FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Nightmare Arena V:1.7.4]

Pretty impressive from a tech-demo perspective, but I found the game a bit dry and boring at the moment. Again, lord knows I couldn't make an online game like this with servers and all that hoo-hah, so kudos on getting that all setup. But looking past that and playing the game, I just found it to be quite boring.

Don't get me wrong, I did think there were some nice touches like the emote system, and there was an attempt to make some cool combat through various levels and an assortment of guns and power-ups. But in the end, combat always just felt like it came down to just shooting at each other in really simple, unexciting ways: there weren't really any fun abilities you could use to outskill your opponents in clever ways, no satisfying explosions or feedback for gunfire, and the levels didn't have any cool environmental hazards, setpieces or unique charm to them. Felt like the game was overall very janky as well, with weird staticy sound effects and such.

It does look like you are still updating it, however, so maybe it'll keep getting improved upon and I'm jumping the gun: best of luck!

GlarkerGames responds:

Thanks for the feedback! :D It helps a lot ill try and make the game more exciting and unique. Im working on new unique guns. I think my game needs a good revamp.

['Tower of the Missing Sock' - DEMO]

Cute game, but a little bit bland once you get past those cute graphics and play for awhile.

Don't get me wrong, I think the game is quite cute and endearing with the style and animations, and the game does have some really neat aspects like the boss fight at the end, which was a definite highlight for me.

But in the end, it felt like the game was merely decent, being a very simple zelda-esque game without any interesting gadgets or puzzles or setpieces: just incredibly basic combat against the same enemies over and over, and the combat was very frustrating at times due to the sluggish movement and attacks coupled with the enemies not being stunned from your attacks. Also, this is a nitpick, but I didn't like the lazy animation done for the door/stairs transitions: just looked unnatural, especially for the stairs in particular since it didn't have the shadows to try and hide it.

The goofy story and style was enough to hook me, and I'm glad since I got to fight that neat boss at the end, but it did feel like this could've used more meat on its bones, if you'll pardon the pun. As a side note, it is cool to see you experiment with all these different genres!

Butzbo responds:

That's a fair point, I took this one as a bit more of a challenge of making a game of this kind, so in terms of gameplay there's nothing I could consider particularly new. Still great to hear that other bits were fun including the boss fight, I'd like to keep going trying out other genres and hopefully adding something new next time ;) Thanks man!

[Grandpa's Minigun]

Fun little game! Loved the goofy story and concept to it, and had a blast mowing down enemies like I was mowing the lawn. All the little touches to the game were great: the feedback from blasting enemies and the corpses they left behind, the little speech bubbles, the way the music amped up when a wave transition happened: really cool stuff. I especially liked the element of having your attack slow you down significantly, as well as turning being very slow: really sold the weight of that minigun and added a cool strategic element of choosing when to attack and when to run. In that regard, I almost feel like you shouldn't have had the dodge roll since it ignores the weight of the gun, but eh, I'll allow it since it was fun, haha.

There were definitely some minor nitpicks to be had: for one, I have no idea what the heck that minigame all of a sudden was, two, it was a bit difficult to tell when I would be hit and when I wouldn't since the hitboxes could be a bit vague (is the minigun and the crown part of my hitbox? is it just one of the kids, and if so, which one? etc), three, it was a little annoying how difficult it was to pick up souls, and four, the game did get a little boring in that I found you could easily just get in a circling pattern to avoid attacks, slowing the action down. Also I was hoping for more gibbing variety: little disappointing that the enemies didn't have more variety in corpses and splatters and such, but as said, that's pretty minor.

jefvel responds:

Thanks for the thorough review! I agree that the dash might not fit in super well with the heaviness of the gun, but it was so fun so I left it in. I had planned to have it more like a drifting mechanic, so you could sort of swing the minigun, and the crown would act as a morning star club, but that might have made the controls a bit too difficult.

Yeah, the minigame comes in super quickly, it was tricky to balance between having a flow that matches the music and giving the user enough time to understand what's happening.

