I'm putting this down as Not Recommended off the back of it being marketed as a strategy puzzle game. On that basis, it is on the same level as a slot machine. To summarize, if you enjoy slot machines and numbers, this is a game for you, have fun, but if you are looking for a logistics based space management organization game, this is a big miss, and will mostly aggravate you more than anything.
In more detail, here's what's good:
- The game looks great; the neons are pretty and the colors pop. More than a few times I've switched to photo mode to take screenshots of my mini-Kowloon. The way the numbers and increasingly large coins pop out is fun and feels like a slot machine payout animation. Not quite on the level of Balatro's ramping, but good non the less.
- The different "factions" present interesting options, and the game presents quite a few spatial decisions that can be implemented to create some pretty satisfying builds and payouts.
- There's a lot of potential here; the bones are good, and with a bit of content patching and adjustments, this could be a really satisfying puzzle game.
Unfortunately, it crashes hard because of a few major downsides:
- Far Too Random; this is the big one. Since you have no direct control over the buildings you get, it's very hard to implement any kind of strategy, planned or adapted. The game can simply choose to never give you a specific building, or give you far too many of another building, limiting what you are able to do. You might get a few Volt buildings early on, which have stacking benefits the more you place in a chain, so you reason "This is a Volt Run, alright" and then never get another Volt building for the next 60 turns. To be fair, this isn't a massive setback for beating each level, the game is pretty lenient on score requirements just to pass any difficulty, but the achievements, which are the games only real "end game" have ludicrous asks for how random the game is.
- Inconsistent strength of "factions"; once you really dig in, you find that some of the factions, like Volt, are far too strong compared to some other ones, both in how forgiving their placement is and how few restrictions you have on their placement. This leads to scenarios where even if you're trying for another goal, placing Volt buildings for bonuses is just a no-brainer for progression.
- Unappealing Challenges; this is the most subjective of my criticisms, but the additional challenges you can apply feel lacking in two major ways. The first is that, while they put a restriction on you, adapting them just requires good draws, and failing at them largely come down to drawing poorly, something you can't control; this means that when you lose to them, it's not because you need better planning, you need better luck. The second is that there's no benefit to them, no score multiplier or further unlocks or even cosmetic effects you gain, they only exist to make the game more complicated, which in this case means more reliant on dice.
As I said before, if you aren't interested in the deeper strategy elements and just want to see payouts go brrr, this very much might be a game for you. I've had fun most of my 16 hours, but very little of that has been from strategy and planning and has mostly been from getting an incredibly strong early draw (Organ Harvesters) early on and being able to simply stack bonuses on two buildings to delete any tax requirements the game has, and even then I've only gotten a little over 50,000,000 of the games required 1,000,000,000 for its highest score achievement.
If you are looking specifically for deep strategy and planning, I'd pass on this one until there are some mitigating balance patches that better implement that side of gameplay, which is completely doable and I really would keep an eye on this title if you are interested in that.
