FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Jump Forge]

Quite the impressive game and editor; It's like a mini Mario Maker! I had both a fun time playing through some featured levels in the listing, as well as making my own level called 'The Basics'. The editor was very easy to grasp how it worked due to the great HUD design and control scheme, and I liked how it had all of the essentials like having to play test your level. Uploading was a breeze! I also liked how animated and charming the presentation was: menus swish out, blocks make sounds as you place them down, and so on.

In terms of complaints: the gameplay is a little simple, so even as impressive as this is, the appeal does wear off rather quickly. Lacking a tutorial or buttons on screen, the game is a bit confusing at first to learn how to control anything. I wish your character would freeze when you enter build mode so they don't get in the way (and it'd be nice if there was some way where you could just have the character float around with no gravity perhaps). Also with no built-in levels to work with, it is a bit overly reliant on having the good luck of finding a good user level to play for fun (and I have no idea how to vote or feature levels that I find for others). But I can definitely see myself coming back to make maybe one more level: it just works so well!

Prox276 responds:

As always, I greatly appreciate it! I can't overstate how much I look forward and value your
reviews each time I release a game! :)
You rarely get to see in-sight this extensive and honest. Thank you!

[Roguebot Rumble]

I think there's a pretty decent concept here, but at the moment, the execution felt very rough for me, leading to a bit of a mixed bag feeling.

To start, it was very confusing for me to figure out the rules of the game: eventually I grasped that it was a bit of a defense game where you try and stop a lemmings-esque swarm from entering your portals, but until then, I had no idea. The energy bars on the portals are so tiny that I barely noticed them, and even when I did, I was confused why, when the enemy enters one of my portals, that it adds energy to their portals instead of damaging my portal, which I felt would make more sense. Furthermore, when I beat the level, I actually thought the game either bugged out or required me to manually quit out to proceed to the next level because I didn't notice the exit portal. I notice you do have little signs that point to objectives, but they disappear so fast: maybe they should stay present all the time, or at least stay for the entire duration of your first level experience to serve as a tutorial.

The combat was alright once it got going, but it was a bit annoying that you don't start with a full array of moves: instead you only get your combos piece by piece very slowly, making combat feel very boring until then. I understand that maybe it helps teach the players the moves, but it just took so long to get to the good stuff and I felt unfairly gimped. Having said that, combat still did feel somewhat lacking even with the combos since the game didn't seem to require any strategy for their use, like using heavy punches for greater knockback or to break shields over using light punches, which could maybe double as mobility options for getting around the arena faster. I'd push myself to use the combos to keep myself excited, sure, but more often than not, I'd screw myself over since it would be better and faster to just take them out with the same mash combo over and over.

Levels were a bit tricky as well, since they fluctuated in difficulty and thus, didn't feel like they gave a good feeling of progression or story to the game. This issue is a bit exacerbated by the reliance on user-created levels as well. The character also had a floaty way they moved which caused me getting caught a lot on geometry or having no way to engage with an enemy without bumping into them, causing damage and frustration.

Again, I think it is a really neat concept that could definitely work: when you have the right level with a right combination of enemies to fight strategically, it can lead to some really hectic and fun brawls where you need to improvise. But at the moment, I just wasn't get the scenario much of the time. As down as I sound on it, I still feel its a good core that I had fun with, and I look forward to the continuation of RogueBot that you allude to, which hopefully this feedback can help in some way with.

MindChamber responds:

this was a fair and thoughtful critique, and I agree on all counts, thanks for taking the time to review

[Mad Pirate Skeleton Bomber]

I wasn't a big fan of the way the bombs switched back and forth, but once I got used to it and saw how the levels were constructed to work with it, I ended up loving what a cool design decision it was! Love how satisfying and fun it is to get through the challenging levels by getting better and better at utilizing the bombs in all sorts of ways: you start off easy with simple bomb jumps, but later on you're chaining together complex combos like jump into wall-bounce into bounce and so on. It's a bit silly in a way, but the bomb switching did add a necessary complexity and rhythm to the game that felt good to get under control and tame with skill.

