FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Radiance Hearts]

Pretty cool game! I quite like the whole coop nature of the gameplay where you are two characters helping each other out by either splitting up or combining your strengths. I especially loved the tutorial sequence where the gameplay and story are intertwined with the narrator simultaneously teaching you the game while introducing the characters and lore: charming stuff. Definitely my favorite part was the boss fight: felt like it had a good variation of attacks that were fun and satisfying to battle through. The gameplay did feel a little repetitive at times and could use some more interesting set-pieces and new mechanics to vary it up, but I had a great time and would love to see the continuation of this and see how it develops.

The big downside for me was the lack of sound effects! There was such a lack of sound in this game that it was always incredibly jarring when it would show up, like how it plays a sound when the boss slams down but not for its various other attacks. I'd almost suggest that the game should just have no sound at all and only have music instead if you're going to be that lacking, but ideally I would say you should have sound effects more prominently for the various actions you and the enemies can take (movement, jumping, attacks, etc). Other issues were some minor things like controls where I would have difficulty getting a rising lumi (super jump) to go off consistently despite my best efforts, and that the combat could be simultaneously too hard (difficult to dodge the waves of bullets from normal enemies, and way too difficult to dodge the boss when it spins multiple times) and too easy (why dodge bullets when you can easily swing your sword to stun-lock all enemies from being able to attack).

Yword responds:

Thank you so much, FuturecopLGF. Sorry about the audio and control issues, and thanks so much for the feedback! :)

[Punch It]

It's ok as a prototype for a simple Simon Says/Bop It game, but unfortunately I found it very lacking. The gameplay mechanics are technically there, sure, and there is some fun to be had in looking at the goofy visuals you've setup for the successful attacks. But as it is now, this game is just too dry and gets old really fast. C'mon, this is Newgrounds, home of beating up people games, and if you're gonna have someone get beaten up, you've got to give it more satisfying feedback: where are the explosions of blood and teeth for every punch that splatter in all sorts of directions, where is the piled-up damage as their face warps from bruises and black eyes and the wall behind them gets painted red, where are the variations in sound, reactions and attacks? Not only that, but where is the personality: we don't even get a reason to hate this Howie Mandel looking guy through a brief intro or some quips/sass while beating him up, and we don't even get a chance to maybe dress him up to match someone we do hate. Beating up Zeus in God of War felt great since there was a lot of build-up and juice to it: this doesn't have any of that for me. Maybe I'm thinking about it too hard, but I just felt like this game could be so much more: for me, you gotta juice it or lose it (a good video about game feel to watch sometime).

WeirdRikert responds:

Thanks for the pointers. This was mostly an experiment with getting an RPGmaker game to work in browser. But, I definitely want to take all the feedback and update the game :)

[Machine Gun Gardener]

Some great hectic fun! The game's a little goofy and I didn't have the best first impression from the title screen which looked very generic and mobile-gamey, but I'm glad I stuck with it as I think it delivers some crazy and classic arcade-style shooting goodness! At it gets more and more intense, I like juggling the various power-ups to deal with all the situations: blast some bombs over there, send a black hole over that garden, spray some flames widely, and so on! Though I have to say that while the black hole looked awesome, I didn't find the flamethrower and the bombs that satisfying: the flamethrower just never felt like it was making contact a lot of the time, and the bombs were confusing as they look the same as if it was a bomb power-pick-up, causing confusion. Still, that's just some small nitpicks.

The only thing that really brings it down for me is that the aiming can be quite wonky at times: due to the game getting really crazy at times and lagging, sometimes my aim go way off point, over-shooting or under-shooting my intended target. I know the game says sometimes about tweaking sensitivity but that ain't the issue for me: it's just that due to the lag and maybe other factors, the way the game treats mouse inputs can be very erratic and confusing. An unfortunate blemish on an otherwise great experience!

studio11508 responds:

Thanks for the great feedback. I will look into making the pickups and actual bombs look different as I didn't notice that until you mentioned it. The flame thrower is designed so that you have to hold it on the enemy for a second or two before it can catch fire (but plants light up immediately), but I think I could throw in some feedback to let the player know it's working so it doesn't feel so wonky. The lagging is something I'm still working on. Due to the nature of the enemies exponentially increasing over time, that means animations, scripts and lighting do as well. I'm looking to remove this type of mode in a story mode version, hopefully eliminating this issue. Thanks again for the feedback!

[Toonio]

Coming from using Flash, this felt like a great application for making some simple animations! I liked how simplified and intuitive it was: buttons and features were where I expected them to be, the undo button surprisingly worked by pressing ctrl-z (though I guess it's just z), and it had a lot of key features like onion layers immediately turned on instead of hiding it away like Flash does by default. I also liked how easy it was to save the result as a gif! Felt like it did a great job at being a great introductory app for some easy animations that you can save and display on the ol' social medias. I did have some minor issues though: I couldn't figure out how to rearrange layers, and I couldn't figure out how to get the fill or drag tools to work, and there were some things like how I expected the animation to stop playing when I hit buttons like go to first frame or move to prev/next frame, and how when I hit backspace to type in a width it annoyingly autofilled with 1 (I wanted to enter 5 so I hit backspace to blank it out and then hit 5, which resulted it in being '15' instead of '5'). And I imagine it might still be a little too complicated for some people, despite the simplification from more robust apps. But overall, I had a great time with this!

kr0tyara responds:

Thank you for your callback! Sadly, there's currently no way to rearrange layers. You can only copy and paste the frames from one layer to another. The 'Fill tool' draws a filled shape, try to just draw a line as usual! Drag tool is for moving the canvas (doesn't affect the actual drawing), it works only if the stage is zoomed.

