FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Lines On Sides]

This one was a tricky one for me to review: it really didn't make the best first impression as it started off slow. Really slow. Waaaaaay too slow. Seriously, a huge amount of levels are dedicated to brain-dead puzzles that practically solve themselves: while the levels keep increasing in size, the difficulty or mechanics involved do not, making it feel pointless. I was so close to just quitting the game thinking this wasn't my jam, but then finally the game actually started to introduce some cool mechanics: being able to move around tiles to different locations, having to ensure there are matches for tile to tile instead of just worrying about the edges, and so on. I ended up really having a lot of fun! I like the minimalist design where you figure stuff out not by 'how to play' controller instructions, but intuition and signals the game gives off, and I love the satisfying subtle sounds as everything clicks into place. It gave me a real sudoku feel where you gotta really think ahead, as while a tile might seem good in one location, it actually fits elsewhere better. So yeah, bit of an odd egg where it's good, but takes way too long to actually get good.

Mandigondo responds:

Thanks for the feedback. I wrote down your observations and I will use them in future projects. :)

[Chikiana Jones and the Golden Eggs]

Seems like a decent concept that was pretty fun, but a little clunky and confusing with its execution to me. I definitely did like getting past all of the various traps and obstacles and then running back through a more challenging version of them: pretty cool stuff. There was some minor jank here and there with hitbox confusion and such, but for the most part it was fun.

The weirdness came to me with the toolboxes and bridge implementation. On one hand, I feel like I understand the idea is that you can strategically choose what bridges you want to build in order to skip some challenging parts of the level. However, for the most part you are given so many toolboxes so easily that it becomes not a choice, but a foregone conclusion that you can just skip huge parts of the game. I'd prefer if the toolboxes were either scraped altogether so as to make people experience the whole game, or to be either severely limited so you need to make a strategic choice of what bridge to build and what bridge to neglect, letting you only skip one part of the level over another. Additionally, you could make it so that the only way to get toolboxes is from challenging branches of the level: then you'd need to decide if it's worth the risk to go through an optional challenge for a toolbox to make your escape easier, or if you just need to get better at the required parts of the level and not skip them. Just feels like the concept wasn't fully thought out and executed in a positive way, at least to me personally.

Steventus responds:

Hey thanks for your detailed review on the gameplay. I've had hunches on the loose ends on the gameplay but I could never pinpoint on exactly what so thank you for verifying them for me.

The strategic choice of toolbox/bridges mechanic was something I wanted to explore but I wasn't able to explore with my limited level design skills. It is a critical skill that I should focus on more if I were to do more big-picture strategic kind of games.

Appreciate your thoughts alot!

[Sunnyside vs. the Eggies]

Pretty good game! Certainly very impressive from a visual standpoint: the title screen, cinematics, feedback from shooting, all the characters, the HUD and so on and so forth just ooze charm and really create this wonderfully goofy world.

Gameplay was a bit of a mixed bag: on one hand, there were a lot of interesting enemies to fight and the escalation of difficulty definitely hooked me, and there were some cool techniques you could pull off like shooting down during a jump to hover. But on the other hand, it did feel like it was a toss-up on whether the fight was going to be fun or not for each room: some of the rooms actually allowed for a lot of fun verticality with platforms and such, and the enemies were arranged in an interesting formation, but most of the time the rooms were very boring, flat, and cramped rooms with enemies just bunched together in a messy mass: no strategy, just shoot and pray they go down. There was also some confusion with corpses: I actually thought the enemies were jumping at me some times, not realizing that they were already dead and it was just their corpse falling about randomly (maybe consider greying out corpses or having them always fly backwards from the shot).

All in all, its shortcomings to me were quite understandable given that it is a game jam game, and I still did have a lot of fun playing this stylish game!

Stepford responds:

Thanks, FutureCop!

I definitely agree with your feedback and I appreciate you taking the time out of your day to review all these games!

[Cracked Up]

Nice and chill little game! It's a rather simple and basic one with most of the puzzles being easy to figure out, but I liked moving my jiggly body around and solving the various puzzles that came up with all the berry powers, and I felt like it did pretty good at introducing new novel bits as it went on, like having to bounce berry shots off of an angle to make a ricochet shot. It's a little bit lacking in some respects: I didn't like the bland way you just disappear and have some text pop-up when you die, for example, but I suppose it's understandable for a game jam. In the end, you just gotta love the fat lil' chicken and fat lil' fox wigglin' around, haha!

Komix responds:

lol yeah I just yesterday realized that we release the game without a death sound.
Hope you stay tuned for the steam version, that will have much more polish. And later levels of the game will surely add more challenge.

[Fairyland Datura: Egg]

Pretty funny adventure! The dialogue was a bit rough and tricky to understand at times (likely due to the usage of google translate as stated in the description) but I felt like I got the gist of it and found it very entertaining and goofy. Despite most of the game being just dialogue, I was nevertheless hooked as I liked seeing the various antics the hero got up to and the crazy tangents and twists and turns the story went off on. I also liked the way the game would pull the rug out from under you with some surprises like the sword fight with the child: I knew I shouldn't have pressed the button, haha! Anyway, looking forward to seeing the conclusion in the future!

