FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Frog to the moon]

I like the idea behind it and I think its a pretty neat precision platformer, but it felt a bit too frustrating and unintuitive at times. Certainly game me flashbacks to games like Celeste with being able to replenish your jumps, and I enjoyed puzzling out the best way to go through a stage and then getting good enough to execute. However, it was a bit frustrating. With the controls, I'm not sure why you chose to make it so pressing left or right executes a jump instead of requiring to press up along while holding left or right: making it jump on just left or right means you can't fine tune your jump by wiggling around slightly because this can make you waste a cherry, which means that you have to be way too committed to your initial jump arc, making it a bit too unforgiving. Also, there were tons of times that I felt like I got a cherry but it didn't count: maybe make the hitboxes a bit more forgiving if it doesn't damage the puzzles. Having said that, I do want to go back and try this game again to get all the way through since it was quite fun: just a bit too overly challenging since it requires such precision. I can understand the design decision of making your character have to commit to a jump arc, like how Castlevania NES does it, but it might not go down well with most players since it just feels bad and unfair at times (most players prefer Super Castlevania SNES haha). Oh yeah, as another note, I wish there was something close to our player that could tell us how many jumps we have left: like a bar with segments or dots below the frog, or maybe Celeste style where our frog changes color to indiciate how many jumps we have, so it's easier to track.

HenrySanchezNG responds:

I get that frustration reaction allot, guess I have a high tolerance for these kind of games, I'm a getting over it fan after all hahaha. But I understand it's not everybody's cup of tea.
The control decision was to restrict the player, that was before the game was published and I had no idea about the average player's skill level. I made a rebalance patch after people sending me messages telling me if it was even possible to pass level 4. So I changed and added cherries to the entire game, guess that wasn't enough.

That jump indicator is a good idea, besides there was gonna be light trail so it could help the player visualize their trajectory.

The whole point of restricting the controls was to make it less about maneuvering and more about initial positioning and calculating trajectories. I thought people would figure things about but now I know that I could've made a better job in teaching the player how to play.

If a sequel ever exists MAYBE I will change the controls hahaha.
Edit: Just kidding, those controls have to go I will change them I promise :P
Thanks for the review

[Hanukkah Runner]

Pretty neat game! Especially love the gorgeous presentation: the animation of the character and the background with its parallax and day/night transitions are very mesmerizing. Gameplay is simple, but fun to get through: felt good to get better at movement and learning little tricks. Interesting use of outlines around obstacles to help visibility (I wonder if this should always be on for easy/medium but not hard, or maybe graphics changed so obstacles stand out without them, or whatever). Only thing that hurts it for me at the moment was 1) it seems like the world is not randomized, which I feel hurts replayability a bit, and 2) there's no score tracking or anything when I wish there was so I can try and save Hanukkah even faster than last time.

KJScott responds:

Yup, the randomised layout reconsidered but I didn't have enough time to develop and put it in, I fully agree with you there. The same goes for score/time tracking. That one though should be relatively easy to implement, so i might take another look at this soon and see if i can't throw a best time in for each difficulty.

[Arm Of Revenge Trial]

Definitely seems to be pretty solid and has a lot going for it, presentation-wise, and I do love a good beat-em-up, but at the moment it just felt a bit awkward to play. The character just felt incredibly stiff, slow, and frustrating to control: usually a punch comes out immediately when you press a button in these beat-em-ups, but here, it takes a long time. Air control was a bit weird as well where it felt like you were too committed to your initial arc or something. There's a parry system which seems cool, but enemies barely give telegraphs of when they are about to attack, so you end up just having to guess pretty much. There's a neat combo system, but I had no way of knowing what my combos were except for memorizing them, and when I bought combo extensions I didn't know what combos they affected and how. I really wanting to get some cool juggle combos going, or some cool defensive counters, but there's so much lag and recovery on my character, I couldn't cancel anything and it just left me feeling so slow, stifling my creativity. Levels were a bit drab as well, with them being incredibly short scenarios and enemies just lining up to get punched. Gameplay can end up feeling a bit tedious from this as well as other things, like the fact you can't hit enemies on the ground, instead having to wait for them to get up. Items are upgrades were weird as well: I unlocked blade mode, but it turned out I have to buy it again if I want to have it for another level? I think this game does have a lot of heart, though, and could end up being cool: hope you get a lot of feedback and I'd love to see more from this!

