FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Nightstalkers]

Decent game, but a bit awkward to get used to! At its core, it's very nice: going through levels, punching the crap out of enemies, jumping over obstacles, and fighting interesting bosses. I did have a lot of fun with this, but there was a lot of confusion. For example, I found it really confusing that the knife/axe/torch weapons were used by punching, instead of having their own dedicated button, and that you need to select the fist in order not to waste ammo. As good as the punch animation looked, it was a bit annoying to get used to the fact that the punch doesn't come out instantly, as the delay meant I found up taking a lot of unnecessary damage. Level geometry was really awkward at times as well, and the fact that you can't even punch the first boss was a real let-down (luckily you can punch the second boss, that was a lot better)! Anyway, all of these complaints are nothing compared to my final complaint: you didn't give the player a manly victory pose when he beats a boss! C'mon man, rip that shirt off, you already had the sprite in the intro cutscene! But in all seriousness, it's a decent game, albeit a little clunky in my impression.

Harlemblack responds:

Thank you for the thorough review. I keep it simple to include only three action buttons. On the odd levels, it is not a boss actually, more like an avoidance challenge. Haha yea good idea about the victory pose. For the next project, I guess. Cheers!

[Ritz on a Roll]

Challenging, but fun! A bit of a mixed bag for me though. On one hand, I really liked the frantic gameplay and the design of the bosses, especially with how they had multiple phases that they transition through as you damage them, all with some very interesting mechanics! Definitely had a lot of fun making my way through. On the other hand, it did feel like the bosses were a bit overly frustrating and not completely perfect in their design. I did beat it, so it is winnable, but something in the back of my head just felt like I got lucky. I dunno, it's like the bosses did have logic to them, but some of the boss patterns like the cat bouncing around with the orbs just felt like you could get stuck with no way out and forced to take damage. It's like, even with the first boss, once he starts his last frenzy phase it just seems impossible to avoid taking damage from how wild he gets, even when I try to perfectly jump and dodge over him, he's just too volatile. Basically, it felt less like I actually won and more like I shot them faster than they could kill me, if that makes sense, which doesn't work as well for me. Perhaps I'm being unfair and it is totally possible to beat the bosses without getting hit at all (or maybe that's just not intended from you), but...well, the game is fun enough that maybe I'll go back in and play more to see if it's possible, haha! Oh yeah, could also be nice to have a button to freeze movement or freeze aiming like the contra games do.

Chdonga responds:

Thanks for the review!

[Comic Reader- Art Forum Battle Royale Volume 1]

Hmm, an interesting application, but I found it to be a bit overly clunky and glitchy, unfortunately. It did have some cool moments: for example, I really like how the app handled the panel of the character stepping on the lips, where instead of showing the entire panel, it shows it in two separate moments, one being the character lording over, and the second being the lips trampled underfoot. Very cool, and I'd love it if there were lots more instances like that. However, for a lot of other panels, it just didn't work: it'd separate them into two moments but it would just cut-off text or pictures 50-50 and make it difficult to read or parse. Furthermore, don't know why the controls were split between mouse and keyboard instead of just using one: I kept expecting to flip to the next page by pressing the right arrow key, but instead I need to switch to the mouse just to click a button. If you're going to involve the mouse, I'd love if it I could use it for other elements, like clicking on certain panels, or maybe zooming in with the scroll-wheels on certain parts so I could read and examine at my own pace. Flipping a page didn't look as elegant as it could've been either: the animation plays, but the page doesn't actually skip until way later, and it still plays the animation even if you go back a page on the very first page which shouldn't be possible. Checkpointing for panels was weird as well: if I go back a page, I expect to hit right and have me start at the beginning, but it still treats it as if I'm at the last panel, despite me wanting to go back (also, sometimes the app would just stop working with the arrow keys altogether and freeze). There are many other issues I could point out but I think you get the gist. Again, hearts in the right place and it's a neat attempt for an app, but at the moment it is lacking in usability in many ways.

Mabelma responds:

Thanks for your feedback. Greatly appreciated.

[Type Help]

Decent text adventure! Pretty fun making my way around and figuring out what to do, and it was impressive the amount of commands that were recognized by the system as valid (for example, I had a good "cry" after spilling the pot on me). There were a lot of confusing elements to it, however. One, I don't feel like it did a good job setting up a plot or goal or anything like that: without that, once it came to the difficult puzzles, I didn't really have anything to push me forward through the difficulty to keep playing. Two, the interface is weird: why do you even display a keyboard if you can't even click on it with your mouse to interact with it? Clicking on any key just sends me to some sort of website. (EDIT: ok, you can click keys on a fresh start, but once you click on the typehelp, for some reason I can no longer click on anything anymore without it sending me to the site). Three, a lot of the logic felt really weird and, well, illogical to get used to (though I can understand if this was intentional, as a lot of adventures worked like this back in the day).

BoMToons responds:

Yeah, perhaps I relied too much on "mystery" as a plot driver, a good story might have added more motivation to stick with the more difficult puzzles (as you pointed out).

The "click a link and you can't click anything else" is a Ruffle bug that I've reported and hopefully they'll fix soon!

Thanks for playing and leaving a review!

[Advent NEON DEMO [Web Version]]

Hyperactive is right for this game: once you get going and get used to how fast the game moves, it feels incredible! I loved both the battle sections and the platforming sections and how they seamlessly worked together: the feeling of flow and speed was incredible. Battles were awesome: I loved how chunky the hits felt and the great way enemies flew and bounced around, and I like the way you could just mash attacks and directions all over the place for great combos, but you can always instantly cancel with a dash to dodge an attack. Just has a great sense of freedom to it!

I do have a few critiques though (minor things, haha, overall it was great!) When wall-running, sometimes I would find myself hitting jump near the top of the wall, hoping it would jump me upwards onto the ledge to finish my run up it, but instead it always jumps me backwards away off the wall: it's ok, but it might be neat if you could influence how you wall jump with directional keys for better control and flow. Pressing a button to rapidly finish a line of dialogue would cause you to need to press two more times to go to the next line of dialogue, instead of just pressing once more. Freezing the camera for slow-mo after a dodge can be a neat effect, but it can end up confusing with me losing my character by running off-screen. Animations for some of the player attacks felt a bit slow with too many frames of blur: could stand for less blur frames or just reducing the amount of time between frames. There were some weird graphical glitches at times, like some weird screenshake and lines appearing at the top of the screen. Also in general, sometimes the game just felt a bit too loose and zippy for its own good and it made it tricky to control or tell where hitboxes were and such, but I think I got used to it.

All in all, looking forward to more from this!

CryoGX responds:

Really appreciate the feedback, and thanks for playing! I'll be taking these things into account. Judging from some of these points, this may be due to some quirks with the porting itself, and I recommend trying the downloaded version (if possible!) to see if those issues persist, as the game's speed partially relies on its framerate.

[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.