Looking at the playtime of the users reviewing the game positive, i found out the game doesnt give really much more than the 0.5 hours of playtime they have. After that you have seen everything in the game and also already reached the maximum depth of the gameplay and its just a matter of sticking to it until you reached the centre of your galaxy, which isnt that hard anyway.
There are no difficulty levels, the mechanics are too simple and lack any depth, its just rince and repeat, "powerups" is a nice word that sounds interesting, yet its absolutely boring in this game as "powerups" only give your robots stats boosts (like +5% vision).
Besides that there are even some problems. Although it is quite hollow and lacks depth, the depth it has or the interesting part of the game is even undermined by some flaws.
For example: You need to gather peaches to power up your generator, the energy level is constantly dropping, so you need a continued income of peaches all the time, otherwise you lose and have to start completely from the beginning with everything lost.
Because of that, you try to get enough robots to gather peaches to keep your energy high.
Now you want to explore the tiny maps you play on, to find these so called upgrades.
You have no clue whatsoever where they might be. And even finding them needs you to first build up a chain of robots and a gatherer to obtain the upgrade. Why is that? Oh yes, because robots cant survive without a connection to your ship, as they lose energy and die. Which means that exploring the map is punished by the game in a weird way (you are held back to do so).
So even if you might manage to find an upgrade (powerup) on the map with a robot (and then him dying with doing that) you might still not get it.
Why? Because while you do that, you were all the time gathering peaches to keep your energy up, remember?
So powering your generator to the maximum triggers the win condition and starts a 30 second timer. When that timer reaches 0 the level will be ended automatically. It turns out this way, that you power up your ship while searching a map for powerups, that until you found them you cant build a connection fast enough and obtain these powerups because at the point you do the level is "won".
Leaving you without any choice or option or benefit of winning the mission.
I thought at the beginning, that i will get a powerup with winning a mission. Thats not the case, winning the mission only means you can choose the next level.
This problem can be worked around (with doing missions with specific "objectives (they are uninspired), so you can decide when to finish), but it doesnt get rid of a problem that still remains there and thats the lack of depth and having every aspect in the game even limit the "depth" that might be there. You will play a game of "wait until your ship spawns a robot worker, build a line, wait for the next robot to be spawned, command him to gather peaches, wait for the next one.....(repeating that over and over), searching for stuff or doing the mission objective (they are boring, uninspired and non existant anyway), get off the planet, repeat on next planet".
Those are all bad design choices. You can choose to launch your ship manually anyway, so why put in a 30 second timer that punishes you for being good at it? And dont start with "you have to find the optimal way to not power up your energy bar too much so you can stay on the map longer". Thats BS and you know it.
Sadly its utterly boring. And the positive reviews here cant get rid of the problems the game has and the playtime shows that they couldnt be entertained for longer anyway. I say you might get about an hour, maybe even two out of it when you are really into this "playstyle".
Otherwise i recommend to spare the 4€ the game costs and buy something more worthwhile. Simplicity is a good thing in games, but only when this simplicity still offers depth.
This game doesnt.
Theres nothing for you to find out, nothing that will add to the basic gameplay loop, no additions, no twists, no tactic, no strategy, no specifications, not more mechanics coming on top of this basic mechanic of gathering.
There could be, as they could have implemented different robot types to spice it up a bit.
Having a robot with a larger energy field, having a robot gathering faster, having a robot creating a shield around him to protect other robots, having a robot that spawns new robots and so on. There are so many possibilities with only using your fantasy 2 minutes, but its not there.
Sadly, as the artstyle is nice.
Oh and yeah, theres only one tune (the one out of the trailer) being played over and over in a loop. (its annoying and the devs know it, probably thats why they inserted an option to mute the game entirely with one button).
