Recent reviews by Evil Mr Henry

To be clear, this is a mobile game. The UI and gameplay is designed for a mobile experience. What this means in practice is that my mouse hand hurts, because you can't just group up a bunch of units, but have to repeatedly send half the units to the enemy, and you really need to send all of them to get anywhere. The gameplay is also quite grindy. You'll need to play multiple levels to get a +1% upgrade to a single stat, which doesn't do enough to be noticeable. The game is also horrifically overtuned. This mostly comes down to the crystal towers, which can annihilate entire armies, and are lovingly placed in every level to take out your armies while being useless to you once you take them over. While there's a small amount of strategy, restricting movement to the roads means there's almost always a single path to follow, guarded by a crystal tower, (sometimes two) and the strategy is to replay the single level that gives the most gold/hour until you get enough +1% upgrades to survive. Then the next level is more difficult. Some levels have multiple roads you can follow. All but one of them are wrong.

The game might actually be semi-enjoyable if they tripled the gold rewards; it's designed for you to play a bunch of levels because the mobile version has ads between levels. On the Steam version it's just making the game much more annoying than it needs to be.

This game is tagged as both a Metroidvania and a Souls-like. These two genres are in conflict. In a Metroidvania, the general idea is that by scouring the map, you will become more powerful. But in a Souls-like, the power curve is very flat. A weapon you find at the end of the game might be a little more powerful than your starting weapon, but not by enough to matter. You can level up, but that's mostly a way for new players to level up wrong. This game resolves this conflict by being a Souls-like first and foremost. If you're looking for a metroidvania game, look elsewhere. You'll go exploring, and find a +3 weapon you can't use, or boots that don't help you at all.

I might have been willing to endure the Souls-like gameplay, but it also has the crushing difficulty of the genre, and without any difficulty levels or accessibility options. Starting out it wasn't too bad, but 12 hours in and I'm simply not having fun.

I played using a controller, which I would highly recommend.

Is the game any good? I don't know. I can't play with this level of head bob, and there's no option to turn it off. I'm going to play something that doesn't make me feel physically ill.

My experience: I got to the first real boss at level 10. I typed in a bunch of words, none of which did real damage, then it killed me in one hit. I went back to earlier levels, ground out some gold, and got some upgrades. I came back the next day to get some extra gold from the daily reward and got another upgrade. I returned to the boss, typed in a bunch of words, none of which did real damage, then it killed me in one hit.

Like, sure, there are some issues with being stuck with a bad letter selection through random chance and what not, but worst case you just retry the level. The base of the game is grinding for upgrades, and the grinding doesn't feel good. There's a limited amount of bonus gold from beating levels, and after that you're fighting five monsters at a time for a handful of gold. Think Diablo if you had to return to town every 30 seconds. It keeps you from getting into a rhythm. If there was an infinite mode, where you could just sit down for a five-minute session and fight a bunch of monsters in a row, the game would be significantly improved. As it is, even if the core gameplay sounds good, there's just not enough of it.

What the game description and other reviews don't mention is that the game's difficulty is set to "♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥". (No, there's no difficulty levels.) Many enemies will do a quarter of your health on hit even if you've been keeping up on upgrades, avoiding damage is difficult, healing is sparse, and let's not talk about the bosses. When the description says "Challenging boss fights", that's a warning sign.

Aside from that, the game just feels...generic. If it had something going for it, I could be persuaded to grit my teeth and power through it, but there's nothing here that makes me want to keep playing. If the difficulty had been toned down somewhat, I think I'd be bored instead of frustrated, but I still wouldn't be enjoying myself.

Very quick review because I haven't spent much time with it, but it's good. It is complex, and reading the guide is recommended, though. I haven't seen any in-game purchases, so that's good.

Takes about a week to hit your first reset, and there's no actual depth until that point. (Possibly after. I got bored before then.) Gameplay for most of that time is basically open the game, buy more ants, then close it for a few hours. Note that the game implies that you can reset after collection a certain number of upgrades. This is only step one. Step 2 is to collect fuel, which comes from using abilities. Abilities recharge very slowly, and only provide a couple percent of the fuel you need.

The game is overly monetized. It's possible, although annoying, to get to planet 50 without paying money, but planet 60 isn't really feasible. Specifically, dark matter (the game's premium currency) drops from the following sources:
* Achievements (not renewable)
* Reaching a new planet (not renewable)
* Special asteroids (rare, requires you to manually click on them, only drops a single dark matter each)
* Daily login bonus.
So, once you've used up the readily available dark matter sources, you're stuck with the daily login bonus. This drops 20-25 dark matter each day.

Aside from some noob traps, you spend dark matter on aliens. The useful aliens cost 500 dark matter, so you can get one about every 3 real-time weeks once you get past the early game. (I suggest the ones that make all parts either cheaper or faster.) However, even that doesn't help as much as you might think, as costs/distances appear to increase exponentially. Halving costs won't help when the next milestone is 300 times as expensive as the previous one.

That leaves you with the basic gameplay. You can click on your ship, but the effect becomes negligible rapidly. You can click on asteroids, but they stop giving useful amounts of gold after a while. You can watch for black holes, but they're only really useful if you can then fire off all your skills, so you can only do this once every 10-30 minutes. Even then it's not great. You can watch for special asteroids, but they don't give a useful amount of dark matter.

So, somewhere between planet 40 and 50, this turns into a game where you log in once a day, collect your bonus, then leave. It feels possible to bypass this grind with money, but I think reaching planet 60 within a year would require spending around $100. (Bit of a wild guess, but I'm not about to spend money on this.)

(There are also some minor issues with the game. For example, they left achievements in place for watching ads and connecting to social media, neither of which appears to actually be possible in the Steam version.)

I actually like DOS platform games, and I gave up on this after a few minutes.
1) The level design is unfair. There were multiple times just within the first level where you needed to fall off a cliff where you can't see the bottom to progress, but there were enemies at the bottom. As a bonus, long falls will daze you.
2) Your life ticks down over time rather rapidly; this will be a significant source of (unavoidable) damage.
3) The hit detection is poor.
4) There's very little new or interesting here to compensate for these problems.
There are better games out there.

The visuals are striking, but they create some serious gameplay issues:
* It's difficult to read the environment. I've died from walking in front of enemies I didn't even know were enemies. I've had other deaths from not being able to tell which elements can be shot through, or other mistakes from misinterpreting the environment. I think it's possible to have a primarily colorless game, but a lot of time needs to be spent on making sure the player can actually read the environment correctly, and this game doesn't quite hit that level. The small levels and quick restarts help mitigate the issue, but it's still an issue.
* Most enemies are wearing sombreros, so you can't easily tell which way they're looking. This is important information when they can go from seeing you to shooting you dead nearly instantly.
* There's little feedback in general. I think the little circles within circles are ammo pickups, but it doesn't say what weapon they're for.
* The sound design sounds weirdly muffled. I have the sound turned up as loud as it can go, and the gunshots are barely pops. In the gameplay video, they're cracks.
* As a side note, the description talks about stealth a bit. This is not a stealth game. There are some levels where stealth works, but others where gunfights are unavoidable. (This isn't really a negative, just a note.)
* Would it kill them to have at least one sympathetic character who survives longer than a single conversation?