FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Newgrounds Arcade]

I really want to like this as I think the intention is cool and there's some real elbow grease in there, but overall I had a bad time with this. The presentation is all over the place: I knew I was gonna have a bad time from the very start when the title screen, the thing that's supposed to sell you on the game, didn't have any effort put into it: basic system fonts, terrible formatting, haphazard layout, inconsistent design (why on earth are the config buttons highlightable and not the main play button?) and badly scaled images (why is the title graphic so small?) which have all this pixelization on them. Just an overall lack of presentation which I'd like to overlook, but it just reminded me of old Geocities sites that people make fun of, it hurt my eyes, and more than that, it was difficult to tell what did what and how to get around. I was hoping that, even if the graphics were bad that the gameplay would win me over, but same issues were had in all the games as well with bad, lazy HUDs, graphics and gameplay: it was cool to see the variety, but I would prefer one great game instead of a bunch of shallow games which get old in seconds, if they even work. Again, its a great concept and a good effort given the amount of content (even though it is overall not so great content), and I think it's a really neat collab opportunity, but I think it needed way more time in the oven: I'd like to think some patches can help but it would have to be a pretty significant overhaul for me.

larrynachos responds:

You're absolutely right on every account! I just can't seem to force myself to tidy up lol. I'm working with artists to slowly rebuild the visual aspects of the game, including the main menu! I'll definitely be revamping the minigame HUDS as well, I just don't have a lot of assets at my disposal :\

I hate to disappoint you, but I just plain suck at art direction lol. Like most of my games, the graphics are a combination of pngs from the internet and assets downloaded from opengameart (this time with the exception of the art contributed by icy64 and others!) just cobbled together. I could spend a whole day just fiddling with the graphical aspects and end up with an equally sloppy product, cause I can't really close my eyes and envision what I want, and when I try it usually evolves out of my capabilities and limited art assets.

I appreciate that you again took the time to do a more in depth review via youtube video! Can I ask what your computer specs are? It appeared to be running quite sluggishly (which is why the recoil in Madness Arena was so severe, and the physics games were running at a snail's pace). It's usually a matter of cpu. I'm using an i7-9700k (throttled at 50% cause I've been having overheating issues), and it runs fine for me (late game madness arena can always get a little laggy though, if there's too many enemies shooting you at once).

In terms of gameplay, I plan on adding more engaging minigames and refining the old ones with better features (for example, I want to replace madness zombie survival with a sort of animated on rails experience like time crisis, but that's something that requires an animator). The upcoming 1.4 release will include a new Line Rider minigame/level editor so you can make, play, and share levels :D

[Ranata the Frog and the Broken Forest]

Oh man, I really wanted to like this game, and some part of me still thinks its quite charming, but I had such a bad time with this, haha. Like I said, I think the overall concept and graphics are very charming and cute, and the game does have some nice touches like the tutorial which allows you to experiment with the controls before actually playing. But the game itself is just so frustrating for me. I really want to jump on flies but it's practically impossible to do so because you can only jump down on them, not up, and branches are constantly in the way to stop you. I really want to move around efficiently and save time, but the frog drifts more than a fast and furious muscle car on NOS. I really want to get this fruits down, but these two fruits are right next to each other and I keep cancelling the first shake by shaking something else, like what sense does that make? I want to deliver this fruit, but whenever I pick up the fruit, my previously carried fruit falls up and right back on top of me and makes me pick it up, and also the witch takes an hour to say I delivered the wrong fruit when I already corrected myself and am trying to deliver the right one! It was quite the adventure, and I did laugh at my mistakes, and maybe I just suck, but I still gotta say that I think the game wasn't designed in the best way possible: good attempt however.

Omael responds:

Thanks for playing. Next one will be better :)

[Dots: Revamped! Expansion]

Simple game, but pretty cute and cool overall! Was really impressed at the overall presentation of the game with the colorful and responsive menus, UI, and HUD: those elements are forgotten by a lot of indie game developers and its nice to see so much work put into them as it really helps give it a sense of professionalism. Game is a little overly simplistic for me: only having rainbow mode as anything special, which doesn't do that much in the first place, last too little and take so long to charge can really make some of the levels monotonous at times, but I will say that once you get deeper into the difficulties and the balls really start to stack up, it gets quite fun! I do wish the screen and game elements were a bit bigger: can't really see the cute faces on the dots, and I also wish the UI was a bit better in some regards to intuitiveness with, for example, the rainbow bar being, well, actually rainbow colored to denote it instead of blue. Still, quite nice!

Starblinky responds:

Hey thanks for the thoughtful review and the compliments + feedback. Appreciated!

