FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[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!

[Pandora's Egg]

Pretty neat game! Certainly makes a solid first impression with the great graphics used throughout, but particularly in title screen/intro bit. It's a simple game, but I like that it is quite challenging and has a lot of cool level arrangements and enemies to work with and figure out how to get around. It was definitely a bit frustrating and clunky at times though: hit boxes felt way more wide than necessary leading to a few deaths that felt a bit unfair as I thought I dodged them, and I didn't like the way the patrol patterns of the knights were random, leading to inconsistent patterns in this game which needs consistency for its puzzle-like nature (at least that's how I feel about it). It's a bit glitchy at times as well: had a case where I fell off the edge of a platform and immediately moved to the side, lodging me into the platform where I shouldn't be able to be, and also a level that I beat despite my character being dead, where he just died while still passing the finish line, haha. Also it's just a preference thing, but I wish gliding could be achieved from a jump just by holding space, instead of having to press it twice, one to jump and another to glide. Overall I felt like I had a good time with it, despite the little bit of jank here or there.

JJGamez64 responds:

Many of these issues are already fixed, including an extra control scheme for left handed players, but I'm not allowed to update this build with the fixes till the Game Jam judging has ended :(

Edit: Game just received a big update that addresses many of these points. Give it a second look and if you're happy with it, tell us with an extra half or full star ;)

[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!