Keep on Mining! - Worlds

A very mindless and unpolished incremental game that feels like it came straight off of Kongregate. I did not enjoy this one. Actual playtime 3.8 hours, I had to go to hospital for possibly unrelated reasons. + It's very long. You'll definitely get your money's worth in playtime at least. - The music is good at first, but there is literally only one song played on repeat. Gets old fast. -- Visual design is a bit lacking… many ores looks almost the exact same. Artefacts are almost impossible to see. The rocks don't have a nice animation when hit, they just kind of bounce. Each world has no nice background effect or tiles, they are just different coloured grids floating in the void. Overall a bit plain looking and lack of clarity. -- No controller support. I had to play this using a mouse on my tv. Was uncomfortable and annoying. --- The core gameplay loop of mining rocks is not super enjoyable. The sounds and animations are basic, and it takes way too many hits to destroy a rock, making it feel frustrating with the short timer, especially early and mid game. --- Some strange design and balance decisions / issues. The market feels bad to use because each purchase of an item increases the price significantly (I think it's logarithmic), so at some point you can no longer afford them, since your income doesn't keep up. You also have to exit out of the map and activate them manually every time until end game. Skill upgrades take a long time to earn, and increase in price suddenly and rapidly. Like an upgrade costs 700 and the linked one costs 100,000. It feels like the dev just put random numbers for each upgrade and didn't playtest the progression feeling and timing. The level up system seems to do nothing until every 5(?) at which point you can mildly upgrade one of your selected perks, or eventually you can unlock the next world. Each individual level up does nothing otherwise. The mines math is messed up. It claims it is contributing 107% of my total gem production. Sounds like A.I. tech bro math. They forgot to put in the unlock node for mithril. So it takes an extremely long time to unlock it after obsidian. Finding the next resource type requires blindly exploring the skill tree to unlock it, rather than being based on the world you are visiting or marked in any way. Continued below. --- The namesake of the game, worlds, feel a bit weird and underwhelming. The rocks get extremely tougher to break, which is annoying, and the map size increases slightly, and you get slightly different environmental nodes, and a percentage increase to income… Most of the time you end up just grinding the previous level because the next level doesn't actually give you anything new. I couldn't find the skill tree node to unlock the resource to increase my pickaxe multiple times for ages, so I was stuck in world 2 while world 4 was unlocked but unusable to me.