Vonka responds:

Thank you, I will fix everything in the future, I will add it, and there will be a good translation into English)

[Wizard, Archer and Egg]

Hah, nice little adventure! While the main character controls weren't anything that special, being just a very simple spammy shooter (cmon, how you gonna make a bow without the ability to charge a shot for more damage or piercing?), I liked the goofy and charming story progression, as well as the unique subversion of upgrading your egg instead of your character. With all that, the game did a great job of keeping me hooked, and boy did I love how it all kept escalating to a great ending! I was a little disappointed that the egg ends up with the same build no matter what due to the way the upgrades get capped: would've loved if maybe certain builds that players go for end up screwing them over in the end when the final boss gets those powers, but I understand that you probably wanted it balanced so everyone gets a fair fight. Cheers for this!

WanZai responds:

Very insightful. In the beginning, I really wanted to make a different but challenging boss battle. It needs a lot of tests. I finally chose to make it more steady and fluent this time.

[Hen in the Foxhouse (Jam Version)]

Huh, bit of an odd egg. On one hand, it's got some interesting mechanics what with the limited ammo that trails behind you, some satisfying feedback for hitting foxes and the various obstacles scattered around, and some potential depth with the armored foxes that take multiple hits. But as it stands, the game feels directionless: I had no idea what the controls were, and I had no idea what I was doing or if there was even anything to do! I was getting points of shooting foxes, sure, but with the limited ammo and no clear direction I wasn't sure what the point was. I ended up making an interesting game for myself where I held down the right button and tried to see how far I could get, all while dodging foxes, trying to only shoot when necessary to conserve ammo: it was kind of fun...but that was just a game I made up myself! I'd really like if the game had, well, something interesting to it, like rules or an objective, as right now it just feels like a weird alpha/prototype: for all I know, maybe there was some sort of objective, but I didn't have any confidence in the game to think there was.

VerilyFine responds:

- First and most importantly, this is a jam game made quickly for the July Jam. So any seemingly unfinished parts are actually unfinished. There are so many ways to improve this, so I appreciate your feedback. I want to update the game later.
-There actually isn't limited ammo. There originally was, but managing ammo ruined the feeling of the game, taking it from 'rampaging', to 'careful'. I made it so the eggs represent how much x2 Fire Rate you have left.
-The directionless feeling is because I made the sandbox I had built into a game only a couple hours before the jam ended. There were no points or respawning until then, and they were quickly slapped on. The game has barely any progression or objectives because of this.

[Yu Jammin]

Pretty cool experience! I thought this was a great example of a fun little education tool, something of a middle man that lets people experience a small taste of the process of music production and the fun of it, without the hassle of going all in and purchasing a full music production application that can cost a bunch and has so much to set up to get started. It's not so simple to prevent me from still getting a little confused during my process (didn't know how to change the pitch for notes, didn't know what cull did, etc) but I made it thru in the end and really enjoyed when the game took my dumb beats and made a cool little final arrangement with it all. Cheers for this!

Stepford responds:

I'm glad you had fun! And I appreciate the kind words.


If you are curious, when you are placing down notes, you can DRAG it up and down while holding left click to change the pitch. And CULL will stop a sound effect from continuing to play if another note is played, so if you have a super long sound they wont layer over each other and make an awful noise.

[Splat Chicken]

Had a bit of a rough start, due to the weird controls, difficulty of getting the double jump to work consistently, and very harsh gravity/fast movement that prompts a lot of mistakes, but I must say that I did enjoy how the game escalated as it went on with the introduction of all-new mechanics, as well as all sorts of interesting puzzles that build upon previously shown notions: for example, when I saw that you could solve a puzzle by throwing an egg across a spike pit onto a button by bouncing it off another egg yolk half-way through the spike put, it felt like a cool eureka moment among the many other eureka moments I had in my playthrough. I definitely think this game does need a bit of smoothing out as the controls/physics did make it unnecessarily difficult and inconsistent to solve puzzles, but I felt the game was pretty cool at its heart, so well done in that regard.

(Also as a side note, maybe chill on the screenshake and chromatic aberration: I know people think it looks cool but this implementation was a bit overboard and just hurt my eyes, haha)

STANNco responds:

Thanks for the feedback! The controls are as they are by design, but I could definetely have taught them better. I'll try to improve on that for next ventures!! And the RGB split stuff, i'm sorry to hurt your eyes lol. I'll give some options another time

[Swimming Leningrad]

As it stands right now, it feels like a decent alpha prototype for a Fire Emblem/Advance Wars-esque tactical game, but as an actual game it feels severely lacking. The game is functional, but just very basic with no satisfying feedback or special effects to the attacks and other actions (it doesn't even have a victory screen when you beat a level, for example). It also doesn't help that the game is very slow and middling due to the low damage numbers and the small trickle of money which prevents you from being able to experiment with buying other units. There was also a lack of any interesting abilities, and no story/objective to it all to hook me. Again, I think this could be something decent as it has all of the core structure necessary for a tactics game (for example, I liked being able to preview enemy move distances by clicking on them and such) but it just needs more time in the oven to have something special or interesting about it. (As a side note, I am coming at this from a single-player perspective only, and I did not try multiplayer).

ProsciuttoMan responds:

Very fair, I absolutely agree with most of this.
Honestly, if there was more time I think a lot of this would've been addressed (barring plot because I don't think we ever did any work on writing anything), but as it stands I think it was a really fun first step for the crew, since this was everybody's first jam game I believe.