FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[SYNTAXIA]

Whoa, this is looking to be pretty cool! Reminds me a lot of games like Lone Survivor or Eternal Darkness, at least a bit. There wasn't quite enough gameplay to really hook me on the depths of the systems and how they will evolve, but the game feels quite polished and high-quality overall, has a very intriguing and creepy world, and it plays with some neat mind-bending concepts, what with warping the world with the power of words to solve puzzles. I think it's shaping up to be something very interesting, so well done!

I think my gameplay was pretty smooth and intuitive without any major issues apart from not realizing I had to click on items to equip them before use, but that was naught but a few seconds of confusion. Otherwise you had my attention the whole way through, so yeah, no major feedback I can think of at the moment, apart from some little thoughts:

*I found it interesting that, considering it's such a creepy game, it also has some humorous dialogue and cute art. I wonder if it's truly going for a 'cozy horror' vibe like it says, or if it's just doing it to let your guard down before it scares the living daylights out of the player, haha.

*I was curious about that 'recent nightmares' warning at the start: is that supposed to be a subtle fourth-wall breaking trigger warning for the player, or is it just supposed to be a weird in-universe thing?

CANCAT-Games responds:

So for your first question: Its mostly just me having fun with the world and the player, while additionaly having the effect of having you put your guard down, hehe

Second question: Yes, right now its just an in-universe thing. However I do have plans on expanding on it more.

Anyways, thank you for your detailed response! If you'd like to chat more you should join our discord :]

[timmy christmas]

Hah, quite the amusing adventure! I may try to be all intellectual when reviewing games, so you'd think I'd bounce off of something as goofy and low-effort looking as this, but I enjoyed all the twists and turns this wild ride took me on! For something that looks low-effort, I actually found a lot of the game smartly designed with some subtle details you might not even notice, like the great sound design that accounts for distance, leading to nice doppler effects. The platforming also got surprisingly challenging as well, which pleased me! Mery Chriskmas (or however you spelled it) to you as well!

StaggerNight responds:

Merry Christmas FutureCop!!!!

[Pizza Kidd - NEW DEMO! 🍕🔥]

Hey, nice to see this pop up again! I'm a big fan of beat-em-ups and I'm glad to see this chugging along and with a lot improved from the previous version! In particular, the visuals are stylish, hitting enemies feels nice and chunky thanks to the sound effects and hitstop, there's a decently strategic moveset you can use to crowd-control or style on enemies with juggles, throws, parries and so on!

That being said, as a fan of a beat-em-ups, I can be tough to please, and there are still a lot of rough aspects to this game that got in the way of my enjoyment. Here's some feedback in regards to that:

*Controls felt really unresponsive and finicky at times. I'd dash when I was just trying to walk because the double-tap buffer is too generous, I'd grab someone when I didn't mean to or not grab someone when I felt I should've been able to, parries would come out when I didn't time it properly at all, my character would take forever transitioning between a grab-kick and a throw, and other oddities.

*While it's fun to punch the standard enemies and the bosses, I really hated the other enemies like the bats, slime, and mini-bots. You can't hit the bats without being hit back, and the slime and mini-bots explode on-hit or on-death. Why do they exist? They just seem built to annoy and I would prefer them removed from the game altogether.

*Enemy AI could be really glitched and act weird, getting stuck in the air or getting a punch off despite being interrupted and so on. In particular, the boss would be doing his spinning psycho crushed and suddenly freeze in one place but keep spinning, becoming almost untouchable until he eventually resets himself.

*Game didn't play the music properly when I first tried the level, only playing it on a retry?

*The controls menu text is impossible to read if you use a controller because the text starts overlapping: consider using symbols/images for the buttons instead of full words to help with spacing.

*There are some minor graphical issues like the enemy shadows floating in midair that doesn't make sense based on what the background looks like.

*I couldn't figure out some of the moves. For example, if you're holding block and then press a direction, I thought you would evade, but that requires pressing the jump button as well which seems needlessly complicated. Instead, if you do those buttons, you sometimes shift your stance or do a mini-dash or something: dunno what's going on there, some sorta parry dash or something?

I hope you keep on chugging along with this! It may be kinda unpolished and janky, but it's certainly got potential and I'm always down for a new beat-em-up!

PizzaKiddo responds:

Hey… Thanks again for jumping back in and giving us such thorough feedback—it really means a lot! We’re stoked to hear that you were at least digging the visuals, the impact sfx, and the expanded moveset. That chunky, strategic combat vibe is exactly what we’re going for, so it’s awesome to hear it’s resonating a bit!

