FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[SNEK: The Game]

Decent game! An interesting take on an old concept: it was fun to race to get pickups in time as you get faster and faster and get longer and longer! I think my only real gripe with the game, as superficial as it sounds, is with its presentation and polish, or rather the lack thereof. It feels like the game has a solid core to it, but doesn't have any pizazz or juice to make it exciting. I feel like it could really stand to have some more special effects not only to amp up certain elements but also help the player learn important mechanics. For example, you could make it so that when you get a potion, you don't just shrink instantly, but a piece of your tail sheds off or explodes or fades away: looks good and shows the player how potions work without even needing text instructions. You could make a cauldron spawn more exciting by announcing it with an explosion and then having a clock tick down sound so the player knows they should get to it quickly, where then you would reward the player with a cool slow-mo blur effect and power-up sound when they do collect it. Again, I know a lot of this might sound superficial, and graphics aren't everything, but I think this game could really benefit from some juice: watch 'Juice It or Lose It' for a more visual example of what I'm talking about! Nonetheless, I felt this game was pretty decent!

Aprime responds:

Thanks! I'll bear those in mind for a future game. Was just trying to keep this one simple given the pixelated graphics.

[NEWGROUNDS AIR FORCE]

Pretty crazy game! Might be a little too hard for its own good (I think I usually can't even last a minute, let alone 30 seconds) but I do like a challenge. It took a bit, but I really liked how fast and crazy it would get, and occasionally it did feel good to unfocus my eyes and get a little bit in the zone and blast away (though to be honest, it probably wasn't me getting the zone and just the letting me breath enough through RNG spawns, haha). Speaking of RNG, its a bit annoying that you can't tell what the power-ups do until you get them (would be nice if the health pickups would look like health icons) and it's annoying how little invincibility the player gets and how varied enemy damage can be. The meme-y humor was a bit out-of-place: just felt like you were flinging internet jokes everywhere and not even bothering to make them fit with the game at all. Anyway, complaints aside, would love to see the game escalate into cool boss fights and such, like a whole campaign/story mode, but at it is, its still a pretty fun arcade shooter.

Also, not to sound like a dick, but the whole guilt-trip donation might be a little...the wrong way to go about it. I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt that it's for a good cause and such, but it might not go down well for a lot of people and leave a negative impression (I know, I know, I do think indie devs need more support and I understand its an annoying situation where its like damned-if-you-do and damned-if-you-dont ask for donations)

MoeAnguish responds:

Thanks for the review, what you said was fair and all, however, the part about the jokes was just me making the game making process more enjoyable for myself. after all, i'm just an indie dev trying to have some fun just like everyone playing my games. and I'm not guilt tripping anyone. if you consider yourself generous enough and have a spare buck to donate to me, that's very much appreciated, if you don't, then that's fine too. i didn't intend for this to seem like a "do it or you're a scum bag" kinda thing.

[Squid! Escape! Fight!]

Pretty cool and charming little game! Certainly had a good impression on the presentation side with some great graphics, animation and game feel. I enjoyed my time with it eventually, but it did take some time to warm up to it. A lot of the design felt very confusing to me. The game starts off very slow: I could understand the first level being a safe level, but there's several levels without any form of challenge: you can just swim your way to the top no problem. Eventually you get puffer fish and eels and such (oh my) which increased the fun, but it felt like forever till then. Making it level-based in the first place seemed a bit odd to me as well, paced it weirdly: felt like this could be the kind of game where instead you just swim up and up either to an incredibly high goal, or forever to see how far you can go for a score, where the higher you go the harder it gets, with more and more enemies and less and less fish to eat. Text at the top would be a bit frustrating at times: I never felt like I needed the instructions or fish info, but if I did, it was a bit annoying that it could be interrupted by me finishing too fast, or it telling me my ink move was ready for the hundredth time, haha. Also, the invincibility frames felt a bit too short since you could get stuck in an eel and get comboed to death if you were unlucky (maybe prevent same enemy hurting you till you leave and reenter its hurtbox?) Anyway, despite my gripes, it still was a pretty solid, cute lil' game and I look forward to more from ya!

Omael responds:

Thanks a lot for the feedback. Next one will be better.

[BulletHeart]

An alright game for a few laughs! Little bit overly simple without much to it, but it's nevertheless quite explosive and kinetic with its animated presentation and has a fun little loop that escalates quickly, making it frantic and exciting to watch all the chaos happen! Little bit weird and glitchy though: I dunno why it's called hight score instead of high score, and it's not even saving my high score despite multiple attempts (it does save the hard score though?) (oh ok, now it's saving my hight score? weird, it wasn't before...huh)

Starryman responds:

thanks for letting me know! for some reason i always mistake high with hight, my english is not very well, but i will fix this definitely fix this errors

[Tankmas ADVENTure 2020]

Well, I'm absolutely late to the party so my review probably don't meet squat, but looking at the remnants of the place, it looks like everyone had a good time and there was a lot of cool stuff made! Shame about some of the stuff like the dance floor never getting finalized (unless maybe it did but the time travel mechanics didn't work for me or something, I started on December 1st when I loaded it up today, and then it jumped me to January 1st after reloading). There was some slight glitchiness here and there but nothing major, just stuff like presents showing the picture preview without me even opening the present yet. Cool stuff as usual, and I love seeing these collabs!

