Runix: Pinball Roguelike

I refunded the game after it crashed for the second time in 80 minutes. I wasn't enjoying the game before then, though, so here are my thoughts. The Good: Controls feel tight, graphics look good, physics feel right. I have no complaints about the pinball side of the game, and if you're looking for a fun pinball game, this might be what you're looking for. The Not So Good: The roguelite-side. What I love about the roguelites is putting together the crazy build. You get a bunch of random choices and somehow manage to piece together a build where the parts are working together to do crazy and unexpected things and you feel like a genius for making it happen. I can't see how you can do that with this game's design. You get balls that do fun things, but generally you have one ball on the table at a time. You have relics that will interact with the balls. But I didn't see much chance for synergy. On my one, very long, unfinished run I ended up trying to go for a gold-based build, just buying all the balls and picking the artifacts centered around getting gold and increasing damage based on how much gold you have. Did it work? I have no freaking clue. The game does a very bad job about telling you what the hell is going on. Stuff is flashing, things blow up, I generally have no idea why. There's nothing onscreen explaining the ball's abilities, you have to go into the pause menu, find the ball, and look at the description. There doesn't appear to be anything showing stats. There's no info-graphic available like some games have, explaining what's onscreen. On the screen next to your health, there are two circles: one with a pinball in a scythe(?) and one with a boot that have numbers, and I have no idea what they mean. I would have guessed # of balls, but it's not! There's a tutorial at the beginning that may have explained this and other things, and I did not skip it, but there's a lot of info and I smoke a lot of weed and I shouldn't have to memorize everything the first time it comes up; I should be able to review it and there's no way to do that which I could find. I couldn't find any indication of the ball queue and which ball was next, which maybe would be useful, like if you wanted to know if the next ball was better than your current one. But you take damage when you drain the ball, so cycling through balls blindly doesn't seem like a great idea. Also, the run is very long. (Like this review, right?) At the eightyish minute mark I was a couple of fights into the third act. The game uses a Slay the Spire style map. and I found it annoying. I guess it might add value to give the player some agency in the path, but it didn't feel substantial and I would rather just have proceeded. To that effect, you also go into a ball shop after every freaking encounter and it is too much. I only had one opportunity to remove a ball, and balls are very cheap, so it seems designed to just flood your deck and I don't know why you'd want to do that. You can also upgrade in the shop, but only 3 times per ball. On my run I stopped buying balls when I had 12 and had max levelled them all and just horded the money. I was rich! On top of all that, there's just some amateur ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ that makes me mad. There is no way to enter the settings menu from in the game? There's a link from the pause menu to wishlist the game (which I OWN because I bought it and am playing it right now and it's not the demo I gave you money) but if you want to change the volume or graphics you have to save and exit to the main menu and change them from there? Even now, I can't believe that's right, but I actively searched for a settings button either onscreen or in the pause menu and I could not find it. But, as I said, I do smoke a lot of dope so I'm always aware that maybe I'm just too stoned to see it. Finally, I had to lower the graphics quality from ultra to high because the ultra quality caused the flippers to lag. (Props to the dev for helping me fix it in the discussions.) This is not necessarily a problem, but my computer's pretty new and fancy and I've never had to lower the graphics with any other game, so found it odd and wonder if people with not so fancy computers may be having real issues. So this game is not for me. At this time, this will be the first negative review posted, so maybe I'm the problem, and you might enjoy it very much. I did not. TL;DR: Pinball good, roguelite bad.