We hear you loud and clear on the areas that need improvement. The controls will receive further polish—we’ll be tweaking things like the dash sensitivity, grab mechanics, and parry timing to make everything feel smoother. As for the bats, slimes, and mini-bots, we’ll revisit those to make sure they feel challenging in a fun way rather than just frustrating.

The AI glitches, music issues, and overlapping text (UI/UX) are definitely on our radar, and we’re working on revisions for those too. And your point about some moves being tricky to figure out is fair—we’ll look at simplifying with single button input assignments (rebinds and customization) and adding better explanations to make everything more intuitive.

One thing we’re curious about—what kind of setup were you playing on? We’ve seen some controller input lag or browser issues depending on the system, which might explain some of the unresponsiveness you noticed. Not sure… If you’re up for it, we’d love for you to try the Steam version at some point to see if the controller experience feels better for you.

Again, your feedback is appreciated… seriously. Thanks for sticking with us through the rougher edges—it’s players like you who help us to make the game the best it can be. If you ever want to jump back into a future build, we’d love to hear your thoughts!

—
PK Team 👊🍕

[Battle Plan: Jester's Knife Demo]

Hey, this is a pretty impressive demo you got here! Overall it feels like high-quality stuff all-around, what with its charming cartoony visuals, polished gameplay, juicy and flavorful interactions and cool puzzles with loads of mechanics that are intuitively taught to the player! I had a grand ol' time and got quite addicted to making my way through this adventure!

One particular puzzle really blew me away where you have to construct an infinite loop for a bullet to keep hitting a switch so you can make it through multiple doors in sequence. It was quite the difficulty spike and required some dexterity since you need to slip the mirrors in place while the bullet is traveling, but boy did I feel smart doing it!

In the interest of providing feedback to help this game grow:

*I'm not quite sure what that train station room was all about? There's a cow floating in space and you can find something in the crates, but I dunno if that was important or some sort of bonus collectable? Don't get me wrong, I love me some bonus levels like Celeste's strawberries, but I just didn't know what was happening here.

*The ice floor really looks more like a spike floor: maybe the design can be changed to be more recognizable at a glance?

*There are these soda machines where you can get hydrated: unsure if that is actually powering up your character or is just added flavor to the environmental interactions that doesn't have an actual effect on the player.

*Maybe it's my fault for not playing on full-screen, but the game seems super tiny overall with the characters being the size of ants. It's not bad, but sometimes I feel guilty seeing all these great animations but not being able to see them up close in detail!

*As mentioned above, that puzzle where you need to set up an infinite loop was a crazy difficulty spike! I liked it, but man, it really came outta left field and could scare some people off! Then again, maybe there was an easier way to do it and I just wasn't seeing it...

*Unfortunately, I took a break and came back disappointed since the game didn't save my progress! I was looking forward to seeing what else was on offer, if anything, but I don't want to have to re-do everything to see.

Best of luck on further development: I think you've got something great here!

GoudaGames responds:

Hey!

Thank you so much for all the great feedback! We loved watching you play the demo and it was super insightful. We're already working on some fixes.

Regarding saving, the game has auto-save, but in the web version it won't work if you close the tab or refresh. You have to exit adventure mode first.

Big thanks once again! We hope you give the demo another chance and get to see the battle mechanic and final boss.

[204Snake!]

Wow, this puzzle game really surprised me and took me for quite the ride!

I'll admit that it didn't have the greatest first impression. For example, the title screen feels very lackluster, and I was stuck on level 2 for an embarrassing amount of time since I didn't notice the new tutorial prompt about moving the critters: my brain just saw the arrow key instructions and assumed it was just refreshing me about moving my character around.

But once I got into the game proper, I was blown away! The puzzle mechanics were very unique and mind-bending to me where you need to manage both your snake and the critters sliding around, and the game gets into some challenging puzzles almost immediately instead of being content to baby you. There's loads of content which slowly increases the difficulty with new mechanics, and the game actually has decent presentation quality with nice subtle effects like the critters shaking right before you eat them.

There are still some other slight issues like how there isn't an obvious way to go back to the main menu to select another level, like if you want to skip the world 1 bonus levels to go straight to world 2. But overall, this was a cool experience and very impressive for a game jam game!

Sodoj responds:

heyo,

you can press the 'P' key to bring up the options menu that also lets you get back to the title screen.

good luck with the rest of the game, if you ever decide to return to it!

