FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Forest Shack]

I was really excited for this game and while I think it has improved in some ways from the original prototype and does have a certain mystique to it with its horror atmosphere, I was overall unfortunately quite disappointed and baffled by it, and feel like it actually got quite worse from before.

As said before, the most critical issue I have with the game is how incredibly confusing it is. But before we get into that, I just want to make note that when I say it is confusing, I'm not talking about the elements that are intentionally confusing for reasonable effect, such as how the player needs to pay a fee in order to see where a path leads to, or how certain mechanics are withheld for explanation until later as a means of progression/tutorialization, or how outcomes of events can be a bit vague like when you choose to steal the offerings and some such: those are perfectly understandable and add to the mystique I mentioned earlier.

What really confused me about the game is the absolutely abysmal UI/UX and the bizarre design decisions that made it so difficult to parse. I'm not even sure where to start: it seriously felt like every menu and UI layout was designed in the most worst way possible. Why can I not learn the use of certain items by hovering over them, until I first visit a shop and read the tool tips there, and only there? Why are some elements given tooltips while others are completely absent, such as the aforementioned items and path symbols? What the hell is the bone totem menu and how do you use it? Why do I have to click a bush in the corner, and what does it mean? And on and on.

The worst confusion of all was the combat design: without any proper feedback for attacks and the HUD elements spread so far apart, it was difficult to keep track of what was going on, let alone derive any sort of satisfaction from fighting. Take the lizard spitting some acid onto the ground in front of the player, or the deer just stamping its feet in place: did that hit me? Because it didn't look like it physically connected with me, and my sprite didn't react in the slightest, and my eyes were focused at the battle in the center not the health bubbles in the corner so its difficult to notice any change there: for all intents and purposes, its easy to think that the attack missed!

This confusion extends to a lot of other elements: for example, the feedback for landing a normal or critical timed hit on the arrow QTE is the same, so it's never clear whether you're getting the critical or not. Similarly, I had no idea I was actually succeeding in the knife QTE because the confirmation is so delayed from my input, and I have no idea what success does: did I hurt the enemy, or did I just stun them from attacking me, or something else? Who the hell knows, everything is so vague and lifeless and lacks any sort of logical connection that can be made due to the complete absence of visual or audio effects! A few hitsparks here, some player knockback animations there, a few damage numbers appearing above heads, moving health and turn timers near enemies instead of stuffed in the corner, perhaps slowing down the speed: some very simple things could help a lot here!

Even if I were to put this all aside, learn all of the game's rules through trial and error, and just focus on the gameplay...there's not much there either. Combat pretty much boils down to mashing attack, chugging a potion when you're low, and reacting to random QTE prompts: there's no real engaging strategy to the fights that I ever found, like having to prioritize certain enemies first, managing supplies in the long-term, or having to stay alert for powerful attack telegraphs and pre-emptively defend against it or stun them first. To add salt onto the wound, the game seemed incredibly buggy, with QTEs sometimes appearing behind enemies thus making it impossible to read, it losing my save file due to oddly-worded instructions, and with it just looping me back to the start despite my best attempts to progress over and over. Finally, without having any real sense of an ultimate goal or story from the very start to strive for, what's the point?

It was unfortunately a big miss for me, but as said, I think the concept behind this game could be nice, and for your first foray into game design, these kind of things will happen. As you create a game and get used to all of its systems, it can be very confusing to realize just how much you need to teach a player and facilitate their experience since it all seems so obvious in your head. Best of luck in future.

HatiValcoran responds:

Looping you back to the start? ᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷ❓

The save system doesn't load your save unless you *click* load at the very beginning.

It is likely you were confused by the overworld travel, after you reach the campfire you enter a different area, it is not visually distinguished but it becomes obvious as you unlock new runes and new enemies that show up as you progress.

It feels wrong to say it, but most of your complaints touch the things I focused in the least in this project, I learned the most on how to craft an atmosphere, a progression system, different types of encounters, balance, coding, planning, prototyping, developing a concept, and *so* many other things.

A far smaller, more tightly designed game where I focused on a small gameplay loop and clarity would had made the more solid experience you were looking for, but unfortunately it would had taught me much less.

