the same, neither escalating the challenge or varying the mechanics in an interesting way that matches their characters (and when it did differ, like the one that makes you type the same one character over and over, it was for the worse, not better). Furthermore, the tension of the chase is lessened by both the way the camera is so zoomed out, and the game just overall felt very bland, lacking pizazz and effects needed to heighten the mood.

It definitely could be something nice, but right now it's just a decent rough draft/foundation I'm seeing.

Also I felt a bit weird that I got caught by the demon but my timer hadn't depleted yet. Unsure if that's a bug or if there's supposed to be a weird desync between distance and time?

errorerratum responds:

Thanks for the review!

I had wanted to differentiate the enemies via the content of the sentences/paragraphs as well as how they attacked. Changing the typing mechanic more than once would have made the characters more notable but honestly I can't think of too many different typing challenges.

I do like the idea of bringing the camera closer to the action and adding more effects, however I did want this game to be a bit more "toned down" in its gameplay.

As for the demon thing: All the enemies will "catch" you if you get too close to them, regardless of where the timer is. The only thing the timer indicates is how long the challenge will last.

[Bloodlust: Santa Monica (Definitive Edition)]

Wow, pretty neat game! Always interesting to see how creative demakes get in representing the original material, and to see Vampire Bloodlines recreated as a point-n-click adventure is neato: reminds me a lot of SNES Shadowrun which I loved back in the day!

For the most part, the game is cool in a lot of ways: a very rich world with loads of interactions and flavor text, tons of quests and character choices, solid presentation and intuitive design, and so on and so forth. It feels really professionally done! Having said that, though, there were a lot of pain points that stood out to me that got in the way of the fun:

*The biggest problem with the game is the dialogue/text system: it commits the cardinal sin of making it so that when you click when text is filling out, it skips to the next line altogether instead of just fast-forwarding the current line to be completely filled out, then requiring another click to go to the next line. Because of the way its setup here and how text-heavy the game is, its so tedious to have to wait for the text to fill out.

*While I like that the game is incredibly rich with interactions, it can be a bit much: there's so many unimportant people to talk to who say unimportant junk, and get us involved in unimportant quests. I know people enjoy sidequests, but I'd like if they at least stay somewhat aligned with our main goals and vampire culture in general: why the hell is my character offering to help out people with so much meaningless garbage? Don't they have more important things to worry about?

*Some of the puzzles are pretty dumb. For example, there's a dog supposedly blocking the way to the suites, but really he's off to the side: can't we just walk right past him? Even if he was in the way, why in the world can't we distract him with the steak or a frisbee?

*I tried playing as a Nosferatu, but was really disappointed. In the original Bloodlines, playing as Nosferatu makes you approach the game in a completely new and fresh way, having to sneak around through sewers and such. In here, all that happens is everyone gets spooked when you first see them, but are easily convinced by a silly excuse. It's really tiresome to do so everytime and a complete waste of an interesting setting.

*Quest log progression is a little weird in that it shows you information you shouldn't be aware of yet. For example, I haven't even read the note yet, but it's already showing me my next steps of meeting with Mercerius at the suites. Likewise, I went over to the beach during my exploration and suddenly got a new quest telling me that Mercerius wants astrolite from the beach: I haven't even met him yet so why would I know that???

*I really wish that the game told me right at the start that I couldn't save when playing the browser version! I just wasted like 30 minutes, only to realize that I wasn't going to be able to save!

The game definitely has a lot of potential, but some of these errors are pretty major. If they get ironed out, I think this could be excellent!

emontero responds:

Thanks a lot for your feedback! I'll try to address all of the issues in the following update.

[The Bugs Manor 🦋 - Prologue]

Hmm, seems like this could be a decent horror adventure, but I didn't find this prologue that helpful in giving me an idea on how the game is going to play, as it is way too hand-holdy, never allowing me to explore or do anything beyond exactly what it prescribes. The story didn't sell me that much either, being a haunted house lorded over by this jackass who is using monsters to raise dead family members and all those classic cliches we've seen done to death. All that left was the general presentation, which to give it credit, did seem pretty good in terms of pixel art.

If there was one notable aspect, it would be the inventory/interaction mechanics, where it has you hold down the triggers to grab hold of objects. This could be interesting as it could add some nice physicality to handling objects beyond just stuffing them into a pocket dimension inventory as most games do. Unfortunately it seemed a lot more simple than I liked: I thought each trigger would represent a hand, but everything seemed to require both triggers to be held, even when they were activities than can be done with one hand, like opening the cabinet doors. Also, it was quite awkward and tiresome to hold down the triggers when moving around.

