FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Steel Surge: Revolution]

Wow, this is quite the cool SHMUP! Overall it feels very well-done in all respects: great enemy and boss design with lots of variety, well-paced wave structure, juicy explosive graphics, a nice bonus overclocked mode, and to top it off, a novel strategy of deploying your drone for focus fire. It's not exactly the most innovative SHMUP as it is pretty bog-standard in terms of mechanics with not much new, but it hits all the right notes for a good experience nonetheless: looking forward to seeing this built upon!

If I were to have any feedback, it would be that I did find the respawn mechanic a bit disorientating in how fast you recover, but it was nice in its own way. Rather, the part I want to focus on is the 'style' system, which I feel is neat since it pushes you to play in risky interesting ways, but feels bad that it is just relegated to points which can be easily ignored by players. Instead, it might be nice if doing stylish things actually gives you a tangible benefit, such as powering you up or giving you a bomb move if you keep it up. Even if you don't want to do that, at the very least, it'd be nice if you gain lives if you get points, meaning being stylish can get you lives quicker. Such things would increase player engagement and make the experience more unique and memorable, I think.

LokiStrikerDev responds:

Thank you for the lengthy feedback! Regarding scoring/style: It is definitely part of my focus to introduce extends/lives as part of scoring with the aim of making "scoring" a viable method for survival as well. The style system was introduced on the last 1/4 of development as it was more of a feedback to already existing systems. The idea it to keep developing this mechanic more and more throughout the stages, introducing both alternative score methods and also new ones. Beyond lives, I'm unsure if I want to introduce another reward method, but Ill leave that door open for seeing if something can go there.

I'm trying to stick closer to a ChoRenSha-type experience, so I'm trying to innovate in little ways while still holding true to a shmup experience with a fresh/evocative style. Once the game is closer to release, Ill be posting an additional demo, to see if I'm hitting all the right notes with the direction I'm taking. Thank you for the comment!

[Golf Adventures! 2]

Pretty good mini golf game here! Overall it feels very smooth and well-presented, its got loads of content and variety, nice subtle touches like the sound quality, and has a surprising amount of quality-of-life options! Well done all-around!

While I am overall positive on the experience, I did encounter a few bumps along the road that I'd give as feedback:

*I don't know if it's just me being stupid, but I kept second-guessing myself and getting confused as to whether I was supposed to drag my mouse in front or behind the ball to power up the swing. For some reason, when I see that power bar stretch out from the ball, I see that as the club back-swing, not the intended path of the ball? Again, maybe it's just me, but I wonder if something about the visuals could be changed to make it more obvious.

*I did find it annoying that you don't have enough camera control to see the entire course at once, which makes it feel very unfair as you can't plan out your strategy. Sure you can zoom out the camera, but 1) I feel like it should be zoomed out by default and not make me do it everytime 2) zooming isn't enough to get a full picture as I need panning too and 3) using the mousewheel to zoom makes the browser window scroll because you didn't lock the cursor to the game.

*I felt like it was a bit tricky starting out? It's not that bad, but some of the early courses required some crazy level of precision (going up those hills and having to land in that tiny flat spot inbetween was terrible) that I felt should've been left for later courses once you've warmed up to the game.

*I'm not sure what the continue option is? Why is the next level, the obvious and most-used button you're going to select to continue with your adventure, not put at the top of the list for easy access?

Aleksander-Sats responds:

Thank you so much for really well detailed feedback! I really appreciate it! :D
So here is my response to all that! :)

"and has a surprising amount of quality-of-life options!" We are going to very soon actually release update v2.1.0 which is primarily a Quality of Life update, we are adding a bunch of nice improvements as well as fixing many bugs.