Thank you for your feedback, I'm still learning so any feedback into the parts a player might find the most confusing about my design is very valuable. ᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷ✎❑

You would had made a great playtester. ᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷ❤

[Bleek]

Hey, pretty dang cool game you got here! The game may be bleek, but the design of this is hella sleek (pardon the dumb poetry): everything about this looks and feels great overall, with a very professionally-crafted impression. The good times don't stop there, as the gameplay is also pretty cool with a nice core design of having to avoid ghosts that can only be seen and defeated with your limited flashlight, while the game keeps ramping up the stakes with new obstacles and enemies that push you out of any potential safe zones and encourage fun chaos. It's technically a bit shallow with it being the same progression over and over with no big story to strive for, but nevertheless its a fun, addictive romp.

If I did have one big complaint, is that it was very tricky at times to determine when I would take damage: many times I would get hit by a bullet or ghost that I thought would only graze past me since the perspective makes me think that they, while technically overlapping, were not actually colliding with me. Upon testing, the game does seem to be rather generous with the hitboxes and only counts it if you get hit dead-center in respect to the 2.5D perspective with depth, not reducing everything to a flat 2D perspective, but still, without shadows for bullets and ghosts it was difficult to discern their actual position: just how far are they actually hovering over the ground?

FodderLabs responds:

Thank you for playing the game!

Sounds like the collision boxes from Bleek will make you "shriek". :P (Bring on the silly poetry! >:D)

We are working on adding some additional content, with different mechanics + additional power-ups.

As for a story... We are thinking of keeping this as an arcade style game, but I would love to explore a story with this character and it's world for a sequel/ spin-off! :D

We've made some tweaks to the collision box (now it's the shadow of the player), but maybe we should revisit the collision boxes of the enemies + projectiles.

But currently, the collision for the ghost and projectiles is actually flat, no hovering or any collision on a z-axis for this game. If it overlaps with the player's shadow, she will take damage.

Hope this helps!

And thank you for the kind words and giving some good feedback! :D

Hopefully we can keep up a good streak with Bleek. ;D

[Dinosaurs Attack Collab 2023]

Pretty cool art collab! It is just a slideshow which is pretty plain jane, but it makes up for it with an interesting concept, reactive buttons, fun interactivity in flipping in cards to compare/constrast with the original, and some nice quality-of-life features such as being able to immediately go to the artist's page by clicking on their names. I easily found myself getting addicted at flipping through all the entries: well done!

As a side note, one of the song intro's sounds so similar to the Leviathan raid theme in FFXIV, at least to me if I'm remembering right, maybe it was another raid but it was definitely from FFXIV: wonder if the musician @namosaurus would find that amusing, haha.

namosaurus responds:

Thank you so much for the love, I know nothing about FFXIV but thanks! I'll def gonna check it out!

[The Ghost of the Witch: An Ear-ie Halloween Headphone Adventure]

Wow, quite the interesting adventure game you got here! I unfortunately never experienced one of these so I don't quite get the nostalgia, but as a fan of adventure games like King's Quest, I was down for what this was offering.

I gotta admit, considering I'm a person who needs to put on subtitles for everything and has a severe lack of imagination, I was really worried at whether I'd be able to play this audio journey. And yes, while it was tricky to navigate with a lack of visuals, no text log, and some difficult to parse voices (not so much a problem with the VAs I think, more a me problem with understanding accents), as well as tedious to replay voice lines to get the one bit of information you want, I did nevertheless appreciate the commitment to the bit and greeted the development with good cheer, especially since it was presented with such charm and care.

For the most part I really enjoyed myself with this, but if I did have a substantial complaint, it would be that I was frustrated it had no save/load option: I find it difficult to beat games like this in one go, and with my slow pace, I believe I might take even more time than the estimated 40 minutes. Hoping to beat it at some point, but I'm almost hoping that there is a save/load that I missed in the overly verbose instructions that you could tell me about (or maybe patch in later)!

KittyhawkMontrose responds:

Thanks so much for the thorough and awesome review and for appreciating the commitment to the bit, which, granted, is sometimes a barrier to getting to the adventure. XD

There was a planned password feature (again, in keeping with the bit) but the passwords were overly long. You're right that it's a worthy concession to QOL though. All of the save menu dialog was recorded, so if we do go back, we'll definitely add saves.