The game did have a few wonky aspects. I kinda hated how the player has a bit of a momentum to their movement and ends up drifting: this made me end up going into a lot of spike walls which had bigger hitboxes than I expected. (I understand it's most likely necessary because of wall bounces and such though). Speaking of hitboxes, the hitbox from a bomb explosion also lasted a bit longer than I felt necessary, creating weird scenarios where you run into a dying explosion and well, die. I wish the game had a cursor lock so I wouldn't click off the edge of the screen and end up losing control. A minor nitpick, but I didn't like how when you're looking at the notes it doesn't pause the game. But really, I feel all my complaints are quite minor compared to the fun I had.

Anyway, well done on this! I had a blast, bombing along through the levels, all to an addictive jaunty pirate tune that's still stuck in my head!

EDIT: Woohoo, Galleon Bertha is complete! What a wild ride and amazing ending: didn't think the game would escalate that much!

saantonandre responds:

Thanks once again for your well thought reviews Futurecop! glad you're on newgrounds satisfying devs hunger for feedback.
I've already watched your gameplay on twitch, I just couldn't wait for the March video :)
I've gotta say, while I failed at showing what were supposed to be the "main solutions" on most levels, my players never cease to amaze me by planning the most complex uncontemplated routes, hahah.

I'm glad you enjoyed the main mechanics! switching was in fact a necessary ingredient for the design of this game, not just to add complexity but in order to keep freedom of movement and being able to shoot unlimited bombs at your pace, with no cooldowns or ammo system, yet having to give a purpose to your inputs. Not having to switch would have so many not-obvious implications.
Yet, I know how it's bold to expect players to adapt to it. I'm happy whenever I see players like you putting effort to slowly find some entertainment.

I agree on the wonky aspects, which I may have subconsciously ignored as I got used to them. I can fix some right away. (EDIT: just implemented cursor lock and adjusted some hitboxes)

I also agree on the tunes, Tim really did an amazing job!

[Kill Lola Bunny]

Christ almighty, this really brought me back to those old days! Every single aspect of this game is well constructed to deliver nostalgia from all parts of Newgrounds, most notably to the old favorite 'how many celebrities can we torture' Assassin series. I'd complain that I think the game overstays its welcome by requiring you to kill Lola more times than you have variations for, so you just end up repeating a bunch to get to the ending, but I think that does capture the old overindulgent spirit accurately, so I'll let it go, haha.

By the way, why are we attacking Lola Bunny? Based on the controversy I barely know of, wouldn't the one we want to punch out and torture be the people who authorized the changes to Lola, not Lola herself? Unless that's the joke? I'm old now, I can't keep up with this stuff.

Yomuchan responds:

That is the joke. You're pretty fast on the uptake, fellow old one!

Anyway, read the opening dialog carefully.

[Diaphanous 0]

I want to like this game: the weird potentially capitalist commentary weaved into platformer mechanics is a unique concept, and the presentation and aesthetic of the game has an interesting charm to it. On the other hand, however, the game's difficulty curve is absolutely ridiculous. Maybe the difficulty is intentional as part of some sort of subtle message? Maybe it's supposed to frustrate you to make you behave more callously to the men you trod on as springboards? I can understand if it's all intentional and just not for me, but I dunno, if this was football, I think this game would get called for unnecessary roughness.

I've played a lot of difficult games in my time and had a blast. Doom Eternal, Super Meat Boy, Celeste, etc, all of them great experiences. The difference with this game is that it just throws you in the deep end immediately and expects you to make crazy pixel-perfect maneuvers that the controls are not built well enough to achieve reliably. Without all of the subtle touches that other games provide to enhance controls like hitbox forgiveness, input buffering, coyote time, and so on, this game just became so frustrating. So many lost jump inputs! I'm sure someone out there can beat it, and I'm sure I could too in time, but it would not be fun at all in my opinion: it wouldn't involve getting skilled at the game, it would involve getting used to the jank. Couple that with having to play on a tiny screen and yeah, I don't need both eye and hand strain from one game.

I was tempted to go all the way with this game in spite of it all, just because of the weird concept, the actually clever (though sadistic) level and obstacle design, and desire to see how it ends, but unfortunately, it lost my save file after I finally beat V and quit to take a break, and I didn't want to go through all that again. I suppose it's fine anyway: feels like the game was just building up to guilt trip me in the end, so I'll just claim a moral victory by opting out.

HapPie responds:

Thanks for sharing your thoughts, if you don't ever find the will to come back to it you still got the gist of what I was trying to accomplish and that's what matters to me, so thanks! And also you're not wrong about the ending.