I agree with pretty much everything you said. Especially with the bar being rainbow colored. I did consider new special types but I found it too hard to balance when enemies were 1 hit kills. And I didn't want to change it too much from the original 2008 game.

And by the way, since this was the browser version I had to make a lot of cuts for performance. The original game is 60 fps, a bigger game screen and has slightly increased visual effects. The original version is on Steam for free if you're interested!

https://www.dotsrevamped.com/play/

[Wrath of Nightmare]

Hmm, I haven't finished it yet, so I can't judge it for sure. The intro is pretty neat and does set up some good intrigue, and the graphics and scale of the world is quite impressive. However, that same scale ended up making me just get lost, and not in a good way. Without villagers repeating the objective or any sort of note/journal system, and with not much guidance in the beginning, I wasn't sure where the heck to go and just got sick of it. If the world was a bit smaller, maybe a journal/note system wouldn't even be necessary. It didn't help either that, as big as the world is, it seemed fairly lifeless: I was really hoping I could examine bookshelves and other things in people's houses to learn about them or myself, but I couldn't interact with anything. If I can keep track of what the heck to do, I think it would be cool: maybe I'll retry in the future.

TheEnkian responds:

I think you've made a few good points. Things I'd like to add:
- Objective screen.
- More clear directions/signposting of areas.
- Interactive bookshelves.

Thanks for playing!

[Erebos]

Pretty neat game! It's a little bleh: a lot of the graphics like the corpses are pretty bad and kinda take you out of the experience, and the ship can be really bland as well, with different floors not even having some different colors or wall patterns to shake it up at least a little bit. But, for what it's worth, I did have some good spooks and the story was cool in that it had multiple endings (though it really sucked that I got an ending unintentionally and then it didn't save the checkpoint so I could retry). I also thought you missed some possibilities: I tried to use the bridge computer before even learning about self destruct and suddenly my character is trying to arm self destruct like he knows about it, and I felt it would've been cooler if he just drives the ship to a planet and ends up dooming everyone in his ignorance as an ending. I also thought there were some times where having the examine button and the interact button do separate things didn't make sense: when I first came across Seuss I examined him first, which had the character calmly state that it was Seuss: then I interacted with Seuss and now suddenly my guy is screaming! Was pretty funny, but yeah, I think examine and interact shoulda done the same thing there, just like how you have it do the same thing with beds.

thesteamknight responds:

Thank for playing and for the feedback!

[Madness: Zombie Horde]

Not too shabby! It ain't necessarily anything special, being a simple shooter, but it does do a good job for being what it is. A lot of games would be lazy and just make this go on forever and be a simple score attack, but this actually does have some decent pacing to it, what with the game actually introducing a 2nd phase at just the right time, as well as having an ending. Other than that, it's got some decent corpse explosions and achievements to unlock, as well as making the player hitbox just be the player's torso instead of their arms to give some good wiggle room. Kinda wish the shooting wasn't so clunky with the weird burst instead of a more comfortable full-auto or single-shot, but I understand it was probably done for balancing. Basically, the game knows it works best as a short game and it doesn't overstay its welcome, so nice work on that.

fullmetalchaz responds:

Wow, everything you said was spot on.
You knew every reason behind my design choices.
Its awesome but also a bit intimidating, thx man.

[Elementalist: 0]

Pretty cool game that could use some more meat on its bones, but it has a decent core to work from! I love me a good brawler, and this game does seem to have some decent combat to it. Enemies seem to have some decent attack patterns with some good thought put into them, though they also have some weird placement at times, such as bats being put so high up that they never fly low enough to attack you. I know you probably put a lot of work into it so you think that people will put a lot of play into it as well, but at the moment, there is no way there is enough content to keep a player's interest through a horde of monsters that large, especially when they spawn that slowly and with such a low variety of different enemies. It took me forever to see a fireball enemy for the first time, and even then, they barely showed up, with the vast majority of the enemies still being the basic ones you see at the start. I think that this game is a classic case of trying to stretch a short game into a longer game: it does nothing but hurt the experience. I think if this game was shorter with a faster pace to it, it would do a lot to help, but even more than that, I'd love to see this with a larger variety of enemies, along with maybe having different levels to showcase different waves of enemies or different arena layouts, and some more cool moves to style on enemies with. It could be something really great!

Franuka responds:

Hey, thanks for the feedback :)
I'm planning on making a bigger, more interesting version (more maps, enemies, skills, etc). This was more of a prototype to work on.