Again, thank you so much for giving this so much of your time despite the frustrations. If you do decide to give it another go, there are a few features that you might have missed that help to speed things along! The first is that ALL dialog is interruptible, and there's no need to wait between presses for choices to become available. You can literally beat the game in moments by pressing a "correct" sequence of keys one after another. The second is that most locations have a long and a short description, with the long one always being played when you move from one location to another. By using the '5' key when you move into a location, you can interrupt the long description and hear the short one. Lastly, and this is almost more of an easter egg: try playing the game in a browser with the JavaScript console open. ;D

Again thanks so much for meeting this little novelty on its on terms. Your thoughts are always helpful!

[Dude - The Deck Swabber]

Hey, pretty neat game! Feels like a legit bootleg NES game that you'd see from some company like Color Dreams or Wisdom Tree. For the most part the game feels pretty well-constructed and delivers some decent sokoban-style puzzles. I was impressed at how some levels intuitively taught certain rules from their layouts, like how sponges work in that they can stop you from sliding (but be careful of the fact that you still push it a tile in doing so).

Now, as much as I liked it, you'll notice that I compared it to bootleg games instead of proper games you'd get from Konami or something (boy, times have changed huh). And that's because it is a bit lacking in some regards:

For one, it is quite a drab game due to a lack of juice. I was disappointed that certain actions like using a sponge on a oil spill just had the sprites immediately disappear: would've much preferred if it produced a satisfying soap bubble explosion sprite and a pop/wiping sound effect. Similarly, it'd be cool if when you finish the objectives of a level, the bucket sparkles or glows in a pleasant way, similar to when you collect everything in a game like Solomon's Key. Little things like that would help to liven up the game considerably.

Another aspect that bothered me slightly was the pace and difficulty curve of the game: it just didn't feel like it was delivering a solid and addictive engagement due to the difficulty suddenly dipping back down at times, lots of puzzles having too much wiggle room, and the game not introducing enough new mechanics or twists. I imagine it eventually gets better, but I found myself getting a bit tired around level 10 or so due to the slow pace.

It's still a nice game, but if I were to be brutally honest, I'd say it is merely nice, instead of being something great or memorable. Not a crime or anything, but it did make me wish for more!

RichardOz responds:

I thank you very much! Regarding the rest, I totally understand the examples you gave and what you said and I personally agree with it in part, I don't agree with it fully because there are two factors about it, the first factor is that the game is a game for NES and that alone means really optimizing everything to the maximum to have a good product, visual effects, sounds and all, the second factor is that although you can do something more elaborate even for NES I couldn't do it because basically I am not a programmer but a cartoonist and animator, I used a game engine which made the development of the game even more limiting, I love to work on the details when I make something so believe me when I say that I did everything I could to be able to take advantage of the game engine to the maximum, you can try the engine yourself.

Regarding the difficulty of the game it was intentional that you had to have easier and harder rooms to detach yourself from the world and experience 30 minutes of carefree play as Dude, he doesn't care if something in a room is too dirty or not too dirty, while whistling he cleans up and is carefree, this let's say was the main purpose, to play and relax without having to think too much, so well-balanced difficulty without rage or anything like that, there is to consider that the game doesn't even have a save so you would have to complete everything in one run and so increasing the difficulty would have stressed the player, which I was trying to avoid
I will play difficult games, but that's not it.

While about the fact that I bored you already at room 10 I am sorry, I will work and study even more to improve my next games, you can already have a look at my portfolio, follow me on twitter or join the discord to stay updated on the next news about Dude - The Deck Swabber and other games

"merely nice" is not so bad for a small game of this scale! I thank you again!

[Cursed Dreams]

I really liked the concept behind this game: going into the dreams of each family member who has their own themed minigame is promising for helping to keep things fresh and interesting with a lot of variety. And I did like that walking around the house wasn't just a vehicle to get to the family members: there were a lot of interesting interactables with fun flavor text for people who want to explore!

But at the end of the day, all of the minigames felt incredibly simplistic, bland, and one-note: sure, there were a lot of them, but it was a real quantity over quality situation where none of them were particularly fun or deep, all of them feeling like they put the bare minimum effort in design. Some of them at least kept things short to match their mechanical depth, but then you had games like the sister's top-down shooter which overstayed its welcome: seeing that I had to kill 100 dolls made me practically quit right then and there. If I were to sum it up, this felt like a clone of Action 52: more games doesn't always equal more fun!