*I see. I didn't think people could get confused but Thanks for the feedback! I will try to make it more obvious which way you are shooting in 2.1.0! :)

*We are adding Freecam in 2.1.0 which you can access in the pause menu, it works great so far! 1) Personally we find the default zoom fine. it's how it is in the prequel so I guess the main reason is due to that. 2) We read into that issue where using the scroll-wheel causes the whole page to scroll. The last time we checked, it's an issue with the webpage and not our game and there isn't much we can do about it apparently. I did however find something else so perhaps it's fixable, well see. In any case if it isn't fixable, we already added a camera zoom slider so you don't have to go to settings for that due to this scrolling issue. 3)

*A bit tricky? Hmmm well we've done more than at least 10 full playthrough's to bug test everything and I don't find it tricky. That being said I am skilled versus a novice thanks to that so I can't really well tell sometimes. The main strategy is using walls and doing 45 degree angles. We have significantly improve the balance on the difficulties of levels compared to the prequel. Seriously the prequel is quite difficult (*cough* Ice 20 & Mech 30).. Anyway back to topic. Perhaps we can switch around the level order to smoothen the difficulty.

*The continue buttons main purpose is really to unpause. That being said you do have a fair point as there are many ways to unpause including pressing the same button you pause with. (Now that I am thinking about it, it is rather pointless.) I guess we will remove it.

[Rocket to the Top]

Oh, man, this is a rough one for me! I actually do quite like the challenge that this game brings and found myself getting a bit addicted to mastering the controls. But lord have mercy, the first impression was absolutely brutal, and 9 times out of 10 I probably would've noped out of this pronto! It's probably a testament to how good and polished the general presentation and feel of the game is that somehow compelled me to give it the benefit of the doubt and keep trying until I grew attached.

As said, the controls of this game are so hard to acclimate to: not only are they highly unorthodox, everything is just so fast and unwieldly, requiring such precise and light tippity-taps of the keys, culminating in a hopeless unrecoverable feeling if you stray even slightly. It cramps up my hands with how bloody delicate you need to be! Would love if everything was just slowed/powered down a bit overall to make controlling and adjustments easier.

In a way, while the game is quite challenging, it is forgiving, but I feel it does so in an awkward unsatisfying way. Typically a game like this would require you to clear the board of coins all in a single trip, with any crashes resetting the board. However, this game instead makes it so that only rubies are reset upon death, meaning that you could, as long as its within the time limit, make a bunch of separate suicidal runs to collect all the coins and then exit.

It's generous in a way, but death and frustration are much more so in this game with the method it chose, I think. I dunno about others, but I would prefer a game where I need to collect everything in a single run but the controls are much slower and smoother, than this game with unwieldly controls but you have as many runs as you want in a time limit. I know it's silly since the two methods kind of equal out, but it just feels better one way!

In terms of some quality of life, I wish there was a way to restart the level if you're in a 'dead man walking' state, aka you can see that you don't have enough time left to collect everything and make it to the exit. Also, would like a way to immediately retry/go back to a level you just beat: sometimes when I was trying to finish collecting everything I brushed past the exit and ended prematurely.

This one is definitely for the hardcore masochists!

platformalist responds:

Hi FutureCopLGF! Thanks so much for the thoughtful review <3

I agree that this game has appealed more to people on the hardcore side of things, and I'd be lying if I said that your response didn't mirror a few of my playtesters. Once I'd realized how tough the game was for folks unaccustomed to the controls, the game design was done and it didn't make a ton of sense to revisit and make the core of it easier (which would have required a full rework of ... well ... everything!). So it was like - polish this thing for the masochists to enjoy, get it out the door and make my next game easier!

Again, really appreciate your detailed, thoughtful review. :)

[Ice And Fire Tower Defence]

Hmm, I think the game is rather cute and I'm always down for a fun tower defense auto-battler game, but I had a really rough time with this as it just felt very confusing and mindless.

I really wanted to engage in a tactical fight with the enemy, but the game just moves too fast and doesn't give enough feedback or information to give me something to go on. It would've been so helpful if there were tooltips where I could learn unit attributes like their role, strength and weaknesses, and it'd also be helpful if I could see how well my troop attacks are doing, such as with damage number pop-ups or health bars, as it all gets lost when they stack up into a chaos of combat where I can't tell if they're attacking or getting damaged, winning or losing.