[Mazza Claus]

Hey, quite the amusing hop-n-bop platformer you got here! While I could argue that the game is largely bog-standard and being held up by superficial comedic elements, I nevertheless felt like I had a decent time with this game going around talking with the locals and completing the various objectives, so hey, it worked for me! I was also happy to see a lot of the issues I had with the previous Mazza game, such as the camera, have been addressed. All in all, an o'right adventure!

That being said, there were still a few rough spots here and there, such as how hitboxes for enemies could be quite janky: there were plenty of times where I'd jump on an enemy and I'd get hurt and they wouldn't, or we'd both somehow get hurt when it should just be one of us (them, most likely). In the same fashion, it was sometimes unclear which enemies you could jump on or not. Finally, I did get a bit annoyed with how the achievements keep popping up, especially for ones I've already gotten.

Chris responds:

Thats weird how the achievements were popping up multiple times. That is probably a bug with the Newgrounds API rather than the game because aside from triggering them thats all handled outside of the game itself.

I’m glad you enjoyed this one still, I remember you weren’t completely sold on the first game. The hitboxes I do need to address I think and you raise a good point about it not being clear which enemies you can jump on and which you can’t. It was also a little challenging to communicate which are enemies and which are NPCs but I was hoping the speech bubbles would solve that.

[Fist of the Neverwake]

Hmm, this certainly shows some promise! Feels like it's going for a Klonoa-type platformer, what with it's 2.5D track-based platformer vibes. It's a bit slow and unexciting at the start, but eventually it gets somewhat interesting and challenging with its level design: felt good to utilize the bells to refresh your jumps, hold the punch to hover, and race through the timed sections. Not too shabby!

However, if I have to be honest, the game feels very rough at the moment, feeling more like an early alpha or prototype, and I encountered a lot of issues.

*I had some serious control issues at the start where my character would randomly freeze up and stop moving forward despite me holding down a direction. It looks like it might've been because I was trying to use the D-Pad, as it seemed to work better when I switched to analog sticks, so I dunno what's going on there.

*There were a lot of times where the game was just very frustrating, ignoring my inputs when I tried to jump off a platform right when it fell or right at the edge, among other things. Would help if certain subtle designs like jump buffering, coyote time, and the like were added to this to make it feel more smooth and forgiving to control.

*Overall the game just had a somewhat rough look and feel, what with its very bland title screen, pretty generic gameplay design with no special mechanic of its own, weird glitches, a lack of juicy special effects, and so on. It's just got that vibe that makes it very much feel like a game jam game, or an unfinished project.

Despite my issues, I do still think the game has potential. It looks like you've got the skeleton of a game here, an engine that you can use to make all of these track-based platformer levels, and that's quite the starting point to work from. From there, with a bit more fleshing out and polish, I'd love to see what this becomes!

SilviaFox responds:

The input issue you experienced is a Godot 3 bug, you can remedy it by flicking the stick once and then switching back to the d-pad!

[Away]

Hmm, not too shabby! The game certainly gives off some chill, stylish vibes with its artistic graphics and sound design, and the gameplay was pretty neat in how you need to trace the shape but more obstacles get in your way as it goes on. The way the poem is slowly revealed as you go through each level served as a neat motivating factor that made me want to get all the way to the end, and I did!

If I have to be honest, though, it did feel somewhat unsatisfying. Yeah, I think it has potential, but once I got to the end, I just had that feeling of "wait, it's already over?" There's just a lack of a satisfying conclusion, and overall a lack of a strong sense of progression, narrative or story being told through the levels. I was also disappointed that the gameplay mechanics weren't more intertwined with the story being told, like using mechanics of weight and wind, changing them as you go to echo the themes.

For a game jam game it's decent, and as said it's got some cool vibes, but there's just something missing for me to make it feel like the elegant poetry I want it to be. I dunno, maybe I'm being unfair holding it up to other artistic games like Journey or Gris and so on.

Heytibo responds:

Yes, I totally understand.
This is the kind of project I'd like to explore further and flesh out.

[Graveyard Shift Online Demo Edition]

Hmm, pretty interesting arcade game! Certainly makes a great first impression with its very authentic retro-arcade presentation: I do love me a classic attract/demo mode to learn about the game, and this delivered!

I do think this has a lot of potential from some fun times, what with its deeper potential strategies involving squashing enemies with tiles or combining them to form the numbers you need...but I will admit that I had a rough time getting into this! My feedback would be thus:

*I found it odd that you need to hold a button to push a tile instead of just naturally walking into it: just felt really awkward and unnecessary, what with the game not making the character sprite look any different when its in pushing mode, and while not holding push mode lets you go over flat tiles, wall tiles still block you, so it can be weirdly inconsistent despite seemingly allowing more freedom.