Pitigamedev responds:

Thank you for the detailed feedback as always. I hope one day I will make a game you will 100% enjoy.

[Parking Ticket Mayhem]

Hah, quite the amusing game! I've always thought that if I were rich, I'd love to have a room filled with breakable objects and weapons where I could de-stress, so the idea of creating a rage game is right up my alley. And considering we're on Newgrounds, this feels like a close brother to the Assassin games where you can really get out what's grinding your gears.

At the same time, however, the game was a bit less satisfying than I hoped. While it was amusing to smash cars and even discover that I could smash buildings and shoot as well, the amusement was short-lived as it soon became quite monotonous due to the lackluster feedback and rather shallow world that doesn't allow for much creativity. Even more disappointing was that, after taking the time to smash everything, the only reward afterwards were just more of the same cars falling from the sky to smash once again, instead of something new or game-changing.

I understand this game likely didn't have lofty ambitions or anything and I don't mean to be down on it, but it's a great concept and I would've loved if this game just had more to make the act of smashing more satisfying. More detailed damage modeling, hit-freeze and knockback and screenshake, more explosive effects, charge attacks that absolutely blow shit away to a ridiculous degree, more fun toys to wreak house with: just take everything to eleven, like a modded version of Teardown or Saints Row!

Anyway, hope you're feeling better now that you got it out, haha.

Raccoon-Formality responds:

hey, yeah, i made a comment on your youtube video but i'll just respond here also.

thank you for playing, i really appreciate that and the feedback. I made this game in a week right after finishing another project so yeah it's not exactly my magnum opus.

i am feeling better but i do still have a lot of rage for a continuation at some point. i want to do like a directors cut and release it on steam or something, idk, i'm really just going with the flow.

also, i'm quite new to newgrounds lol, I usually just post my games on itch.io but this one was doing very well on itch so i thought i'd try some other platforms as well. So yeah, i am not very well versed in the LORE of newgrounds lol.

anyways, thank you, have a nice day

[Fall from Space]

Hmmm, this is quite the interesting Fallout/Zelda 2 adventure you got here!

Was definitely quite impressed with it in a lot of respects, obviously starting out strong with the very stylish and cinematic (albeit a bit over-indulgent) opening that plays when you start. But the game itself also had such a huge scale and variety to it: side-scrolling action sequences alongside top-down exploration, so many people to talk to and objects to examine with loads of flavorful text, a huge world map with all sorts of locations and random encounters, tons of secrets hidden around, lots of quests and unlockables...it goes on and on! Clearly, a lot of effort and love has been put into crafting a huge adventure here!

Having said that, though, the game also felt incredibly awkward, stuttery and laggy to play at times. Combat was particularly bad feeling with no satisfying and intuitive feedback to it: just made me never feel like I was connecting with my blows, and I was constantly getting surprised when I got hit despite being so far away or giving my best efforts to dodge the telegraphed attacks. While combat was the worst, the awkwardness also extended to other elements, like the pause menu taking so long to come up after a press, dropped inputs, or weird collision detection and such. I understand these might be limitations of the engine, and while you have my sympathies, it doesn't stop it from feeling bad nonetheless.

Apart from that, there were some other minor complaints, like how tricky it can be to keep track of quests: it seems like the log only tracks your main quest, but none of the other quests like tracking down the child. Yes, if you go back to the quest giver, they'll likely tell you something about what your current setup is, but still, that's so inconvenient and they didn't always provide all of the details you needed.

I dunno, I'm a bit mixed on this one. Like I said, I really appreciate this huge world you've built with so many characters and quests and such, but as much as I wanted to keep going, I couldn't get over how sluggish and bad the combat and general movement felt: it just sapped my motivation. Almost felt like the game would be much better if it scrapped combat and just stuck to exploring: perhaps that might better fit the limitations of the engine, assuming there is no better way.

JoelJGames responds:

Hi, thanks a lot for taking the time to leave so much feedback. It's really useful.

