I have to admit, I had fun and the game only cost a couple bucks so take this review with a pinch of salt.
First of all, lets let the rabbit out of the hat, I enjoyed the game and it was cheap, so why a negative review? Because its broken, has issues, is unbalanced and ooh yeah, did I mention it has issues?
So lets start with what the game loop is and explain why its so broken before going in to parts that are well, broken. You start the game as a tiny little outpost, not much in the way of explaining, I guess everything is meant to be self explanatory. It isn't really. So, you mine gold, you use said gold to upgrade. You also gain some minerals based upon which planet you are on. When you win or lose, you get what you have mined. Use those minerals to progress the tech tree. As you progress the tech tree, more weapons get unlocked. Weapons are based upon the round you are on, so, the normal weapons come first until you get to the mythic. That is the entire gameplay loop. Just more. If you play the demo, you have in effect basically played the entire game without the tech tree. You wouldn't have seen the different weapons but you will have played the game.
Now, why is it broken. Well, its a rock, paper shotgun style of game with 0 brainpower behind it. My basic gun is great until it has to facce a tier 2 weapon and then it is basically useless but I get my tier 2 weapon before the tier 2 enemies so I just push along home with it. However if I haven't gotten enough research done, my tier 2 weapons won't defeat the tier 2 enemies. It literally means that you must clear the maps multiple times, farm the resources and then get the research and then it goes from impossible to super easy.
Now the tech tree can really be described in to three different sections, the weapons which you must spend resources to unlock, the perks being unlocked which come from unlocking the research and the upgrades to your perks.
Now why is that broken? Well, the number of perks is pretty crazy and totally unbalanced. They are also, random so by having 50 useless perks to pick from and only a dozen good ones, you can literally end up with no actual useful perks. Perks that are at mid game could have requirements to activate such as 'have under 10 gold at the end of the round' while you get thousands of gold and gold from killing enemies, so it is impossible to activate but you got it and there are dozens like this. On top of that, perks that don't do anything. Just not coded to do anything or broken entirely. The perk tree can't even be fully unlocked, even with 100% completion, just no more points to unlock.
Now with weapons, they aren't coded properly and there is no way to remove useless weapons from the pile. I have a machine gun and a gattling gun, doesn't matter, they shoot so slow that they can't even kill one enemy coming to the base at end game compared to a bomb that will kill all of them in 2 hits. Same upgrade cost, just what you get. Same with tier 2, most tier 2 weapons can't clear end game but some do. Some take too long between attacks to be useful, clears the map but won't reload before the one survivor kills your base. So you get 3 choices and 1 reroll and if you don't hit a useful weapon, your run is just instantly over, you can do everything right and just fail on a roll. Same with perks, you might get a good perk or none and that will make a run super easy or impossible.
I've tried the impossible difficulty some 20 or so times and the final mission has never given me a weapon that allows me to pass level 6. 10, maybe 20% damage with full upgrades and combat perks before I die. Just totally unbalanced.
Now this game also is. . . AI slop which some people have a real issue with.
Now on top of all of that, it is obvious that the creator has not spent time actually testing the game as well as looking at it. Even now that it is released, it has a trail version comment in the bottom right. I mean it says it all, it really isn't a complete or ready game.
Now, why did I still have fun, cause its broken and I found things funny. My favorite thing was unlimited perk farming. If you are lucky, you get perks that allow more perks and if you stack them, you can get more perks and then you get more perks from more perks until you have infinite perks. Which is fun.
Now there is one perk that allows you to gain some permanent something after level 5 so in theory, I might need to farm that to finish the final mission but honestly, in all the games, it never dropped on the final mission for me and I wouldn't want to have to fail dozens of time to farm one perk if that is the path forward.
Now as for the game getting tiresome, it is always 15 levels. One enemy type and its just kind of rinse and repeat, would be nice to have some variation. At the end of the day, its just an incomplete and broken game that shouldn't be released yet BUT (and yes that is a big but) for its price, it was fun. For a few hours of fun, is that price really unreasonable, no. You get what you pay for but at the end of the day, smaller and tested, rather than poorly designed, poorly concieved and pushed makes it a cash grab and not really a good game regardless of the price.
So, as I said, take this review with a grain of salt and play the demo if you are interested and decide for yourself.