[Chez Bernie]

This one's an odd duck for me! I like these kind of 'smithing' type games where you manage shops and craft items, and this one was pretty neat. Lots of interesting complexities to the job like getting coal and ingots ready, timing your bellows only when the coals are hot, hammering the iron dead center for perfects, and so on, were quite fun to get good at managing. While it only has one item to craft at the moment and simple deliveries, it's fun to build up your renown while running around and listening to the goblin moan and groan, haha.

The crux of my mixed impression was in regards to the tutorial/instructions. On one hand, while the game does help out somewhat with environmental storytelling, like symbols next to the stations and little feedback touches like the coal spitting out fire if you time the bellows, it was really confusing to figure out how everything worked. For example, I still don't know if there is a way to keep the fire going, or if you just need to have it run out and resupply with coal. I didn't even notice that there was a very tiny 'instructions' billboard in the corner that was trying to help, and even when I did notice it, it wasn't much of a help at all as it was way too small and vague. But on the other hand...I kind of ended up liking figuring everything out on my own through experimentation and making good guesses so...it might actually be the game's strength, in a way? I dunno: that's the tricky part of game design! But it's definitely something I thought you might want to consider.

I do think, at the end of the day, while this is currently lacking, this is a pretty neat proof of concept that I had fun with, and I would love to see this expanded on: stuff like more recipes, more orders, quests, and so on. We need more of this goblin smithy!

TealRocks responds:

Big Big Thanks for this detailed feedbacks :D!

We're really conscious about the repetitiveness of the gameplay over time,. Complexify orders (add new weapons), add several kinds metals, add customers and fidelity system, complexify the inventory, add a reputation system for weapon, and others. This is a sample of ways we want to upgrade the game. We heard and took seriously and constructively your comment :).

Also we've a very cool idea that is create a "Weapon Test Zone". The purpose of this zone will be : You will be able to test weapon on "victime" (like humans ^^) in a mini game to increase its reputation. Really love this idea ^^.

So, when we started, we didn't think to continue the game but we received a lot of good feedbacks and we've many ideas to improve the game. So be sure we will continue to develop it :).

[TOYROGUE]

Once I figured out how this game works, especially in regards to the interesting design choice of having cursed items still be useful since they can be thrown at enemies to reduce their stats, it became somewhat fun. But for me initially, it was way too confusing since it lacked any way to learn of these concepts in-game. Couple that with the drab environments and repetitive gameplay both for picking up so much junk and fighting being overly simple stats bonking against stats with odd randomization and I can't imagine many people getting to the point of having fun with it.

I think the biggest oddity is the random maps. I had an interesting experience on my first playthrough. The first map was just a simple room with an exit and one warrior. I thought the warrior was my friend, a fellow campmate, but suddenly I ended up fighting him, and realizing I didn't have a weapon, I ran. Exiting the level and moving on, the next level was much larger with tons of monsters which blocked access to the exit and the only weapon. I tried to be clever and 'ran' through the monsters to get the weapon, and upon finally getting equipped, began my quest. I died shortly after though, but despite that, I thought that was actually a bit of a cool 'story' experience, very rough and survivalist with tons of improvisation, teaching me certain mechanics. However, on my next playthrough, the first map was huge with tons of easily accessible loot, upon which I was immediately geared up and clobbering enemies. It left me confused on what the intended experience was, and I think it would be better if you either constructed some maps manually to help serve as tutorial sections or guide the player in a general way, or at least reigned in the randomization so maps aren't quite so...well...random. As random as roguelikes can be, they are still generally built to tell some sort of story, but this didn't seem to have that.

Like I say, I think there are some nice ideas in here, and I did like a lot of the presentation in regards to the menus, transitions, and so on, but the gameplay execution is a little lacking for me at the moment: too confusing and random to get the intended experience.

