AVOID THIS GAME LIKE THE PLAGUE!
Now that I have your attention, what can I say about Karma? Well, for starters, that despite being the title of this game, it seems to have nothing to do with the game besides being a percentage value on your screen that doesn't appear to affect the game in any way.
The 'plot' itself, if you can define it as that, is so loosely-defined that it's not even funny. Sure, it's fairly obvious that you're a guy who works with computers and is trying to get by in a reasonably difficult life. There's supposedly some 'mystery' to be unraveled, but it unravels by unlocking a skill tree path. Even then, it plays out as a narrative, with basically just white text on a black background. On top of that, it doesn't even make sense! The grammar in this game is outright awful. For example, "You have done a hacking today, stay low to keep off attentions." The 'plot' simply has lines like "Trying to disconnect the array" that don't mean anything, and have no relation to the other lines the plot throws at you. I know less about the plot after playing the game than I did before starting!
I gave up the game after my character randomly committed suicide and I got a game over in the process. I had lots of money, reasonable karma, minimal stress, and a tonne of great home improvements. It happened completely out of the blue. Instead of allowing me to go back to the previous day, the game only allowed me to quit or start a brand new game. No thank you.
The game tries to sell itself an an 'idle' game... or at least, it appears to. You have to study to unlock new jobs and work to accumulate enough money to buy things in a store. Both of these things take a fair amount of time, roughly a full minute for each task. That may not sound like much, but it's practically all there is to the game. You'll need to wait the minute out several hundred times, if not thousands of times. I say you must wait it out, because at the end of each day you are presented with a summary screen that shows you your daily expenses and stress modifications. You must click through this screen, so sadly, you cannot leave the game idle!
The graphics are black and white, which, although drab, help emphasize the monotony of working in a cubicle, day in, day out. However, the graphics constantly 'bob' for no apparent reason. This gives me, and will probably give many others, quite bad headaches while playing.
The audio is average, but there is absolutely no mute button. In order to play your own music, you're going to need to turn off the audio for the game process itself. That shouldn't be something I have to do in a game released in 2015.
As an *actual* software developer, this game feels almost insulting. You can purchase sex dolls in the store, and you can even purchase (multiple) wives through the store. You have no interaction with any co-workers other than terrible bot-like conversations through the chat, and you lead an incredibly boring life. Supposedly there are multiple endings, but my character ended up committing suicide. Very motivational.
Let's break the game down into the only five buttons you're going to be clicking the whole time:
[h1]Study[/h1]
Actually, not a bad concept. There's a skill tree with interlocking paths that advance your skills in a reasonably believable manner. However, some of the skills seem to have absolutely no impact on the game. For example, the traveling path unlocks things like bikes, motorbikes and cars. I was thinking that maybe he could get to work quicker and get more done in the day. Perhaps travel to exciting new locations? Nope. They simply become items you can purchase in the store, with associated stress relief and maintenance costs.
[h1]Work / Change Work[/h1]
Working is completely pointless. The game seems to actually advise *not* getting a job (a great message for a game to be promoting). Once you acquire a job, you will be forced to do your job, day in and day out. Working accumulates gradual stress, at a far greater rate than it accumulates profits. There are no days off, and you don't have a choice of when to work or when not to. This means that stress will constantly pile up. You can 'change' your job if you have more than one option, but there's no choice to not have any job. I suppose that's at least some sort of positive message from the game...
[h1]Chat / Hack[/h1]
Chatting is terrible. Imagine you're chatting with Siri or CleverBot. Then imagine that those bots were programmed by five-year-olds with terrible English. That's pretty much all chatting will get you in this game. There's no choice of who to chat with, and more than half of the time you can't even chat with *anyone*. There's no notification of when someone becomes available to chat with, and there's no continuity in chat whatsoever. It would appear as though the ability to chat, the other person's name and the chat messages are all on random number generators.
Hacking is also terrible. You have a small chance of successfully hacking, and obtaining a small amount of money in the process. If you fail, you will be presented with a message saying that you have the power to change the outcome of your hacking. You will attempt the hack again, and the second time, there's a 100% chance that you will succeed. Why even have a failure chance in the first place, if you're never actually going to let us fail?
[h1]Shop[/h1]
Money feels as though it has no real use. If you run out of money, you simply go into debt. There is no punishment or game over for running out of money. You can use money to purchase things in a store, but conveniently, you can only see how much things cost once you already have enough money to purchase them. In another spark of genius, the developer decided to list almost every item in the shop with a different stress/maintenance decimal value. To work out the most beneficial items to purchase, you have to do a mathematical calculation in your head for each item.
Ignoring the fact that no-one abbreviates 'maintenance' to 'maint' and that there is plenty of room to display the full word there, the 'stress' value is also completely irrelevant, as your stress bar doesn't have any sort of value itself! Presumably it would be 1.0, but this is never stated anywhere. It could just as easily be 100.
Without any sort of indication, *some* of the items allow you to 'use' them after purchasing them. The only item you need to get from the store is the [spoiler]Super Computer[/spoiler], for this exact purpose. It allows you to gamble $1,000,000, with a chance of no payout or an extremely high payout. It seems to be rigged to always pay out slightly in your favor, and there's no punishment for going into debt, so there's no reason *not* to use it. Did I mention that you don't even need the initial $1,000,000 to start gambling with that much?
[h1]Part-Time[/h1]
Why is there even a separation of part-time work and full-time work? Both are repeatable, but accrue stress, and both provide incredibly low amounts of money for the stress accumulated. It feels as though this division was literally only even created to add padding to an incredibly small game.
[h1]In Summation[/h1]
I would say only get this game if you are a hardcore achievement hunter, but I wouldn't even recommend it then! Before even starting this game I had four achievements 'unlocked', although they weren't registering on my profile. Clearly there's something buggy going on with the achievements, and I wouldn't count on them unlocking correctly, or even staying unlocked for that matter.
I got this game as part of a bundle where I wanted one of the other games. Essentially, I got this game completely free. I *still* feel ripped off. This game certainly isn't worth $6, and I wouldn't even recommend this game if it was free. I could make a better game than this in half a day, and I barely know anything about game development.
AVOID THIS GAME LIKE THE PLAGUE!
