FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[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!

[CryptoCoaster]

Very amusing and rather deep game once you get into it past the initial bumpy entrance (pun intended): really fun and addictive stuff, thankfully with none of the risk of actually doing it for real, thank god!

I was a little bit annoyed initially where I'd buy but then get stuck with no way to sell positive for a huge amount of time. I was also annoyed about the penalty for hitting buy/sell when midair as it felt unintuitive, and I wished I could break/speed-up the cart to take advantage of highs/lows I'd sail over. However, once I accepted those annoyances as intentional design, I learned to embrace my inner day-trader and do more rapid-fire buys and sells on short sets or even single hills and the whole game opened up: really cool and fun to experience the evolution of strategy and the risk-reward in trying to hit that sell at the peak but not when you're mid-air!

I think the game has been pretty cleverly designed with a lot of risk-reward and time-pressure to both lead the player towards that rapid-fire day-trader strategy after seeing how the classic sit and wait strategy doesn't work, and to show the player just how crazy and stupid all this crypto/stock/day-trading shenanigans can be and how easily you can fail (I wouldn't blame you if the game was subtly designed to push that message by always trying to screw you over, making it trend downwards right when you buy and trend upwards right when you sell, because it sure felt like it haha). Smart and funny stuff!

0x6a61686e responds:

I considered dropping the price on buy, tried it, unfortunately had to scrap the idea. No deep thought behind it tho, I just thought it'd be funny.

[Punch It Deluxe DEMO]

I certainly like the idea behind a destressing game where you can de-stress by whaling on someone, and I am quite impressed at the technical achievement of getting this to work in RPGMaker, but I still feel like this game is quite lacking from its intended goals.

While the game has had some minor improvements from its previous version, such as the introduction of new damage states for the character as they get beat up, the gameplay and gamefeel still remains overly simple and repetitive to me (and even the damage states, as new as they are, are incredibly sparse and not all that exciting).

The two game modes kind of mess up the goal in their own way. In the normal mode, the game has you beat up the guy in a rapid-fire matching game until you mess up: fun in concept, but the game mode has the guy immediately get his revenge by pulling a gun when you mess up, defeating the whole point of destressing since you will lose in the end eventually. Meanwhile in the freeplay mode, while you never need to fear losing, the game quickly gets repetitive as the actions you can take are incredibly limited and there is no fun game logic to spice things up as in the regular mode.

Ideally, I think that the game requires at least two major things to achieve its goal as a stress reliever:

One would be a more interesting and tactile way to attack the guy that gives more pleasurable feedback. For me, I'd like the game to be like the intro to Mario 64 where you can tweak, pull and slap Mario's face around, but in very intricate and freeform ways. You could make it so you swish the mouse around to simulate slapping the guys face with a virtual hand, for example, and have the guy reel back and get smushed and warped depending on the strength/direction of the mouse movement. This would make the game infinitely more replayable as it would increase the amount of actions you can take rather than the static three.

Next would be allowing the user to customize the guy you're attacking. I have no emotional attachment to this Howie Mandell looking guy: what I'd like to do is customize the guy to look like someone I know, so I could get pleasurable revenge in attacking them.

Unfortunately, I do feel like all the things that might make this game good might not be possible given that this was awkwardly made in RPGMaker, so I understand that my feedback will most likely be for naught.

WeirdRikert responds:

Thank you for the in-depth analysis. This game was a lot of first for me, and moving forward I have more information to apply to future games.
There is certainly more that could be added to this game, and I hope to do a proper sequel that impliments all the mechanics at some point.

[DRIFT APOCALYPSE - Drive Over Zombies]

Pretty neat game: any game that promotes smacking enemies with the backend of a car from a sweet drift gets a thumbs up in my book. I will say though that while I like the concept in theory and I do think there's some fun arcade gameplay in here to enjoy getting skilled at, I found it a bit frustrating to play due to the weird controls (it felt so unnatural to press both directions to boost) the overly slow and slippery feel of the car and the lack of variety in enemies/obstacles/etc. Eh, maybe I just suck at it, haha. Also I found it really weird that the tutorial is stuffed away in the options: feel like it should be a main menu option instead given its importance.

Also, and this is a silly pet peeve of mine perhaps, but I really don't like the inclusion of coins and continues and such: it just makes it feel like the game design has been compromised to promote this weird crowbarred-in grinding aspect.

torrydev responds:

First of all, thanks your review, I appreciate a lot this feedback.

I agree the controls are a bit weird, as well as the coins / unlockables / continues system. But that´s because the game is originally designed for Android Play Store and I wanted to have like 2 button gameplay to be comfortable to play on touchscreens. (As well as including some kind of monetization to get a bit of revenue at least)

The main problem the game has is that drifting over zombies it´s kinda hard because of the controls, so a lot of enemy ideas I had to add a bit of variety couldn't be implemented because it´ll be too difficult to deal with them.
I also noticed that most people improve a lot when they play and get used to the controls and told me that the game experience improved a lot for him.
So I prefer to leave the game as it is now; a short, fun with a bit of depth arcade game, and focus on a future project where I´ll apply all of the feedback I'm getting!