Exploding monsters with a ton of gibs was something I wanted to have too, but didn't have time for adding, maybe they'll be in a future game. And yeah, both siblings have a hitbox, a circle around their feet, it's not very clear at all, didn't think about that. The splatter system was written very haphazardly, which made adding variety to it pretty tricky, but it's something I might improve on in future games :)

[Crush the Industry Demo]

Wow, pretty impressive demo! You frontloaded by saying it wasn't gonna be polished or anything, but I felt like what was shown was already quite polished: animations and graphics were very lively and cute, combat system was deep with a lot of interesting strategy and characters to choose from, and so on and so forth. All around it just felt very well put-together, with the thing I liked the most about the game was how intuitive the interface was: while I felt like the initial tutorial was a bit too much to grasp at first since it just dumps everything on you at once and I feared I was gonna miss something, it was great at how helpful the game was in letting you hover your mouse over practically anything to get a tooltip to see what it was. There were some small things that could be fixed up here and there, such as how sometimes the effects from combat would happen too fast for me to realize the full effects that just occurred, but from seeing how it's already going I think you're on a good path. Looking forward to the full version!

As a silly side note, I hope you're having a good time developing and that the whole toxicity aspect is just for fun and not to be used as a shield against criticism or anything like that: it can be rough out there but I hope you're able to stay with a healthy outlook and sort out the good feedback from the bad. I just don't want this to be a "oh you didn't love my game? whatever, you're just a hater" thing instead of realizing what might seem likely overly critical feedback deep down is trying to be helpful...eh, I'm overthinking things.

CognogginGames responds:

Thank you! And I'm having fun with it. I wouldn't want a shield against constructive criticism -- it is essential to helping me improve the game. The character core skills update that just went live was something that I was motivated to do after reading feedback here.

[Cactu-Sama 2]

Nice to see a sequel to Cactu-Sama as I liked my time with that and also enjoyed my time with this! All-round it was a cute little game with some great challenges that mostly relied on a nice 'gotcha' system where you need to avoid taking what seems like the obvious route, as it is usually a trap.

If I were to have any complaints, there would just be a few minor nitpicks. For one, I found the game to be a bit more muted and less peppy that the previous one: movement felt a little more stiff, sound effects were more quiet, and events that used to have a bit more fanfare like completing a level were unfortunately silent now. I also felt like the story setup was a little weak: I mean, it is a little amusing to just see the balloon drift away and read "oh noes" but it did just kind of confuse me since we don't even see what cactu is doing: is it his balloon? Is he sad? Where is he? Is he even chasing after the balloon? You might say of course, it's obvious he's chasing after it, but every level just has us picking up puzzle pieces for some reason, so what the heck is he doing? Haha, anyway, still a cute game.

Diemorth responds:

I'm glad you liked this new version of the game! :D

You brought up a lot of relevant points, the game is actually a little quieter. I really tried to prepare the game for the story, but we ended up not developing it much, the story ends up looping and I think it can be a good start to have that defined in the case of a sequel. They are certainly points that we will pay attention to.

Thank you for the game compliments and for playing! :D

[LeviRamirez NFT Generator]

Whoa, Nice Fuckin' Tits, Levi, dayum! Where's my right click? I need to save these gems!

Anyway, y'all are crazy. But at least you're not as crazy as people into NFTs for real.

LeviRamirez responds:

I want you.

[Heaven's Ring]

On one hand, apart from the lack of sound effects, I thought this was a pretty neat precision platformer with solid presentation and a decent set of mechanics and obstacles to go through, and I always like a challenge.

But on the other hand, I had a really frustrating time with this game in contending with the controls: for some reason I just couldn't get the bounce to work consistently, particularly when trying to go for height, as it just felt random on whether it would get height or not. I tried all sorts of different methods to get it to work but it felt like I had to fight the game every inch of the way just to have it work with me.

