- Highly fun, addictive, great value.
- Short campaign, engaging endless mode.
- Relaxing, relatively easy gameplay.
- Incremental roguelite asteroid shooter.
- Poor UI, controls, visual feedback.
- Unbalanced progression and upgrades.
Emotions
Players felt satisfied due to the game providing excellent value for its price, consistently meeting or exceeding expectations regarding quality, pacing, and gameplay length. Key elements like the responsive controls, addictive upgrade loop, and well-designed progression system contributed to a deeply enjoyable and rewarding experience.
Reviewers experienced joy primarily from the game's overall fun and addictive nature, often described as an enjoyable old-school arcade experience. The engaging music, fluid gameplay, impactful upgrades, and smooth, bug-free performance significantly contributed to this positive emotion.
Enjoyment stemmed from the game's compelling and entertaining core gameplay loop, which players found hard to stop playing. The fun incremental space shooter experience, combined with satisfying mechanics like bomb chain reactions and varied enemies, created a highly engaging and often relaxing, yet sometimes intense, experience.
Frustration arose from various issues including a slow start to the game, unbalanced or lacking upgrades, and technical problems like crashes and stuttering. Poor control schemes, unreadable skill descriptions, difficulty seeing the cursor, and a perceived design to extract more money also contributed to negative feelings.
Players felt disappointment due to the game's short length, perceived lack of content and variety in upgrades, and a general feeling of mediocrity or lack of polish. Issues such as an unpolished UI, inconsistent art style, missing audio cues, and confusing mechanics led to the game not meeting expectations for its price point.
Verdict
Mostly positive
Summary
Positive 91% · Negative 9%. Score: 9 / 100
Positives:
- Players overwhelmingly find the game fun, addictive, and offering excellent replayability. Many highlight its exceptional value, noting it delivers far beyond its modest price point and provides a satisfying 'just one more go' experience with effective gameplay loops and a relaxing yet engaging feel. The game's blend of incremental and roguelite progression contributes significantly to its appeal, becoming particularly fun after an initial slow start.
- The game's aesthetic is well-received, with players loving the wonderful and charming pixel art. Both the music and sound effects are highlighted as fitting, engaging, satisfying, and contributing positively to the overall experience.
- Players appreciate the developer's passion, responsiveness, and continuous effort in fixing issues and improving the game. The full release is seen as realizing the demo's potential, with many significant updates and changes implemented since, exceeding player expectations.
- The inclusion of the mothership mechanic is highlighted as a great addition, providing a sense of safety while also adding a strategic layer. Manipulating enemy movement to protect the mothership introduces challenging and fun maneuvering.
- The endless mode is noted for being very challenging, particularly with intense meteorite encounters. This mode provides a significant test of skill for players seeking a tougher experience.
Negatives:
- Players experience issues with terrible controls, including a hard-to-see cursor that needs customization options. Important information like player health or pickup summaries is not easily visible, and critical feedback such as damage indicators (sound/visual) is missing. The UI overall lacks polish, with elements like skill explanations going off-screen and some mechanics remaining unexplained.
- Players report that many upgrades are either weak, unsatisfying, or create significant balance issues, making progression feel off. Some feel upgrades are designed to waste time, or that the economic 'inflation' doesn't scale well. The optimal gameplay comfort is only achieved very late, highlighting pacing issues.
- The 'endless mode' is criticized for being poorly balanced and redundant, lacking new upgrades or meaningful objectives to incentivize continued play. Players wish for more substantial content updates beyond this mode, as it fails to provide long-term engagement.
- Some players reported critical issues such as game crashes and initial stuttering, alongside shortcomings with the saving mechanism. These technical problems can disrupt gameplay and negatively impact the player experience.
- The Ukrainian localization is reported to be of very low quality, akin to a machine translation, which significantly impacts the experience and understanding for native speakers of that language.
Gameplay:
- Players consistently report that the main game can be completed in 2-3 hours, often in a single play session, by clearing its 15 waves. An endless mode unlocks after completion, providing significant replayability and extended engagement.
- The game is generally perceived as relatively easy, especially when played strategically, contributing to its appeal as a relaxing experience. Many players consider it a 'chill out' game suitable for casual play after work.
- The game is characterized as an incremental roguelite asteroid shooter, where players blast objects, gather resources, and manage survival elements like oxygen and HP while defending a mothership. Permanent upgrades are a central mechanic facilitating progression across runs.
- The game features a permanent, Rogue Legacy-like skill tree where collected coins are spent to unlock upgrades, making subsequent runs stronger and faster. While effective for progression, some players find the overall upgrade experience functional rather than exhilarating, and noted that some skill descriptions are unreadable.
- Oxygen management is highlighted as an important early-game mechanic, often requiring consistent upgrades to avoid premature deaths. However, after approximately 30 minutes of play, oxygen typically ceases to be a significant concern.
Performance:
- Players appreciate the game's accessibility, noting its minimal PC requirements and small installation size. This allows it to run smoothly even on older or less powerful 'potato' computers.
- Some players encountered isolated technical problems, specifically reporting a couple of game crashes and an initial stuttering issue. These appear to be occasional rather than persistent widespread problems.
- Most players experienced a highly stable game, reporting flawless operation with no significant bugs, glitches, or lag. Any issues encountered were described as minimalistic and infrequent.
Recommendations:
- Players generally recommend this game, finding it worth the money and time. While some believe it is worth its full price, others specifically suggest it is a solid purchase when bought on sale or at a lower price point. The available prologue is highlighted as a good way to experience the gameplay before purchase.
Miscellaneous:
- Reviewers note that most existing criticisms are considered 'nitpicks,' and small design features are currently missing but are planned for future updates without impacting core gameplay. Additionally, the game has broad appeal across all ages, from kids to adults, indicating an accessible and generally positive experience.
- There's a clear demand for increased gameplay variety and challenge. Specific requests include more diverse ship types with unique perks, a deeper branching upgrade system, more challenging boss encounters, and additional waves to extend replayability.