*Maybe I'm missing something or just being unlucky, but I felt like I was getting screwed over by tiles constantly spawning on the edges of the screen where I can't do anything with them except push them over the edge since, to my knowledge, we don't have a way to pull them in.

*I can't figure out how the math works when you combine tiles: I thought I had it at first, but then I started to get unexpected results that just seemed to make no sense. Maybe the order in which you combine them makes a difference as well? Without being able to rely on that mechanic, I gave up and it again felt like randomness screwed me over since there were times I just couldn't find the number I needed to complete anything.

*I don't understand the time limit as it feels very short and doesn't seem to refresh when I complete matches? Feels like you can barely get anything started, especially due to the aforementioned annoyance regarding so many tiles being spawned in areas where you can't use them, never mind waiting for tiles with good numbers to finally show up.

*Dying is a bit of a bummer in the way it resets the whole board instead of letting you continue where you left off: sucks to be so close to finishing a match and then having to start from scratch while time ticks away.

So yeah, I tried to love this one, but confusion and frustration were unfortunately in high supply here! There's definitely something in here, but I'm just having a tough time understanding it: hopefully this can provide some insight for the final version!

captainfailmore responds:

Thanks for the in-depth feedback! I'll reply to a few things here, since I didn't leave much information on the page and it might have helped if I did.

Something that I did a poor job of communicating is that the time limit is something that only exists in the demo, and you aren't the first person to remark that it's a little too short. In the full game, the time limit doesn't exist at all. It's hard to make a good first impression if you can't even figure the game out before it sends you back to the title screen, so I'll probably amend that when I update it next.

Combining numbers works like this: If the number you squash is lower than the number you're pushing, it subtracts. If it's equal or greater, it adds, rolling over past four. The only exception to this is two fours, which gives you a one. It's weird, but you basically have the opportunity to make whatever numbers you need, even if all you have are a bunch of tiles with just one single number.

Tiles replenish once they're below a certain quantity on the field, so shoving tiles you can't use over the edge is the right move. You can use those to get rid of gargoyles, too - that's not hugely relevant early in the game, though. Markers appear on the map's edge frequently enough for edge tiles to not be completely useless, too, but that isn't going to be readily apparent within the demo's short time span.

I've actually considered having the board populate with random tiles after you lose a life, since waiting for them to replenish creates a bit of a lull. On the one hand, I like giving the player a breather, but on the other hand, dying later in the game can be really punishing, since it takes a while for the game to pick up steam again. I'll probably revisit this idea when I can get around to updating again.

Thanks again for your constructive feedback and for giving the game a fair shake, I really do appreciate that.

[Scrap Your Pants]

Pretty fun little hi-score arcade game! It's a little bit short, but the gauntlet you need to fight through is pretty intense with a lot of crazy enemy patterns to keep you on your toes! I'd almost argue the enemies are too much in that collecting scrap becomes something you'll be unable to focus on anymore, but still, I enjoyed the pressure, with the cherry on top being the charmingly goofy presentation and smooth gamefeel.

A few notes:

*I'm probably thinking about it too hard, but I feel like the game is a bit too random for the hi-scores to mean anything. As said before, the enemies just make everything a bit too hectic to collect scrap with any sort of intentionality, and while the inclusion of a card shop adds some spice to the gameplay, it only serves to add another random element that can determine whether you get a big score or not. Just feels like its down to luck, not skill, but maybe that's sour grapes, haha.

*I understand it's an edge case that doesn't happen commonly, but I was bummed out that during my dead-man-walking state (aka i'm a head that is exploding and will die soon) I tried to grab a medikit and it did absolutely nothing and I still died. I'm not saying it should bring my body back, but it would be great if it at least put the flames out and let me keep going as a head!

*The card shop is a bit weird in that when you purchase something, it doesn't deduct from your score immediately: your score only refreshes to represent your purchases once you collect your first scrap afterwards. Also, the text for the price of the repair is so tiny you'd be safe in mistakeningly thinking it's free.

QualityStuff499 responds:

This is a 10/10 review! I love everything about it and i really enjoyed reading it, about the bugs! I am struggling a TON with patching the medkit for a week now! The game just crashes every time he picks one up :( , for the cards i added a re-roll button for the upcoming update! And i nerfed the robots a bit by putting some weaker ones to have a chance to spawn instead so the player can focus on collection a (tiny) bit more, thanks again! My favourite types of reviews are genuine critics of the game cause they keep me busy patching stuff, I don't notice some of the problems