Because of all that, and the way that resources seemed to keep growing faster than I could spend them, the gameplay just devolved into spamming, with both teams pretty much equalizing in the center and making no progress. I tried to experiment myself to find out unit properties, but it all just gets lost in the chaos due to a lack of feedback.

Perhaps I'm just missing what the ideal strategy is, but I don't think the game is doing well enough at giving me enough information/hints to find it. Still, I think you're on the right track, and the UI and all that was decently put together.

octopus58 responds:

Hello, thanks for checking out the game! I understand it might be a bit intimidating because of the speed, I purposely went more for a think fast and adapt design. There is a wiki article if you are interested describing unit attributes, types, hints, etc but I understand that it not being accessible straight from the game can be a little frustrating. I've seen people adapt a few strategies, and I linked a somewhat simple one in the description as a video, but I do see some people struggle a little with finding an efficient strategy (especially with spacing out troops). I do appreciate the feedback though, it feels good to know all the different thoughts and ideas. Thank you again!

[Sine Surfer]

Hmm, this is a decent little arcade game you got here! The whole aspect of being stuck to a track and only being able to slow down or speed up makes dodging a rather novel experience, and the enemy design, such as the muncher that is always chasing you, adds a nice element of push-and-pull that forces you to speed up away from slow, boring, cautious play. It's a nice, simple game and I had a few times where I got into a really addicted trance state, so well done.

If I did have a few points for feedback they'd be:

I was a bit disappointed that the game didn't evolve past its initial setup: would've loved if, as you reach certain thresholds, the game starts introducing new enemy types, obstacles, and so on. With only a incremental speed upgrade, the game starts to get quite dull, and the unlocking of flavors isn't that exciting.

Speaking about flavors, I was confused on what the point of the flavors were at first. Call me an idiot, but I kept selecting new ones, starting a game, and being confused as to why nothing was different, only to realize later on that you need to press a button to activate them: feels like an unnecessary step as you'd think selecting them would just immediately change it.

Was a bit disappointed that the game doesn't save your previous top score and flavor unlocks on a revisit.

Also, it's a minor wish, but I wish that the character itself would change to reflect its life, instead of the life counter being tucked away in the corner where it is difficult to see in the action. In a manner similar to Balloon Fight, you could've made the character lose a ball for every point of damage they take.

Roverkibb responds:

I'm glad you enjoyed it! I agree that I could have made the flavour selection a bit less complex since a lot of people seemed to have trouble with that. Lots of good suggestions here too. I wanted to keep the game very very simple since it was the first one I planned on fully developing and releasing, but I'll keep your ideas in mind if I ever make a sequel (working title: cosine surfer).

[Shape Crash]

Pretty decent puzzle game you got here! For the most part, it seems like a twist on the suika game which removes the size-growing aspect and replaces it with a more simple and traditional match-to-disappear system. Because of this, I didn't necessarily find it as novel or interesting, but it still felt well put-together in terms of overall construction and presentation. It didn't blow me away, but I didn't hate it either: it's ok.

If I had any complaints they'd be that:

It's not that complex of a game, but I felt like the help/tutorial section could've been done a bit better: right now it's just a big wall of text which is difficult to read. Ideally it could be spaced out or edited to be shorter, or even better, it could be replaced with more images/animations/video demonstrations.

I had a bit of a bad first impression, since I played the game on easy, where it's, well, a bit too easy: there just isn't enough variety in piece types to create a fun sort of stacked-up chaos and improvisation that the game wants, leading to me being bored to tears. I know you could say it's my fault, but I didn't know any better and lacked direction: perhaps the game should just direct the player to the ideal experience with just a single difficulty, or maybe having the difficulty increase as you go up in levels, and so on.

I also really feel like the game needs some music, or more pizazz to make up for the lack of music: without it, the game can be painfully dry and silent.