MagicWing responds:

thanks for feedback.
i will try my best to improve the game.
notice:you can hit enemies on ground after unlocked corresponding skills

[Codeine Cowboys [v2]]

Hmm, my initial impression of this game wasn't that great at the start. Don't get me wrong, I love the concept and everything and I think the gameplay is good once you get going. But it took me a long time to get used to it at first. The graphics are so gaudy and loud and you move so fast it's very difficult to tell what the hell is going on: I couldn't tell if I was invincible or being hit or where bullets were or where guns were on the floor because everything just got lost in this sea of glitchy graphics. Once my eyes adjusted to it as much as they could, I started having fun running and gunning, but it was still a bit frustrating as one slip and I could lose track of what's happening. If the graphics could just be cleaned up a bit more so things could be more readable, this game would be an absolute slam dunk for me!

MoeAnguish responds:

That's very fair. thanks for the review!

[Santa's Silent Night]

Pretty cool game! Has a lot of heart to it, the concept is neat and everything has a nice level of polish to it, especially with the escalation of challenges for each day. There are some frustrating aspects to it however. Throwing presents was very difficult because of the way it doesn't just drop it, but chucks it up firstly, adding a lot of unnatural time to the throw. That's fine, once you learn to roll with that, then you need to deal with your movement directing the angle of the throw. I can understand the logic behind making this a mechanic, since you think that it could help players direct shots a bit better, but I found it to be more of an annoyance than a help. In the later levels, where you need to move a lot to dodge things, I found myself constantly having my presents go off mark because they were being influenced by my movement. In the end, I wish the present throw was just consistent (but I can understand if this was done to make it more challenging, perhaps). Also, I found the laugh mechanic just a bit weird since it is so delayed from pressing the button: like a full second delay. Anyway, I still had a lot of fun despite my difficultes, so nice work.

KJScott responds:

That's good feedback, thank you. I had considered adding an option to enable/disable that mechanic. I'll add it to the drawing board again for a future update.

[FRIDAY NIGHT FUNKIN']

Pretty funky game! Certainly fun to play and very impressive with the stylish graphics and the way everything bops to the beat. Love all the countless little touches to the game, like the cool menu and the way the characters get frightened by lightning and such.

As a long time rhythm game player, however, there are some frustrations. I really want to see how well I'm hitting the notes and what my current combo is, but they are only shown for a moment on the girl in the background instead of the center of my note chart, so they are difficult to read (also the 1 looks like a 7 so the combo counter is odd to read in general as well). There's no results screen at the end either with any sort of grading or scoring so it's not easy to tell how to improve or how you're ranking: for example, how many misses, goods and sicks you got.

In general, as well, the note charts felt...very loosey goosey at times. It's difficult to explain but, this felt like a game where I unfortunately had to rely on my eyes instead of my ears, because the notes weren't directly correlated with the music consistently: sometimes they were, but other times not. With tons of songs in other games, I can close my eyes and still hit the notes because the arrows are aligned with the music. With this, however, if I were to close my eyes, I'd end up not hitting Sicks or straight up missing notes since they are misaligned. I dunno, maybe there's something else at play, and I understand that maybe I'm being unfair comparing it to things like Stepmania and DDR, but take it as a compliment that the game is cool enough that I want to.

EDIT: Weeks later and just wanted to note that in general, I'm loving a lot of the changes that have been made! Still feels a little tiny bit clunky in some respects, but overall I feel much more confident with the note charting and general play, and I love all of the new options and touches like the lore cutscenes for Senpai and Tankman and such (though they are so cool it does just make me wish we had them retroactively for everything else, haha, tough crowd I am huh). I definitely do think this game has a lot of heart, style and infectious fun to be had that easily overcomes my minor gripes from comparing it too more polished existing rhythm games. Well done once again and best of luck with future development!

also if it hasn't already been said, the music kicks major ass

ninjamuffin99 responds:

lov u futurecop

[The Flower Arrangement]