Even taking my issues with the bounce away, the game just felt overly slippy/bouncy and too fast all-around, as well as way too short with the levels getting way too hard too fast to make up for that shortness. A good attempt, but precision platformers like this need to be extra solid with their controls to make everything feel fair, and this felt very confusing in that regard.

booplesnoot69 responds:

we might do an expansion in the future, the game was made in two days for a jam so there wasn’t much time for me to make sound effects, sorry for any inconvenience! 💙 i’m glad you enjoyed it at the very least though ^-^

[GOMBI-ACTION]

Short and sweet action-packed game! Love me a good boss fight and this cut to the chase with some decent patterns to fight through and great expressive animations. Wish there was another pattern to contend with but I liked what I got. Started off hard but I liked the challenge and got it down no problem eventually. There was a bit of an exploit with slimes in that if you don't kill any, they stop spawning at two on screen: not sure if that was intentional or not.

While I enjoyed myself, it took me a bit to get used to at first: I didn't even realize there were bounce pads on the sides (for some reason I thought the cogs would hurt me if I got close to the sides so I barely looked over there, and I figured the upper level was just for the slimes to jump in from) and the fact that you don't change direction when holding down fire was good, but confusing initially. Also I don't know what the combo counter at the bottom was? It felt like I was getting life back when I reached a certain combo, but the number felt random and sometimes wouldn't even happen despite going into triple digits (or it would happen when I had full life which wasted it). Would help if that was a bit more intuitive, maybe it should say something like 25/90 or it should just be a bar filling up with a health/plus symbol on it to show its purpose more intuitively.

Just-a-ng-dummy responds:

Thx for the feedback!
I'll try to make a tutorial section for the game and improve on some more of the mechanics!

[Forest Shack ( Prototype )]

Hmm, it's a decent game with some intrigue on how it evolves, but I found it to be very drab and boring for the most part, unfortunately.

I found the graphics in particular to be the cause of most of my issues: the crosshair was very difficult to see (consider changing color and thickening the lines), the action was very difficult to parse as there was barely any feedback, sounds or animations to make events like attacks apparent, along with incredibly tiny health/cooldown bars that are difficult to see. In general, menus and various other aspects were just incredibly muted and lifeless (to be fair, some of the mutedness adds to the somber atmosphere, but I feel it is overkill).

I did like that the game had some cool input timing events for recovering health and shooting, and I did like how the story surprisingly evolved with the cool monster transformation, but for the most part the game felt very slow and plodding. A solid attempt though!

HatiValcoran responds:

Edit: To celebrate 10,000 views, I've fed the crosshairs some baby back rat ribs!

Yes, I can see what would make you feel that way. There are very few goals early on, and most of the novelty comes from the new animals you face off against every other night.

For the sequel I plan to ensure the issues with the readability of the user interface are tackled right from the start, and improving the readability of actions is also in my radar.

It's good to hear that there were parts that you did like, I will look forward to seeing if you like the planned changes.

[Valkyrie: Sacred Feathers S]

Interesting game! A little bit confusing because I initially had no idea I could shoot back and thought the game was just about survival and dodging for as long as you could (maybe the first playthrough should introduce controls more, or have a crosshair where the mouse pointer is) but I liked that the game got right to the action quickly, and once I got into it I found that it had a decent variety of enemies, power-ups and strategy to it. Some good ol' arcade action!

That being said, its greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. To me, it's very impressive that the game was made in RPG Maker, but if we disregard that context, we're just left with a merely decent twin-stick shooter that is brought down by the various chains that RPG Maker has. This feels like something that would be made for a school project: decent for a first start, but missing various bells and whistles to make it really stand out on its own.

If, for example, this was not a game on its own, but a game within a game, like a replacement to the general combat for a big RPG or adventure game, it could be rather cool, and from what the description says that might be the case, so looking forward to that in that regard!

ByEthanFox responds:

Thanks! Yep, as you read, it started life as R&D for a minigame to feature in a chapter of Nina Aquila: Legal Eagle, and I ended up releasing this version as it just ended up more fun than I expected, and I figured people might enjoy it. It also gave me a testbed to test some features (the version on NG is a later revision; the itch version went through a few iterations).

Thanks for playing!