FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Guitar Munchers]

Pretty cool game that I think has a lot of heart in it! I love the arcade aesthetic that reminds me of games like Burger Time and Pacman, especially the goofy cutscenes you get as a reward for every few levels. Feel like the graphics, music and design are top-notch, and I loved my time with the game once I grasped it and started setting up combos and such. Only problem is it took a long time for me to grasp the game, and I doubt a lot of people will have the patience for this: heck, I almost dropped it myself plenty of times! The first few levels are really hard where the enemies just home into you and destroy you: felt like the later levels were easier actually since the enemies had less relentless patterns. Munching can be frustrating at times: sometimes I'd be trying to do the final bite on a string only for the game to think I'm biting the pixel next to it, leading to death. The combo system is neat, but really unintuitive, explained oddly, difficult to reproduce because of the above munching placement issues, and introduced too late and then the game doesn't explain it further. This is one of those games that toes the line between being 'satisfying hardcode retro difficulty' and 'frustrating and unintuitive': I came out alright, but could definitely use some help to make it shine for everyone else like it deserves for all the work you put into it!

LeSam responds:

Hey there! Random comment after ten months but I just got around to fix (I think) this problem you had in your video :

> Munching can be frustrating at times: sometimes I'd be trying to do the final bite on a string only for the game to think I'm biting the pixel next to it, leading to death.

Previously what it did is that it destroyed according to the biggest segment around the bite. So if you were eating a string on a part that was on its last life, but you were also just a little above another one with full health, it first destroyed the one with full health. Now it should only do that if you're really on that full health segment (which should be a bit more intuitive, so hopefully less frustrating)

Just woke up this morning thinking about this and was like "Why did I never fix this?" :D Anyway, happy new year ;)

[Biker Hero]

Not too shabby; it's a fun and goofy little prototype that I could see growing into something big! I actually felt like I liked the game better before I discovered that I had the ability to shoot. When you can shoot, you can just blast away through everything, but if you can't shoot, you have to dodge around the interesting bouncing enemies you've set up, which is a lot of fun and very challenging. Maybe make it so that the bike transforms into gun mode only at bosses, but for everything else, it's in speed mode where you just dodge through enemies. Obviously it could use some polish: animated sprites, smaller hitboxes, more special effects and such for pizazz, etc, etc, just don't lose those sound effects, haha!

BobbertOC responds:

Thanks for all the feedback! I think you're right about the shooting making it too easy, and I like your idea about the bike transforming at boss stages. If I pick this up again, this is definitely something I would consider adding. :)

[NEO:YORK:KNIGHTS]

I really want to like this game because it seems to ooze style with its cool art and aesthetic, and I love robots. It really makes me feel like I'm missing something, because at the moment it doesn't feel like you can do much in terms of combat. If you try to hit the enemies, they seem to hit back at you no matter how hard you try to hit before them. I try and outrange their swing with a backstep or whatever and they still hit me. Throwing your sword, while cool, just seems to lead to you getting dogpiled with no weapon. If you manage to survive and upgrade to a gun, then it's just a mindless slaughter as you gun them down without any challenge. If the combat system was reworked to have a bit more style and allow the player to control the situation more, maybe add some levels or something, this could be a robo Katana Zero in the making. I think this game has a lot of potential and I would love to see this worked on and come back in a more extended form!

MoeAnguish responds:

Thanks for your input! I'll keep this in mind if i work on this or any other platformer/fighter kinda game!

[Blooming]

Holy moley, you expect a lot out of your players! This game was super confusing, unintuitive and frustrating: a lot of the time when concepts were explained to the user, they were done with vague graphics, and those graphics weren't even visible at the moment you needed them! However, once you wrap your head around how the game works, this game had some crazy mind-bending puzzles that really challenged me and blew me away! Can't get over what a unique and interesting experience this was, and I'm glad to say I was able to beat it. It's not all sunshine and rainbows though: I felt like the dogs were a bit annoying to deal with due to their weird AI, and the boss was a bit of a letdown after the initial thrill due to how much health it had and how little time you had to pick a flower to strategize through the obstacles it sent your way. I bet a lot of people will bounce off this game, and you should work on that, because I want more people to see how great this game can really be!

HealliesGames responds:

No matter how hard I try, it seems that creating an easily understandable game is really against my nature.

I think it is partly due to my experience with videogames;
games like Another World or Contra took me hours, if not days, to figure out how to get through a part.
I want to convey this, apparently failing.

The dog AI is actually simple: they follow the linear path until the character is inside of their range. Then start following you. A circle showing how much distance to keep should solve the problem!

As for the boss instead, I should be able to resolve simply by removing the possibility of making consecutive attacks, since the moment you are dead you don't have the physical time to collect the flower.

I really hope I can improve this aspect in my production. This thanks mainly to user feedback, as well as thanks to your work of reviewing complete with gameplay.
I wait to see how you played it!

