FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Dominion Ex]

Nice shoot em up! Overall it felt like the game was very satisfying to play with a lot of cool special effects (especially the shockwaves), and I definitely loved the weapons and how they all had their strengths and weaknesses: you gotta be accurate with the rockets but they have great splash damage, the vulcan is decent all-around but you gotta get dangerously close to not suffer from the lack of accuracy, and the plasma is awesome at insta-deleting foes but it overheats so fast so it should only be a last resort. And then there's even the drive where it passively boosts your speed as long as you have it equipped. All these interesting pros and cons made fighting the great and various array of enemies (who are also weak or strong against certain weapons) super interesting as it keeps you active in searching for the best tool to use in the ever-changing situation: very thrilling stuff! Bosses were quite a cool spectacle as well. I felt like the whole ability to just warp out to homebase whenever you want was a bit confusing to come to terms with at first, but I suppose it allowed for some interesting convenience as some people might want to cash out immediately instead of more traditionally waiting for a level end. Well done!

Extar responds:

I'm glad you enjoyed the differences between the weapons, with the enemy immunities I wanted to make it so there's no one strategy that works all the way through, and so there's always at least one enemy who will give you problems regardless of which weapon you use.

Yeah, I let the players go to the hangar at any point so you can kind of upgrade as you're going, although you get more points if you save up more coins before visiting the hangar. Also, you can go back to the hangar to reset the screen if things are getting a bit too hectic :)

Thanks for the the detailed review!

[MADNESS CANVAS INTERACTIVE GALLERY]

I always appreciate these collabs as I think the heart is in the right place in terms of showing these artists some love and showcasing all these great talents, but I have to admit I did feel like this gallery was very lacking.

For one, it's very dry with no real pizazz to highlight or frame the art. It's as basic as it can get with just a simple back-and-forth between bland pages: It think it would be much cooler if the artworks were displayed in a big collage/gallery/poster like what's shown in the description, where you can hover or click parts of the art to see who worked on that part and so on: you know, just something a bit more fancy and interesting to get people to stay.

Furthermore, it felt like the gallery was lacking a lot of key features: for example, you can't click on an artist's name to see their profile, so unfortunately I think a lot of people aren't going to see and follow other artworks from them, which is a bummer because I think the point of a gallery and collab like this is to let people see art and then get to know and love the artist. By not putting an immediate link, you've made it for difficult for people to get connected and show love to the artist when they would want to.

Also, there's no table of contents or index or what-have-you to allow different ways to list, view or search for art that interests a user. By having the gallery be a simple list with only one way and one order, I feel like it unfairly emphasizes whatever you've chosen to be first in the list: everything near the end of the list probably won't be seen or remembered by the usual user as they would get bored or be tired by the time they've made it there, if they make it that far at all.

iamtheangrysons responds:

thank you for your feedback!

[Gyro Gear Tournament+]

Seems like it has some cool stuff going for it! I quite liked the unique style of combat with what seemed like multiple viable strategies, like go straight for clashes, fake them out, jump to hit them in the body or bounce on their head, knock them out of the ring, etc. I also liked that the stages mixed it up a bit with not only arena combat, but this kind of race combat as well.

Unfortunately, the game overall felt very rough and confusing to play. Don't get me wrong, I like when a game jumps into the action quickly, but this game overdid it by just immediately dumping me into combat without even teaching the controls, and even once I did learn the controls, I never felt like I could tell if I was playing correctly as it all felt so random and the potential feedback for seeing whether my hits were working wasn't visible or it was tucked in the corner where I wasn't able to look since I was fighting. It could definitely benefit from more explanation on fighting techniques and more feedback like damage numbers and maybe color sparks indicating whether an attack worked or failed or whatever (maybe it does this but I couldn't tell).

Not only that, but the AI seemed to be very subpar: eventually the AI seemed to get smart in the later stages and mixed their strategy up a bit, but a lot of the early fights just had the enemy come straight at you like a robot and just constantly clash over and over. I think there is a lot of potential in this game that maybe I'm missing out on just because I don't know the mechanics since the game never taught it effectively: very unfortunate.

rotcivsette responds:

Thanks for playing and for giving feedback! The game's nature is indeed very chaotic, so don't worry. It seems I didn't succeed in communicating the mechanics through gameplay overall very well, but I'll state here some information in case you're still curious: the sparks does indicate feedback (yellow: damage deflected; red: damage inflicted; orange: body hit). And there are words giving more feedback to you above your RPM bar. Thanks again and I'll try harder next time!