Extar responds:

Thanks for the detailed response! Your first playthrough sounds rad, having to run the gauntlet of enemies without a weapon sounds pretty cool. :)

I think a problem of making small games, especially that people are just going to play casually for fifteen minutes or so in a browser is that the further you stray from conventions (and it feels like RPGs are made up almost entirely of conventions at this point) the more you're going to either have to explain things to the player or drip-feed things into them, or you're just going to throw them in at the deep end and leave it up to them. My general experience of rogue-likes like Nethack, Zangband and such was that they tended to go more for the 'in at the deep end' approach. I was hesitant to even put the game onto Newgrounds because of the fact 'steep learning curve' and 'casual fifteen minute games' are a difficult match. :)

Like you suggested, it would be best to put a tutorial into the game, and I did think about making some constructed maps, however there really wasn't much in the way of token space or time once I'd got the 'core' parts of the game actually working. Pico-8 limits projects to a certain size, so all the code has to come in under a token limit for it to run. The last time I made a proper tutorial for a game it was easily 10-15% of the total code, and as it stands now the game is basically using 100% of the token space, so I'd be looking at making the code a heck of a lot more efficient, or just cutting bits out.

I'm glad you appreciated the menus and transitions, because it felt like that's all I ever worked on during the project. The inventory alone took absolutely ages! :)

Thanks again for the detailed review!

['Brain-Toasting Dungeon']

What a charming little game! The whole "choose-your-own-adventure" style really takes me back to the past, so it's very apt for a flash jam, and this one certainly nails it with a lovely amount of funny scenarios all brought to life with goofy animations. The game doesn't necessarily have much depth to it and it's over so quickly, but it was fun while it lasted and I enjoyed every second of it, including going back to see all the alternative choices. My initial playthrough went through with practically no deaths: I think I caught on to the strategy too quickly of choosing the seemingly stupid choices, haha. Cheers for this!

Butzbo responds:

Wow, great to hear it was a throwback! and it's also fun that you figured the logic of following the weirder choices ;)
The good response makes me think of making a more elaborated story with something like this, we'll see. Thanks for the review!

[Vending Machine Action 2.0]

Whoa, what an incredible game! I love the intensity that this game brings: so many explosions, crazy gunfire, leagues of enemies to blast through, and the bosses, oh man, the bosses are absolute dynamite! When I saw the first boss running with those iconic gunstar-esque limbs, I knew I was in for a good time, and it just kept escalating from there with all sorts of cool variations in level design like battling through a level while being lasered at, or running down a collapsing bridge. Weapon-switching mechanic was pretty neat as well: I thought it felt really gimmicky at first, but I did feel it lead to some cool dynamic fights where you need to be ready to improvise at all times.

It does have some minor issues: for some reason the game's volume is incredibly muted, and even then, I think there is a distinct lack of sound effects in the gameplay, particularly for the enemy death explosions. Sometimes the readability of the game suffers from so much shaking and explosions that you can get hit from a bullet you didn't see. One of the stages just had me stuck at the beginning with no way to proceed until I selected to just skip: bit of an oddity. Finally, the controls can be a bit awkward to get used to, with weird things like having to stop shooting just to pick stuff up, even if you're standing right on top of the pickup when shooting.

Still, this game was such a trip! I'd recommend dressing up the title/intro a bit more as right now it is a bit drab: people need to see a hint at how epic the game can be!

EDIT: AHHH THAT ENDING SEQUENCE AHHH! I never thought a vending machine would make me feel so many emotions

toaster101 responds:

Thank you so much for the feedback :) i'm glad you liked it

[Noir: Deinitialize]

Someone really loves Nier Automata, haha! Definitely a pretty neat game that certainly has a great presentation to it through graphics and sound, though it's largely just ripped from Nier, so I'm only giving you half-credit for that aspect, haha.

But speaking of that, that's kind of the good and bad part of this game for me. On one hand, it's quite fun to run around, blasting and slicing enemies and bullets: feedback is nice, and there is some decent variation to levels in terms of enemies and setup.

But on the other hand, it does have a lot of the bad parts of the hacking minigame from Nier: because so many of the bullets can be destroyed by your attacks just like Nier, except now you have a sword as well as bullets, there's barely any challenge at all. Huge swathes of levels can be beat by just running straight at enemies and mashing to nullify their bullets: it's only until the end when blue bullets and such start showing up that you need to somewhat use your brain a bit.

Heck, even when blue bullets show up, your character has so much health you can still just tank and mash your way through levels. Due to this, the game has a lot of repetition to it that really dulls the experience for me.

Basically, it's decent, but I was really hoping for not just a recreation, but something that takes the idea from Nier and expands on it in a cool new direction. Still, for what it is, I had some good fun.

Yword responds:

Thank you very much for playing! And thank you so much for your great feedback too!