Q-UP

Definitely a hit or miss for each individual player. I went into this thinking it was a silly game I’d play for a bit and forget about, next thing I know I’m spending 2 hours trying to perfect my skill tree and optimize everything. Haven’t even played for a full week and I genuinely have lost sleep because I was trying to create a new build in my head. Again, not for everyone, but WOW this game is better than you would think. Genuinely in-depth and makes my brain melt at times.

it's fun and well designed. they should remove matching against ai, it's less fun. if you like balatro, or any type of stack and combo games, give this a chance. it's a good game for alttabbing. the visuals and animations are satisfying, and the game feels unique.

Entire "game" is the 'I see what you did there" meme, assuming you've kept up with how modern PVP matchmaking works. It's a coinflip autobattler. There is technically some gameplay in how you design your skills board but it's not fun. Not sure why anyone would recommend or play this.

it strips the premise of a PvP shooter down purely to the metagame and progression but then does a bad job with that remaining part

Q-Up is a weird little game and I think your enjoyment of it is going to stem almost entirely from how much you enjoy the joke that permeates every corner of it; that being, "what if skill-based matchmaking went so far that a game was boiled down to a literal 50/50 coinflip, but everybody still treated it as if it were a deathly-serious skill-based game." You'll get developer emails personally apologizing to you if you lose three flips in a row, interns reaching out to try to figure out your improbable luck if you win three in a row, and so on. I, personally, found this entire concept hilarious, and I admittedly have a little too much fun shouting at the developers whenever I lose a coin flip and pretending like they're making me lose. Outside of that, the game is basically an incremental game; you get skills and equipment you use to make your number go up, so you can climb up through the ranks and see the game's story. It's all about finding the most broken combinations possible. I personally found it a lot of fun in short bursts, and there's a variety of characters all with unique mechanics you can try. Admittedly, every strategy does just kind of boil down to stacking triggers to make your multiplier and base Q number go up as much as possible. Maybe not super great after a ton of replays, but I've definitely gotten my time and money's worth out of it. Worth a look, especially on sale.

The moment you stop caring that you lost you lose a second time

Maybe it's just not for me, but the 'parody' elements didn't outweigh the lack of much else going on with this one

Realistically, I could refund this, because the gameplay's just an incremental, build optimisation auto-battler at its core, and I'm not really about that life. However, it offers a competent meta commentary and I rate a developer for putting something like this out there, so I'd recommend picking it up just to support developers doing quirky things.

Oh dear. I accidentally played this all day! This might as well be tar heroin for my 5g using, yt-shorts addicted, Magic the Gathering obsessed, well vaccinated, and fast food eating lard-ass. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ wonderful game! Be EXTREMELY careful if you are supposed to be studying or doing anything even remotely time sensitive; this game will stunt you! P.S: Thanks for the Silicon Mac support! I hate apple as much as the next guy, but playing even small indies on this cheapo mac mini is a luxury these days. You guys are awesome!

Balatro if it was funny and esports