EDIT: Revisited on hard mode and had a pretty good time: really warmed up to the game! Final score: 7470

JacksonTXG responds:

Aside from the music, I can probably make the experience more catered to the player by making some adjustments to the overall gameplay. For the tutorial, I can see your point, and I'll try to make it short and simple in the future. As for the origin of this game, it's quite simple: I planned to make a Halloween game with the same match concept but with different candies in different sizes, but failed to finish on time. I soon refined the design with this project. Thanks for the feedback, and for playing the game.

[Darkwood]

Hmm, for the most part, I think this is quite a promising little action RPG roguelike: it's got a nice graphical style to it, decent amount of loot, enemy, and event variety, and its quite addictive and satisfying to build up your character and face ever increasing odds.

I couldn't help, though, but have a bit of a rough time with this, despite it being so promising. I don't know if these issues necessarily kill the game for me, but it was quite annoying, like having pebbles in my shoe.

The character movement was very strange to me with the way he awkwardly adjusts and moves irregularly. For instance, if you walk straight in one direction, and then walk immediately in the opposite direction, your character will do a bit of a weird curve, as if they're a car/tank having to u-turn. It's minor, but it just felt really odd and constantly threw me off slightly.

The camera was really annoying with the way it framed the action and made it difficult to look ahead. Despite the level being a big field, the camera attempts to slice it into 'rooms', but without doors/transitions between these 'rooms', there were tons of times that I would get ambushed by enemies that were just off-camera, aka in the next 'room', and it was impossible to see them ahead of time.

Some interactions were very annoying to figure out. For example, I wish it was easier to compare armors and see previews of their positives and negatives, like seeing my stats turn green or red when I hover over an armor piece: whenever I found a new one, I had to hover over each piece and memorize their stats to compare instead of being able to see them both at once. There were also times when I was at a shrine and I wanted to learn what the symbol it was referring to meant, but it doesn't allow me to open my menu to find out until I step away from the shrine: why?

Attacks and damage was also very difficult to parse at times. For example, despite the orc having an obvious swinging animation, it was still possible to just walk into him and die instantly from mere contact: I feel like enemies should either have contact damage or animated damage, not both. Plenty of attacks just felt like they come out of nowhere and can insta-kill you without even knowing what hit you, like the tree boss root attack.

As said, I still think it's a neat game, but there's just a lot of clunkiness, particularly with its core feel, that really ruffled me: if it could just get polished up, I think it'd be great.

ErikSwahn responds:

I am happy for the support! The movement, camera and combat were not the strongest elements for this game I admit. The thing about the orc was a new piece of information. It is important that it feels convincing getting hit by an enemy, so it definitely needs work. Glad you spend time going through the game :)

[ART GALLERY COLLAB]

Hah, a rather amusing art collab! I do like it when an art collab gets creative in its construction, and while this may be a generic slideshow at first glance, the presence of these audio logs of hoity-toity artists overanalyzing the pieces is a novel addition, elevating it far beyond my initial impression.

I'm a bit torn about the low-effort interface aesthetic, though. On one hand it does have a certain weird charm to it, and it can be an amusing juxtaposition to the hoity-toity analysis, as if to say 'why are you talking this so seriously?' But on the other hand, it does, even if its intentional, feel incredibly low-effort, and makes me as a viewer less-inclined to have faith and stick through the whole collab experience. It's important to have art framed and presented properly, just like how food has to be plated for maximum effect, even if technically it tastes the same.

Because of the above, I'm inclined to believe that it might've been better if more effort was put into the interface. For example, if you were to make the interface very high-class and like a museum, with classical music playing: to see these goofy pieces get analyzed as if they were within a fancy wine-and-cheese event would be rather amusing and coincide with the audio logs better, I think! But perhaps I'm overthinking it and not accepting it for what it is.

In addition, as much as it might go against the low-effort aesthetic, I do wish there was a bit more quality-of-life changes in the interface, such as links to the artist's NG profile if you click on their name, as well as a back arrow and a index/gallery view.

Thetageist responds:

That’s an interesting take, and I feel like your suggestion recontextualizes the comedy, though I’m unsure if it’s in a negative or positive way. In the current setup, the narration is more of the punch line than the artworks themselves, because it’s the one thing that doesn’t fit with the rest; what you suggested would make the artworks the unexpected element and therefore into the main punch line.