[Listeria Wars]

Pretty cool game! I feel like it hits a home run in terms of core structure as the gameplay, graphics, sound, music and so on feel great! While the swipe controls were a little confusing at first, eventually they create a good feeling flow to the strategy of moving your units around. The only issue I have at the moment is that, while it does do well at introducing new units and such each level to keep the pace going, it takes quite a while to introduce any cool story elements, and then the flow is kinda disrupted by the difficulty spike/need to grind. With some minor balance tweaks, however, I think this game would be incredible!

MrRubel responds:

Thank you!

[Just Slide 2]

Very nice! I was initially thrown off since it seemed the same as Just Slide 1, but I feel like this game has improved in the puzzle design and introduced a lot of cool new mechanics as well to make it even better than before! Still satisfying as ever to paint the levels, as it has a really addictive quality to it.

AdityaChaudhary responds:

Hope you enjoyed playing :)

[Nitrogenous]

Interesting game, but I do feel a little bit lost, haha. I think I understood it the main gameplay eventually and it is cool to chill out get lost in a trance of dodging, but I didn't feel like there was any sense of progression: the levels seemed random and didn't seem to rise in difficulty or change: only the player stats changed. I was expecting the player stats to be random, but naturally be higher and higher as it went on, and I expected the enemies to be basic but introduce the other ones in later levels, but sometimes I got high stats and difficult enemies straight from the start. I wasn't sure what a dangerous behavior was either as I wasn't able to get the bar high enough, unfortunately: maybe that would've been a cool boss fight or something. I understand that it doesn't necessarily have to have progression since it's just a score attack, but it felt a little lost without it, I guess. Pretty trippy game, however!

HealliesGames responds:

I didn't specified it in the instructions: with the increase of the danger bar, the probability of spawning those non-yellow protons increases.

The difficulty is intrinsic in the player's statistics, so yes: it is slowly progressing.
Actually there's no special event; a dangerous behaviour is only an indication.

But I was thinking of adding some sort of special wave between one behaviour and another, and maybe making the survival time more dynamic instead of the static 20 seconds.

Thanks for the feedback, Lucas!

[Ritz]

Pretty rad game! I like the presentation: feels like all of the elements such as music, sound, graphics and so on are there to make a nice core game. The only thing missing for me was a big hook. It's a nice game and I had fun finding all the cheese in the level (although the jumping mechanics are very fast and it takes a bit to get used to, but i "got gud" at it), but aside from the quirky quips and such, there wasn't much else, like a unique mechanic, to make it stand out from being just a basic platformer. I enjoyed it though, so I feel like it's a really decent core: would just love to see it polished up a bit and blossom into something big and unique like that weird Pizza Tower game or something, I dunno. But I understand if it was just a small prototype game for Pixel Day, and it's impressive in that regard.

ninjamuffin99 responds:

thankya futurecop for all ur work i appreciate ya

[Magickal]

Pretty cool game! I like the progression of moving from level to level and the variation of enemies is very impressive. Graphics, music and sounds give off a really cool gameboy aesthetic. While I think the core gameplay is good, it is a bit frustrating at the moment. For example, sometimes food seems to recover mana and sometimes it doesn't (and if you need to eat multiple food before you get a mana point there's no way to track it)? Only being able to have one bullet on screen leads to inconsistent shooting mechanics where a miss is too devastating since you need to wait too long, while a hit allows you to shoot once again immediately. Some of the enemies can be a bit frustrating to deal with since they can be slightly above or below your line of fire, but I do like the variation and you can dodge them, so it still works in the end. Basically, the game is still good as it is, but I think it could use a small bit of tuning to reduce frustration: you could allow a more consistent shot pattern, or allow checkpoints, or increase the speed of the game/reduce the time spent per level so the player can learn and retry quicker, etc.

Harlemblack responds:

Hey thanks for the elaborate review. Yes I actually had faced the issues you mentioned during the development phase. On Mana mechanics, there is actually an invisible mana bar being full of 100%. Each spell uses 30% mana while each food taken replenishes 10% mana (except the moon sphere as it restores 100% mana). This explains the randomness of filling mana by picking up foods. On shot pattern/management, I actually tried to provide three bullets on screen at a time instead of one. This made killing enemies ridiculously easy. If you notice, most enemies depend on ramming themselves to hit the player, not projectiles. You could just stand in a corner and eliminate any enemy marching towards you. To compensate the one bullet system, spell mechanism was created. With proper positioning, timing and spell type, player could wipe most if not all enemies on screen with single spell. Lastly, on game speed, yeah I was lazy in this part. I once tried to vary the speed but it was a mess. The first three levels require 3 mins to complete while the last two about 5 mins each. the gameplay duration will be about 15 mins and I think it's too short to have any checkpoint. My current games still use the elements of classic arcade games such as no checkpoints, lifeup mechanism, etc. But I really appreciated your inputs and shall make them considerations in my future games. Thanks.