[ULTRA FORCE: OBLITERATION]

Really felt conflicted on this! On one hand, the game looks and feels very stylish and cool: the intro was really neat as were the slick door transitions between screens, the graphics were low-fi but had good icons and general presentation, and in terms of gameplay, the guns felt very punchy, the enemies were varied with interesting attacks, there were neat power-ups like the extra drone and the planes felt so smoothly animated and controlled.

But on the other hand, I felt like the intro went by way too fast for me to read and could benefit from some voice overs to punch it up, the door transitions were oddly muted and would benefit from a satisfying bzzz-ka-chunk-vrr sound to give it some extra oomph, the graphics were incredibly bland and boring at times with repeating the same background over and over and enemies being so sparse to not allow for the usual fireworks, the power-ups were unsatisfying as most of them were just stat increases that are barely noticeable or only noticeable if you luck into getting a certain gun, and most of the enemies felt boring and badly paced to fight as there were not put into interesting waves or formations to fight. In general, it felt like while the game has a good and slick core look and feel to it, it just felt like the gameplay overall was very boring, slap-dash and had no sense of progression to it, making it all feel meaningless in the end.

Looking at the constraints of the jam now I can understand that maybe it was unfortunately hamstrung by size limitations, but I just want to give my opinion coming in as someone who isn't aware of that. I'd love to see this or another shooter by you all come out that is more fleshed out since this does show a lot of promise!

Stepford responds:

Cheers, Futurecop! I do agree that the game is a bit slow at times and the upgrade system can be frustrating due to how niche they can be at times - but yeah. We wanted to add different backgrounds and level variety, but we ran out of time and filesize.

I appreciate you taking the time to play all these games. <3

[Isometric Room Collab]

Pretty cool collab! I not only like travelling through the collection of art on display here, but I also like that you try to spice it up with some minor side objectives like a scavenger hunt and other cool niceties like the map screen that keeps track of your current location. Overall it is quite nice, though I did feel like there was some sort of unfortunate damages done in creating the collage as some art pieces look to have been damaged/pixelated when being shrunk to fit or whatever, which along with some of the animated characters sticking out like a sore thumb gave it a bit of a clunky uncoordinated look. I really wish there was a zoom function as well so I could look at the art more closely.

Other than that, there were some minor confusing aspects, like how due to imprecise hitboxes you can hover your mouse over the top of a room (but still within it) and it will think you're hovering over the room above it. I didn't even realize I could click on animated characters to have them talk. The rooms are a bit oddly titled as well, for example, saying "floor 3" when it is still the 2nd floor (more accurately you'd probably say "room 3, floor 2" and so on). Also, I wish there were some more controls to allow you to navigate the art, like maybe being able to click/drag or to use mousewheel to scroll/move instead of only being able to use the arrow keys.

progamer09 responds:

glad you enjoyed it

[Pewt 'em Up!]

I think there is a pretty decent game buried in here, but it felt like it really got off with a bad start to me and was difficult to continue from that. There definitely is some cool aspects to the game: the music can get everything pretty hype, there's a neat story element flowing through it, and the visuals, while basic, do have a bit of a nice flair to them with explosions and such. I always appreciate a shooter, so I really wanted to enjoy myself with this.

But man, I just hated, in terms of visual and sound, how slow and bland the ships fly around the screen and fire bullets. I know this is how some games work, like Gradius or Raptor or whatever, where you start off as very basic and build-up your power bit-by-bit. But while I can accept it in those games because the gameplay is still fun and exciting straight from the start, in this game it just felt unacceptable with how limp and weak you start as a player, and how tedious of a grind it is to get up to the point of feeling good. I think its a crucial example of how the journey needs to feel just as good as the destination.

I appreciate that the game tries to entice the player through the escort mission: a friend appears and shows not only how cool your ship could get, but what epic fights you could eventually be happening. I feel though that it took way too long for that to happen in the first place, and the feeling doesn't take too long to dissipate, as the missions before and after that are incredibly slow and boring, with the vast majority of time spent shooting rocks instead of having cool dogfights with enemies. I dunno, maybe you can call me impatient.

Also, as a minor side-note, it would be nice if the upgrade menu could have the info for items pop-up when you hover over them, instead of having to click on an item just to see the info for it, and then back out if it isn't what you want after all.