Looking at it through that lens, I’m actually inclined to agree with you on this one, and I hope this gets tested out in another Art Gallery Collab!

[Dear Edmund]

Hmm, quite the promising management game with tricky balancing of many aspects, including morality! Reminds me a lot of games like Yes Your Grace, Papers Please, Frostpunk and the like. For the most part it has a pretty solid presentation and cool concept, and I was intrigued to play.

At the same time, however, it had a lot of rough aspects that I felt could use some ironing out:

My biggest problem with the game is that it feels rather toothless and unsubtle. Yes, you need to make decisions to try and keep both parties happy lest you run into a game over, so you might need to make some choices you don't like here and there, but the whole crux of this game should be that it's hard to be good and easier to fall into corruption and I just wasn't feeling that. For example, whenever a choice came up where I can earn some coin by being evil, it was incredibly easy to say no, because what the hell do I need money for? I'm a superhuman who doesn't need food to survive, modifications to my house don't provide me any tangible benefits, and I have no attachment to my wife just because the game says I should! Games like Pathologic and Vampyr have strong motivations within gameplay to tempt you towards evil through selfish survival or even the greater good: this doesn't except in very shallow ways. It's so blatantly and cartoonishly black and white instead of having some interesting grey areas.

Dunno what the whole point of the contracts spilling to the ground and needing to be picked up is? Even though you put them on the shelf, they get erased on a save file being loaded, so they don't seem to have any sort of actual importance. I was also disappointed that despite me picking them up beforehand, the guy berated me for not picking them up when he should've recognized that I already had.

The 'accept/refuse' system is a bit awkward at times in how it is handled: for example, when the guy with your wage appears at the end of the shift, it gives you an option to accept or refuse, but either way results in the same thing of you getting your wage, when you'd think refusing would be spitting in their face and not wanting the wage.

Found the money system rather confusing in that you have street budget and personal funds as separate things: don't know why it can't just be one thing and I was confused about how each of them work. For example, I thought, based on the instructions, I was supposed to be not collecting the money in the safe so it goes towards the budget instead of my pockets, but every time I was forced to collect.

Would be nice if there were some quality of life changes, like being able to speed-up or click to complete text being written out. Speaking of text being written out, it seemed silly that it starts to write out the program code for specifying text color before it suddenly transforms back into regular writing. Some of the menu navigation was a bit awkward as well, like I couldn't find the way to go back in the shop menu to the root, being stuck at the end of one of the branches.

Some aspects of the menu and UI were way too tiny, especially when it came to text: could stand to make some things bigger for better readability.

Best of luck in further development!

MindTheGrease responds:

Thank you for the feedback! It’s still in beta so there are many things that need ironing out such as accepting the wage etc. The main mechanics are in place and through feedback I plan on adjusting everything to a release standard.
Cheers mate

[Dave the Game]

Ehh, this was a really weird one for me, as it's a bit of a beautiful mess, in a way!

I actually found it pretty novel that it seemed to lean heavily into some unorthodox controls and physics to create some absolutely bizarre jumping puzzles: in a way, it was rather unique and mindbending to wildly walljump and rocket around! However, the more I played, the more it felt like the game was not properly coded and was just an absolute mess, and any intentionally I assumed previously was either a mistake or an excuse: bad either way.

It's just so bloody unintuitive, janky, and lacking so much quality-of-life or refinement that I gave up. It didn't help either that the game is so tiny and doesn't explain anything effectively, along with having a very boring and grey world. It's a shame since I thought the boss fight was promising at the end, along with some of the level design and little charming bits here and there, but yeah, overall I felt like this needed way more time in the oven. I understand it's a game jam game so you were limited and did what you could, but it is what it is: it's at least neat enough that I'd like to see another attempt from you in future!

TheLoFiBoi responds:

This review was so honest and constructive all i can say is thank you for the insight and for playing the game, and you already know our next projects shall be even better!