Had a lot of problems getting this game to run unfortunately. For some reason, if you let the text run to complete a page, and then go to the next page, the text won't appear for the page. What I had to do is hit a button to skip/make the text fill out the page, and then if I went to the next page, it would appear. It added a lot of stress to the run, especially since some pages are actually blank and I thought they just weren't loading, haha. Also, it was a bit clunky at times in other ways: for example, I tried to go back on a choice page and I got stuck on previous pages which the choice still being up for me to click, but not being able to go forward. Once I got used to the clunkiness, though, the story itself was quite charming and funny, especially since it had a lot of interesting interpretations of this kind type of theme and how spooky it can be, despite hunkiness. Art style was a bit odd at times with how it fluctuated between styles constantly (one second it's very beautiful, then suddenly it's a comic, then suddenly it's anime, then it goes back to beautiful art, haha), but eh, overall it was nice and got across what it needed.

waffrus responds:

Man. After I adding in looping music, it DID get a lot clunkier. I'm sorry it was such a pain to read. I added in the link to the game on my itch.io account bc it seems to work better there. I did notice that after running through the scenes once, they loaded better the 2nd time but... that's a real pain to have to do. I'll try tinkering around again, but I'm trying to mostly move on to the next project lol.

Thank you for your thoughtful review! I'm glad the story itself was enjoyable even if the shifting art style was a bit of a hit or miss. Tbh, I did consider keeping it all in the sort of painterly style... but then this would have taken even longer to release and I wasn't sure if some of more comedic scenes would have even worked with that style. Oh well, live and learn haha. Thanks again!

[International PixelArt Gallery 2020]

Very neat gallery; great to see many different artists all over the world. I felt like the navigation was a bit clunky however. There's always a bar at the bottom which can obscure some of the art: would prefer if the bar hides itself and pops up when you mouse close to it. Similarly, I wish I could get the artist to pop up if I would hover my mouse at the top. Hitting back/next at the bottom is a bit clunky and awkward: would prefer if you could just click on the screen anywhere to move to the next picture, or maybe click the sides of the screen to go back or forward (sometimes I think it does this but then doesn't for others?). Wish the res marker in the upper left would go away so I could just view the pieces without outside interference. There was also some clunky overlapping text and graphics in some locations, just giving it a bit of an unprofessional design, taking away from the ease of viewing the art. Still, hearts in the right place!

JamesChapp responds:

Thank you very much for the feedback.
All these suggestions I will take into account for the next update of the gallery.

Thank you very much for taking the time to share your suggestions.

P.S. don't forget to follow your favorite pixelart artists on your social media.
Greetings.

['Curse of the Sock']

Pretty cute game, but it was a bit choppy and weird for me so I hope I can give it some good feedback since it's a demo. Climbing on ladders was very frustrating at times: if you just hold up on the very first ladder in the game, you'll just fall right back down, as you need to kinda force yourself onto the platform with other movement. The standing melee attack is a bit annoying in how it forces you to stand still, makes you want to constantly use the air attack instead which feels better. You can mash the jump button to keep playing the jump sound even though you are already mid-air. The scythe ghost enemies felt really annoying to fight since they can get right into you and you force you into taking damage if you try to attack them since you can't knock them back with an attack effectively. Animations seemed a bit wonky at times: would have attacks be cancelled or have enemies I've killed since look like they're getting their attacks out and such. Controls flash away too fast in the beginning: I didn't even realize I had a duck because I didn't have time to read it all. There are some nice things already in the thing like how it seems like the hit box for the player attack does take into the account the arc of the swing, not just the final position of the sword. Hopefully this gets polished up for a full release as I think it could be cool!

Butzbo responds:

Always appreciate the more technical reviews, and you make some pretty good points!
>It's weird how long I wasn't aware of the 1st ladder issue, its kind of critical being the very first thing you do so I just updated it now.
>The 'standing attack' endlag was something I made a bit more intentionally at first for a slower pace of gameplay, but it hasn't been so well recieved so I'd have to look more into that.
>Usually with animations I'm used to fixing the ones that interrupt eachother (mostly with death triggers), but I had so many of them that eventually one of them slips away lol.
>Glad you mentioned that detail on arc hitbox! I hadn't done these kind of melee attacks in games before so it's great to hear that some parts are on a good direction.

Thanks Futurecop!