midgetsausage responds:

sorry for the late reply but brandy was busy kissing george in the last day so they had to rush that dance floor

[Chucan Fall]

Hmm, game has some ups and downs. For example, the title screen logo is very impressive, but the rest of the HUD elements such as the credits, score display, and so on are very bland hard-to-read text: could use a bit more stylization or outlines to add a little bit of a professional touch. Graphics seemed a bit haphazard as well with the coins and mines looking good, but the actual platforms looking like a sprite that's been awkwardly stretched/resized. The gameplay is quite basic, nothing to write home about, but it's functional: was confused on why I would die when I didn't land on a platforms, and why I couldn't recover from death by landing on one during my death fall (feels a bit unfair to not be able to). Controls were a bit confusing at first with me not realizing I had to click the sides of my screen with the mouse (thought I could just click to the left or right of my character to move in that direction) so I switched to keyboard which worked better. Seems like an alright idea, but I think it's just missing a lot of spice and something special to make it really stand-out from others.

GoodL responds:

Thanks! I always appreciate your feedback, and honestly since you reviewed World War Wizards a year ago I've always kept what you said in mind while working on new games. I really do appreciate it! I totally agree with what you're saying on the text, it's absolutely true that I didn't put in a whole lot of effort there, other than the title screen text, and doing so definitely could have applied that extra polish. It does look a bit... unfinished I suppose.

As for the mouse movement, Construct defaults "touch" inputs with with mouse pointer inputs. I never intended anyone to play this game with a mouse. I suppose I could have disabled that from even being possible.

You are not wrong that the platform sprites are a bit awkwardly stretched. Despite doing this game in pixel art, I didn't actually use "true" 1x1 pixel art when it game to putting the assets I drew in game. I'll keep that in mind next time. It's something I usually like to do, but I guess I was slackin'.

Lastly, in my mind it made sense that if you didn't land on every platform then you'd be "falling too fast" so you would "take too much fall damage from landing on a platform after missing one." But I do realize that that isn't exactly cohesive with the fact that the fall speed increases over time. Honestly I was hoping to hand wave that away with "video game logic." lol

Thanks again, and happy new year!

[Hazel the Plant Witch]

Goddamn, what a charming game! I really love the dialogue system in the game with how it works off of your limited recordings: felt awesome to talk with everyone and gather the appropriate lines like a puzzle/investigation, and it was very impressive in how many ways the plants reacted to every type of line you'd deliver (even the ones I'd just do as jokes, haha). So innovative and clever: blows modern dialogue systems outta the water since it actually involves more than just checking off everything in a tree or picking the best response! Reminded me of old-school games like Shadowrun or Wizardry where you could collect discussion topics to help your investigation. It did get a little frustrating at times with the limited recording space, but the game was short and sweet enough to not be an issue with that. Top off that innovative design with some really cute graphics and story; this is a winner! Now if you'll excuse me, I gotta go back in and collect the rest of the dialogue!

minibunnies responds:

Thank you so much for this wonderful feedback! I'm really glad to hear you enjoyed the puzzle of the game. We tried our best to cover all of the dialogue options we felt made sense, even some of the more obscure random lines. I'm happy that you found a lot of those lines! We wanted to restrict how many lines you could have at once to make the choice of what you record matter. I can certainly understand how that limitation might be frustrating though! It really means a lot to hear how much you enjoyed it, thank you for your kind words.

[Shake Art]

Pretty neat and silly artistic tool! Dunno if it's much of a game unfortunately, but I did have some fun goofing around making some drawings and shaking them about. I was hoping for a bit more functionality, like other tools to mess around with, or the ability to save/print/share our drawings and such, or maybe a game to go with it, perhaps based on our drawings (I mean, Vib-Ribbon, which I looked up based on this, did have a neat game to go with it). Anyway, I don't mean to harp on that so much: it's still quite nice, reminds me of generative art assignments back in college. One thing I did find a little confusing was the decision to make 'end line' actually cancel the line you're currently making, instead of finalize the line: I initially thought to make a line you'd left click and then right click, but instead you made it left, left, right: got used to it but I would occassionally mess up and lose progress.

nokoi responds:

its funny cause im making a sequel and almost every feature you mentioned is already in the to-do list lol

[Ola! Tannenbaum]

Cool little fun arcade game! I like how there is a bit of a double-game going on, where one game is just you focusing on getting a high score by hitting the targets, but another game is looking for opportunities to best decorate the tree in a good way (like looking for targets where you can criss-cross big lines of tinsel and such). Wish I could save/print my final tree image and score and compare it with others to see who's the best decorator along with the highest score, haha! Also, I kind of wish it would automatically opt-out of the tutorials on a retry, but it's not necessarily, fine as-is. (Also, this is probably silly, but the flashing tutorial text is already enough for emphasis, having the circle targeting for the flashing text made me actually think I needed to aim the bauble there at first, lol)

Extar responds:

Really glad you enjoyed it! Pico-8 usually lets you take screenshots from the game with the F6 key but that doesn't seem to work when playing it through HTML5 in-browser. I'll see if there's another way I can get a screenshot into the game.