How To Grow a Black Hole

AI allegations aside - and I really do believe this was vibe coded, there are just too many signs pointing to it - the game is really just not that enjoyable once you realize the loop. Upgrades don't have clear meanings, and often appear to harm you rather than help you progress. Last patch completely gutted performance for myself and others as well, so the current state of the game is basically unplayable for me. I posted in the forums and was essentially ignored. The Discord is full of the dev and his friends posting memes and clowning on anyone who has any real feedback for the game. Hate to say it, but this isn't even worth $4 in the current state. Maybe the dev and Claude can turn this thing around, but I doubt it.

At $4, it's really hard to muster hate for this game. It has AI, but I don't care. Allegedly, It has a despondent development team on Discord which again I don't care, but in the end it commits a bigger crime altogether. It's boring. To build a large black hole You need to balance upgrades and pressure. there are a ton of upgrades available and I would say half of them are either unhelpful or outright detrimental to that goal. Whats more, the upgrades that do seem to be helpful don't have any meaningful effect on black hole growth, they just add more bars to upgrade and more numbers to shoot up. I get that this genre of game is built around that principle but when I play other games like this you see more troops, more buildings, more colors, more visual representation you're getting stronger. Here, it's just the jpeg of the black hole taking up more of your screen. It's just not a fun game and even at $4 I can't recommend it.

As other reviews have stated the game runs like crap. First 5 minutes in the game and I thought something was wrong when the game started to freeze up. Save your money and buy something else.

Vibe coded, progression and upgrades make no sense, curvature upgrades are dissapointing. Some upgrades are actually downgrades, disk pressure scaling and feed source scaling don't add up (example feed sources unlock super cheap but enabling them will instantly end your run, meanwhile the auto upgrade will buy them and have them enabled, which makes auto-buy useless). Curvature upgrades hit a wall when they start costing millions, at which point theres is no longer any progression. Force collapse mechanic is not fun: You can have a run last hours/days trying to grow the black hole, and one click too many (either new feed source or mass) cand instantly ruin your run and force a restart. Meanwhile you have upgrades that scale with disk pressure which means if you want to maximise progression you have to be on the edge of your run ending as much ass possible, where failure costs you everything. Disk throughput tends to be like 3-4x what your max disk pressure can be, which makes balancing this hell (eg 30M throughput with 6M max storage). This is by far the most obnoxious game mechanic. It feels like the dev hasn't really played his own game All in all not good

Not well optimized Idle Game AND not well researched (Jupiter Orbits at ~5 AU i'm at 10AU still "Earth Orbit" size not "Jupiter Orbit"). For the fastest growth you want to use the "tidal shear" upgrade that boost income depening on the "compression"(range between "able to reset" to "forced reset"). Which early on is a bit of a dance of understanding what upgrades do and micromanaging inputs. With usually about 1-3 minutes of time to correct, if it starts filling. i say early here because those minutes quickly become 0.01 seconds. Inputs are lumpy, you could get unlucky and get 3 units in 1 second because of "orbits" even when the feed is 1/s. And the Forced limit is growing WAY to slowly, and the Upgrades for that have way too high escalating cost. I currently have a forced reset at ~65mil with inputs of 160mil/s my bar jumps binary from ~60% to 0% with most of the time being at ~0 because of the lumpy feed, WHO tested late/mid game balancing?! there should be at least 2 additional zeros on the forced limit. As someone from the Programming field, this game with what it does, to what it uses (i.E. Optimization) feels vibe-coded, so i suspect the creator is either someone fresh out of school or "vibe-coded" through AI. The Research system feels EMPTY, which only reinforces the vibecoding suspiction. the UI design fells untested, MAX buy doesnt show how many upgrades would be bougth, but the cost adapts so it does calculate. Reseach Tree is DEAD Space with some Nodes in it. [h1]THIS Game is not worth 4€[/h1], i would believe this to be a University Entrance Project of a Programming Student (and thats pushing it, a basic verison of this could be a 3h test), from what i've seen and the potential exploits i have seen this feels like a [h1]MONEYGRAB.[/h1] Not a passion project by somebody unfamiliar with the field.

I desire to feed my boy, my poor lad is so hungry. He must consume. CONSUME MY SON! CONSUME the very COSMOS!

i have to say : it did not really click. The game throws a lot of information at you right at the start, and i had a hard time to understand "what it wants from me". The UI is kind of clean, but there is too much information there for someone starting the game. Usually with these type of games, you get either hooked very fast, or not at all. Unfortunatly i am second. So i can´r really recommend it. from my point of view PS : regarding the strange AI hate reviews : I dont get the problem? EVERY developer ( even tripple AAA Studius) is using AI in some form, why wouldn´´t they ? it is a great tool that takes away workload, and allows SoloDevs or very Small Teams to do stuff besides their full time job. I really can not see how this makes a game worse, just because AI was used. Neither is not using AI making a good game... And especially i can not understand why ANYONE would "stalk" a developers postings or whatever somewhere in the net to "prove AI was used"... do you not have better things to do in your life? :D

its peak, i hold click, black hole get bigger, i reset and it get even bigger

Quote from game description: [b]Compete globally or against your friends to achieve the biggest black hole. Maybe you'll be #1.[/b] Forget about it, when u spend a whole afternoon playing this game the server says F your run and u won't compete for the leadboards. I'll perfect the game and never touch it again.

Upgrade interactions are inconsitent and sloppy. After the last patch, the discounts you get for upgrading different black hole upgrades stopped working and still hasn't been fixed. My last run I was 28 light years in diameter and sitting at around 50-200% disc pressure, when I decided to remove a few levels out of compression to be safe before upgrading feed levels. Even though my limit before forced collapse was close to 500% disk pressure, immediately after removing a few levels (which should decrease pressure) my pressure jumped up to over 500% and the blackhole collapsed, ruining my run. Don't waste your money on this trash.