As much guff as I'm giving it, I do think the game could shape up into something nice, but I'd say that the written description did a way better job at selling me on the game than this prologue did, because it at least gives me an impression on what the intended gameplay is!

Moonth responds:

Hi, thanks for the feedback.

I'm sorry that the prologue didn't convince you, I hope you like the final game more.

It's true that the story is a cliché of the horror genre: "kids exploring a haunted mansion and discovering the horrors it hides." But I don't think that's bad per se, I've tried to give it narrative charisma through the characters and the setting, but I can understand that there are people who don't like the story for lack of originality.

The full game will make more use of the object interaction system, and I'll also put in the possibility of changing the control from needing to hold down the button, to simply pressing the button to grab/drop an item, for those who find it annoying.

And of course, you will be able to explore the whole house, including the areas that are not accessible in the prologue, so I hope that exploration will be more interesting.

['Lair of the Missing Sock']

Not too shabby!

On one hand, it's a pretty bog-standard action platformer: bit janky and rough, lacking any sort of special spice or quality-of-life features like being able to peek downwards. On the other hand, though, the art and story are very goofy and lively, there's a good variety of enemies and level design, and the boss fight was pretty cool.

Basically, it's not necessarily something I'm going to remember or recommend to people, but it's not something I'd kick outta bed either: it provides a decently fun short adventure and has enough potential that I'd like to see how it evolves in your next installment!

Butzbo responds:

Thanks for the review! Good to know of the aspects of the game which stand out post experience, and others that can be further developed.
Thanks for playing, and great to see you're still at it! (:

[The Device: No$ Ghost Finder]

Hah, this was quite the experience! Not necessarily all in a good way, but a memorable experience nonetheless.

First impressions were a bit rough. For one, call me paranoid, but I'm always a bit reluctant to give out location information and other such data, and two, I had no idea the game was meant to be played on the phone only: my attempts to play it on computer just had it error out for location permissions, not giving me any sort of direction to change devices. It may seem obvious, but I was quite confused for a good few minutes.

Anyway, eventually I sorted everything out and got my own little ghost detector on my phone! It didn't seem to be doing any that special except barking out random garbly words now and then, but I was of the impression that there must be some sort of cool AR puzzle game at play here: maybe if I get the readings up to 100 or so, it'll give me a clear ghostly message that I need to use the symbols on the phone to decipher which will point me to some sort of location/website which I then solve using yadda yadda yadda. So, I set forth into the neighborhood!

Eventually though some hot and cold deduction, I was able to get my ghost detector all the way up to 99.9, which seemed like the highest it could get! Unfortunately, all that I encountered was a fire hydrant: no ghosts, no special message, no puzzle, no nuffin'. None of the random words that were popping up during my walk seemed to have any sort of significant pattern or spooky message either. I suppose this is accurately recreating toys of old, but it didn't make it any less disappointing.

So yeah, a bit let-down, but nevertheless I admire your creativity with this and hope you continue to experiment: last year's phone adventure game was great, for example!

alsoknownas1 responds:

As always, thanks for the review. Getting your feedback is honestly one of our biggest motivations to qualify for monthly voting. You always engage with a project on its on terms, from striving epic to ersatz happy meal toy. Apologies that it took a bit of unraveling to figure out which of those we were going for this time. We always try to take all of your feedback onboard, but communicating that better will definitely be the key takeaway for our next more esoteric project, and there will be more. We're definitely going to continue to experiment, rest assured.

We're forever grateful for you championing GoTW. We have a bunch of super special projects coming up, but we're definitely still working on larger scale projects in this coming year.

It might sound funny, but apologies for your taking a--perhaps--needless walk. :) Hopefully, it was pleasant despite the absence of ghosts.

[Scary Scuffle 3D]

Hmm, seems like it has the potential to be a fun, goofy brawler, but in its current state, it's more like an early alpha or prototype, lacking a unique angle or significant pizazz.

As said, there's a decent foundation here: I like the different arenas and running around chucking objects at each other and all that jazz. But the game always seems to devolve into a messy brainless mashfest, as the movesets don't seem to have any sort of real strategic depth to them. Why bother blocking, for example, if you aren't able to gain any sort of advantage against an attacking player for making a smart decision? You may as well just attack him as well and slap it out. Would definitely love it if characters had their own special moves, and if the arenas had special events that would happen to help increase the chaos and push players together more, such as meteors raining from the sky in the UFO level and so on.

I realize that my feedback probably isn't ideal because I came from this at a single-player angle, but I still think most of it is applicable. Still, something to consider, as human opponents could change some things around (but not that significantly, in my opinion).

DaemonPlus responds:

Thank you for the well thought out feedback! Very close to my postmortem of the project too. I wish we gave ourselves more time... But learnt SO much under pressure. :)