[Flip Palace]

Very solid game! I loved the concept and felt like it was done very well by having a good set of levels with both a great difficulty curve and good pacing at introducing new mechanics. Found myself getting really addicted to making it through the levels, enjoying the eureka moments as they came. The game, while quite minimal in terms of graphics and such, still had a decent amount of juice to it with the animated buttons and death animation, among other small touches. I did have a bit of a frustrating period where I kept expecting 'down' to always be the 'flip' action and 'up' to be the 'jump' action, instead of them being reversed after flipping, but I got used to it, so nothing too bad. All in all, feels like a well-executed game!

08jack responds:

thanks for the detailed review!

[I Wanna B The Clock]

Fun little gag, but it did make me wish it had something even more to it! Seeing the characters bounce up and collecting the Bs made me think that it was building up to something, or that I had to catch the other characters as they go by or...well, or something, anything, but the game was just that simple in terms of mechanics. I suppose it's just the fact that it does have some niceness to it what with the upbeat, bouncy animated graphics and music that makes me wish it was even more. Also feels a bit lacking that, even as a high score game, it doesn't even display your score in game. But I mean, what was I expecting? It's based off of B and it is exactly what an homage of it would be, and it was clearly made in just a few hours, so eh, what can I say? I'll let it slide, haha.

Stepford responds:

I TRIED TO WARN YOU!

[Put Out the Fires]

Solid puzzler! Quite minimalist and a bit dry in terms of special effects, and I wish there were some quality-of-life things like being able to save/load your game, but overall I really enjoyed the mechanics and the progression of difficulty as the game introduced them bit-by-bit with hints. Definitely felt quite clever and had some good eureka moments to the puzzle designs!

Pjorg responds:

The puzzlescript engine should save your progress via browser cookies I think? Glad you enjoyed otherwise.

[Frame Game - Gif Maker]

Cool application! Not only is the presentation stylish as all get-out, I feel this serves a great purpose of being a solid animation program with just the right amount of options to let even a newbie make some neat gifs, but not so much as to overload the user and frustrate them as a more traditional application would. In that respect, it's a great stepping stone program, a way for a person to get introduced or have some quick animation fun while being able to slap their gif on their social medias and share: very cool stuff. Thanks for letting an oldie like me have the chance to animate for a bit like I did in my youth, hoho!

CaperCube responds:

Thanks for the heartfelt review dude! A big part of our goal with the game was to make it easy to use for new animators and not frustratingly simple for experienced ones, so I'm super happy to know that our intent wasn't lost in development! Cheers yo, glad we could make your day!

[Eggsolotl]

A bit of a rocky start, but a cool game! It was a bit frustrating to learn everything without a tutorial or anything: it's somewhat intuitive, but there were some aspects that I didn't realize for quite some time, like being able to run up columns, or being able to match on diagonals or by holding an orb without placing it down either, and I wish there were some sort of targetting icon to let you know what orb you're about to pick up since there were plenty of times where it picked up one I didn't expect it to (like picking the one next to me instead of the one below me). Once I got past all that, I felt like it was pretty solid! Has a lot of charm to it, especially with the cute transition animation. Only thing lacking for me was the progression: felt like it just gets a bit monotonous and takes way too long to start introducing significant differences, but it wasn't too bad as the gameplay was decent at its core to compensate.

AxolStudio responds:

Great feedback!
This was made in < a week. So many things were rushed.
We are in the process of developing this further, and have added some new game modes, and 'special' eggs, etc. Hopefully you'll come back and give the new version a play when we release it.
A 'target reticule' is a pretty good idea, actually... I hadn't thought about it...
One of the improvements we have already added (but not released yet) is that if you hold down you pickup the egg you are standing on, instead of one next to you.

Thanks!

[Xin's Commission Campaign]

Move over Breath of the Wild, we got a brand-new exploration game here! Found myself having a lot of fun exploring the map, finding all the treasures and chuckling at all the various dialogues that pop-up. The game can be a little monotonous at times as the landscape can be quite barren and overly bumpy making treasures tricky to find, but the NPCs made it up enough for me. Speaking of that, it is pretty inside-jokey so I dunno if it has mass appeal, but hey, it's Newgrounds and I recognize most of the people mentioned, so hey, it's all good for me! Also to note is that the game is a little wonky in some aspects, such as the water acting oddly, the bike being able to go straight up mountains Skyrim style, and the treasure chest spreading the gems so far you need to pick em all up one-by-one, but I felt like they didn't detract, but rather just add to the goofy nature of the game (for example picking up the gems is fun thanks to the pitch-shifted noises). There were a couple of weird bugs here and there: Corey's commission lines were doubled up in a strange way with a line being written twice despite it being said only once, for example, but nothing too bad. Anyway, cheers for this!

plufmot responds:

Ahaha I'm glad you enjoyed it! This is definitely a game for the culture! Also the Skyrim bike thing was intentional. Was too much fun just being able to drive up anything. Keep it real!