Lag and sluggishness I'll have to put down to perhaps taxing the Gameboy hardware a bit *too* hard, it's built to run on the 1989 OG Gameboy so I'm limited to how fast it can run in general and in New Grounds it's the ROM running in a Gameboy emulator (so replicates how it would be). It'd (hopefully) be more impressive running on the original device, but I'd still like it to be enjoyable in the browser!

Saying that, I'm going to make a note to look at how I can improve the responsiveness of the combat as while not modern console comparable, I'd like it still to be fun! The impacts in particular, I'd like them to feel more meaningful.

The pause menu has a wait before it, it was to work around a bug if someone pressed it straight away so I'll make a note to see if there's a better solution than that so it doesn't suffer on every press.

More detail in the log I agree with this too, I'll try and get some more guidance in there for the missing child quest!

Thanks again for the feedback

[THREAT != CONTAINED]

Not too shabby execution of your classic "avoid the stalker while collecting macguffins" horror game! It's not exactly the most original thing, but nevertheless I found it to be a decent short and sweet spooky adventure: of note is that I found the presentation and graphics to be quite cool, especially all of the various caged monsters (almost made me feel like I was viewing an art collab) and I appreciated that you didn't utilize ear-shattering jump scares! I also liked the small touch of being able to race by the guy at the start to interrupt him: always cool to see a skip mechanic be modeled in-universe!

If I was to have any complaints, it would primarily be that I could barely understand a single word that anybody said: would really help if you had some subtitles, or at the very least reduced the distortion that's present in everyone's dialogue. And in regards to skipping the dialogue at the start: as I said, its cute that you can do that, but it also might've been better if it just starts you off in the power room on subsequent plays?

Frosty responds:

Thanks for the reviews as always!!

[Greedy Goblins]

Not too shabby for a little retro-style arcade game! Overall found it quite the charming experience and loved the little touches it had, like the funny cutscenes between levels that reminded me of Pacman with its intermissions. It starts out a bit slow and was feeling quite repetitive and unchallenging, but later on the levels did start to get more creative and provide new obstacles and layouts to keep things interesting.

The main complaints I have against the game:

*There is this really annoying friction that is apparent when you run against the walls that can slow you down or stop you in your tracks: feels very unnecessary and gets in the way constantly.

*There would be plenty of times that I would plant a bomb next to an archer, only for it to immediately explode and kill us both: I understand that they can set them off, but I swear I was leaving even of a space between us and it just felt dumb.

*As stated before, the levels can be a bit silly in how unchallenging and relaxed they are at times: most of the goblins and obstacles and collectables just felt like window dressing at times, not actually providing any sort of interesting risk/reward or strategy to take care of them. Yes, the bombs do provide a bit of excitement with how they can hurt you just as much as they can hurt the enemy, but usually it wasn't that much to keep me interested. I dunno, I know I'm being vague, but it just felt like it was lacking some core appeal or mechanic.

*It felt like I was constantly holding the run button to the point where I feel like the default speed should just be running and the button can be removed so I can relax, or perhaps invert the buttons purpose to become the walk button instead since it is needed much more rarely (if at all).

KageKMB responds:

Glad you liked it! If I'm not mistaken, this is the highest you've rated one of our games.

Response to the complaints:

-Wall issue should be fixed, (changed movement from move_and_slide() to move_and_collide() ). Please tell me if it's better.

-On adjusting the bomb next to archer issue, unlike the walking it'd require significant adjustments to the backed of the game. Which in turn requires a lot of testing to make sure it doesn't break the game. I'm not going to rule out, but it won't be adjusted within this week lol. Hopefully resizing the hit-box does the trick.

-A trend with your feedback on CubePunk's titles tends to be related towards the complexity/difficulty being a bit low; Keep in mind the majority of people who play browser games skew more casual - and majority of feedback praises the rate the challenge increases difficulty level (with some saying the peak challenge was even too much). Future games will try to add "challenge" or "expert" game modes; made for the hardcore players; so that'll hopefully fix that issue. In the case of Greedy Goblins - an iterative sequel with a harder difficulty cap is more likely than an added game mode.

- If I ever updated it to reversing the walk/run toggle - it'd be an option in the settings and not the default. Going against the muscle memory/convention that's been a thing since SMB1; it'd frustrate the majority of players.