[Pain Reaction]

Very cool action-packed game! Game is packed full of that satisfying Prox276 game feel I've come to expect: some good ol' explosive pixely fun! I love how the screen-shake is used to effectively signal the most important events, being an enemy being hit (so you know you aimed correctly) and an enemy exploding (so you know you need to look for revenge projectiles), which felt like an improvement over other games more haphazard screenshake. I like how the levels ramp up in terms of difficulty with new and interesting enemy types and other difficulty tweaks, though I wish the boss would also improve in some aspects as well. I wish the rocket would only appear in your hand when you're ready to fire: its a bit confusing when it looks like you should be able to fire but you still can't, and only showing it when you're ready would help, I think. I got a bit confused when enemies were dying from their own buddies projectiles: in a way, its neat, but it felt a little unsatisfying to me that I didn't get to take them down myself, but that's just me (probably because it doesn't screenshake when this happens?). Solid game all-around!

By the way, I love the goofy drooly face the basic imps make when you hit them, haha.

Prox276 responds:

Thanks! Your thorough and constructive reviews are something I think of from the moment I start a new project and it's one of the things that motivate me to do my best and create something that improves on my past games! I really appreciate it! :)

[Puzzle Crafter]

Game does kind of have a clunky look and feel to it with the simplistic visuals which aren't professionally tiled/spaced in any manner along with a general lack of juice, but it is still somewhat impressive how intuitive and neat the level editor is, along with the decent variety of levels and mechanics shown in the adventure mode. Game could be helped a lot with some better visuals and FX, just some minor things like glass shard particles when you shatter a glass block, for example, and maybe giving the finish block a classic checkboard finish-flag pattern on it. I also think that having the game elements be tiled/on a grid would help with designing the levels as it would make placement of elements more uniform, leading to more consistent physics simulations. Adventure mode was a bit lacking in that, while it had coins and such, it didn't seem to track them in anyway to have you try for a par/perfect score or anything like that, especially since if you don't get them all at the end it just shuffles you to the next level anyway instead of letting you retry for a better score. Also the boosters need some help as they blew out my eardrums when you had that level where a box was constantly triggering their sound, haha! Basically, its a bit rough at the moment, but I think it has some decent potential!

larrynachos responds:

Thank you for the review and suggestions! I've been meaning to give it some TLC updates but I'm actually working on two new games right now! I'll definitely take your suggestions into consideration when I hop back into this project though!

A grid system for the editor is something I've wanted to try but couldn't implement with the current setup. The adventure levels are the same way because of that. I think there's only 1 or 2 coins that you can't ever collect, most of the coins are there to show that you're still on track, even if you bumped something and changed your direction slightly. It's more of a guide tool if anything.

Yeah that boost level needs some changes, but at the moment you can knock it off of the boost with the ball that's sitting above it. That's something others have said too, so I'm gonna make sure that gets fixed next update!

Thanks again for the feedback, it's very helpful!

[Forgecore]

This was a real surprise hit for me! From such a somber, dark atmosphere the last thing I was expecting was a goofy physics rocket platformer, but man was it fun and totally fit! I absolutely love the way the game delivers its story through the rising challenges brought forth with every new game mechanic: moments like trying to get to the top of the mountain through the snowy winds were absolutely intense and memorable! I also really like the subtle way the heat gauge gain slows down a bit just when you're about to overheat: very user-friendly and just adds to the intensity of pushing the limits. This game definitely delivers a great and unique experience though difficulty and gameplay, similar to games like Getting Over It. Only complaints I could see would be that maybe its a little too hard (obviously subjective) at times which could lead to the intensity of the story being lost and the game being abandoned from frustration. For example, while a level like 'the city' is fairly dynamic with the player struggling against the enemies however they can, other levels like 'the mountain' kind of require memorization of traps from previous failed attempts to pull off a perfect run (since you need to know the exact timing where you should build up enough heat to last through the period where you should no longer touch the snow and stay airborne from then on). I could be wrong on this though, but anyway, I had a really great time with this, so kudos on a job well done!

morazor responds:

Thank you very much, I'm glad you've enjoyed it so much!
The mountain was a surprise to me, I didn't realize it could be so hard, probably because I completely overlooked the most intuitive strategy that most people tend to use. Sometimes it's hard to put yourself in the shoes of a new player that doesn't know all the tricks.
Anyway I understand that some people enjoy having a more relaxed experience and focus on the narrative aspect of the game: in that case having a difficult challenge can merely feel like an annoying obstacle. With the game already released, changing the mountain level would feel unfair for those who already beat it, so I've slapped together an easy difficulty setting to give a overall more approachable version of the game.
These are for sure some valuable lessons to be learned. I'm thankful to everyone that played the game and shared their experience, hopefully this will make my next games better <3