Kitadashi responds:

Thank you for your feedback! 🍀

[Radiance Hearts]

Pretty cool game! I quite like the whole coop nature of the gameplay where you are two characters helping each other out by either splitting up or combining your strengths. I especially loved the tutorial sequence where the gameplay and story are intertwined with the narrator simultaneously teaching you the game while introducing the characters and lore: charming stuff. Definitely my favorite part was the boss fight: felt like it had a good variation of attacks that were fun and satisfying to battle through. The gameplay did feel a little repetitive at times and could use some more interesting set-pieces and new mechanics to vary it up, but I had a great time and would love to see the continuation of this and see how it develops.

The big downside for me was the lack of sound effects! There was such a lack of sound in this game that it was always incredibly jarring when it would show up, like how it plays a sound when the boss slams down but not for its various other attacks. I'd almost suggest that the game should just have no sound at all and only have music instead if you're going to be that lacking, but ideally I would say you should have sound effects more prominently for the various actions you and the enemies can take (movement, jumping, attacks, etc). Other issues were some minor things like controls where I would have difficulty getting a rising lumi (super jump) to go off consistently despite my best efforts, and that the combat could be simultaneously too hard (difficult to dodge the waves of bullets from normal enemies, and way too difficult to dodge the boss when it spins multiple times) and too easy (why dodge bullets when you can easily swing your sword to stun-lock all enemies from being able to attack).

Yword responds:

Thank you so much, FuturecopLGF. Sorry about the audio and control issues, and thanks so much for the feedback! :)

[Punch It]

It's ok as a prototype for a simple Simon Says/Bop It game, but unfortunately I found it very lacking. The gameplay mechanics are technically there, sure, and there is some fun to be had in looking at the goofy visuals you've setup for the successful attacks. But as it is now, this game is just too dry and gets old really fast. C'mon, this is Newgrounds, home of beating up people games, and if you're gonna have someone get beaten up, you've got to give it more satisfying feedback: where are the explosions of blood and teeth for every punch that splatter in all sorts of directions, where is the piled-up damage as their face warps from bruises and black eyes and the wall behind them gets painted red, where are the variations in sound, reactions and attacks? Not only that, but where is the personality: we don't even get a reason to hate this Howie Mandel looking guy through a brief intro or some quips/sass while beating him up, and we don't even get a chance to maybe dress him up to match someone we do hate. Beating up Zeus in God of War felt great since there was a lot of build-up and juice to it: this doesn't have any of that for me. Maybe I'm thinking about it too hard, but I just felt like this game could be so much more: for me, you gotta juice it or lose it (a good video about game feel to watch sometime).

WeirdRikert responds:

Thanks for the pointers. This was mostly an experiment with getting an RPGmaker game to work in browser. But, I definitely want to take all the feedback and update the game :)

[Machine Gun Gardener]

Some great hectic fun! The game's a little goofy and I didn't have the best first impression from the title screen which looked very generic and mobile-gamey, but I'm glad I stuck with it as I think it delivers some crazy and classic arcade-style shooting goodness! At it gets more and more intense, I like juggling the various power-ups to deal with all the situations: blast some bombs over there, send a black hole over that garden, spray some flames widely, and so on! Though I have to say that while the black hole looked awesome, I didn't find the flamethrower and the bombs that satisfying: the flamethrower just never felt like it was making contact a lot of the time, and the bombs were confusing as they look the same as if it was a bomb power-pick-up, causing confusion. Still, that's just some small nitpicks.

The only thing that really brings it down for me is that the aiming can be quite wonky at times: due to the game getting really crazy at times and lagging, sometimes my aim go way off point, over-shooting or under-shooting my intended target. I know the game says sometimes about tweaking sensitivity but that ain't the issue for me: it's just that due to the lag and maybe other factors, the way the game treats mouse inputs can be very erratic and confusing. An unfortunate blemish on an otherwise great experience!

studio11508 responds:

Thanks for the great feedback. I will look into making the pickups and actual bombs look different as I didn't notice that until you mentioned it. The flame thrower is designed so that you have to hold it on the enemy for a second or two before it can catch fire (but plants light up immediately), but I think I could throw in some feedback to let the player know it's working so it doesn't feel so wonky. The lagging is something I'm still working on. Due to the nature of the enemies exponentially increasing over time, that means animations, scripts and lighting do as well. I'm looking to remove this type of mode in a story mode version, hopefully eliminating this issue. Thanks again for the feedback!

[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.