Berserk B.I.T.S

TLDR:/ Game breaking bugs literally keep the game from even launching most of the time. I might give this a neutral recommendation mostly just based on aesthetics as a neat little toy, But it kind of fails at that because it takes too much screen space and fails at being an idle game because doesn't have good balance of idle vs active play. Ugg.. I SO WANTED to like this, it just looks so good that I ignored the bad reviews. But the look and the Megaman.EXE nostalgia is all this has going for it. There are many problems with this but the biggest reason I can't recommend it at all is simply that the game randomly won't even start like 90% of the time. It's actually unplayable. And looking at the forum it's been a problem since the game released almost a year ago so I don't expect the dev to fix it at this point as they clearly just have no idea how to code a functional program. But if you do manage to complete the summoning ritual and get it to launch you are met with a disappointing hodgepodge of ideas. It's actually impressive how it manages to get things wrong that seem like they couldn't happen at the same time and yet they do. I'll start here with a brief description of the gameplay. Basically you just send your little character out to auto battle through a level to collect resources and eggs to upgrade your farm. The farm has critters you hatch from the eggs that you need to feed to get attack cards for you character, and robot you need to shake for coins and healing.(feeding and shaking to mostly automated). The only form of choice or input you have is to choose which critters to keep in your limited farm slots. Basically building a deck of attacks for the auto battling. Now to the problems. The most glaring issue is the interface. It simply fails at being a desktop pet because it requires multiple large windows that can't live on your screen beside other programs. (I would really expect it all to be in a nice little Tamagatchi capsule. ) And yet despite it taking up so much screen space, all the buttons and things you need to interact with feel tiny even at the largest size. Your inventory,farm, and pokedex all are fit into an awful horizontal scroll that you can't see enough of at once and is a pain to navigate. Especially the pokedex because you have to click through it one entry at a time. And it doesn't even remember the size or arrangement of windows, so you need to reset it to how you like every time you start the game.(If you even CAN start the game again) Next we come to the automation. The big problem here is feeding your farm. Although it only take about an hour of play to earn the resources to get the auto feeder, it's really annoying have to check in every couple minutes to feed your critters. But then after it just becomes almost trivial and pointless that it seems like it should never have existed in the first place. But even then it still managed to be annoying because the way you get food is to buy it at the shop. Again a trivial task made horrible by you need to buy the food ONE....AT...A...TIME!!!!! forcing you to waste time on a system that is nothing but uninteresting pointless tedium.(There do appear to be upgrades to make food automatically but I couldn't stand playing long enough to grind for them) The needing to shake the bots for coins in almost as bad. The game at least starts you with an auto shaker that's good for a 300 shakes and that's more then enough time to earn the permanent shaker but yet again it just makes it so pointless that it being in the game at all is just an annoying distraction. Even the auto battling has a big pointless annoying thing which is that you can't let it run endlessly. You can set it to loop an area only an arbitrary 67 times??? And you need to either click it to increment each number or type it in. Why can't you just click the loop button and let it go? Just sheer incompetency on the devs. And while auto battling you are often given a choice to mine more resources or battle more so if you don't babysit it you get less stuff. again failing to be an idle game, but also being too uninteresting to want to play actively. The progression is just plain slow and boing. You character levels up but only gains more health and damage. And they gain it S..L..O..W. It doesn't even feel like it makes a difference. You unlock new critters to farm for attacks randomly from eggs but I was already getting multiples of the same ones even in my small amount of playtime that would just go into storage and be useless. So that part of the game is the most interesting and it's still pretty lackluster. You also collect resources to get more automation at a painfully slow rate. Like 1 every 10 minutes and it take 10 to buy one thing that's not even interesting. There are quest to do for more resources and eggs but every one I saw was just fighting in an area without healing. Snooze fest.