Scritchy Scratchy

Frustratingly unfun in the long run. Balance goes out the window about 60% of the way through, and if you're playing the game 'right' then you're basically no longer playing by the last fourth of the content because it's whizzing by. I legitimately do not know what the mechanics of the scratchers from the fourth catalog are because I never manually scratched one. Despite this, the entire endgame is a boring, grindy slog of a mess with multiple systems that do not work well together. [list] [*]Badges (Achievements) unlock cosmetics, but you need to purchase the board to claim the badge points every time (not expensive, just pointless) AND use prestige points to purchase the ability to spend the badge points to get cosmetics. [*]Systems feel like they're designed with "well this is how it's always done" without consideration for the logic of things. The achievement for buying all cosmetics rewards you with currency to buy cosmetics, as does the achievement to get all the achievements - Both when there's nothing left to buy. [*]Upgrades and prestige undermine themselves. You can make a late-game system permanently unlocked so you have it at the beginning of the next run, but upgrades are still just as expensive, so it's more or less worthless until the end of the run anyway. [*]The prestige scaling is just awful. Horrendous. Things at the bottom of the tree are worthless to the point of being skippable, while requiring the hard capped maximum amount of prestige points you can get in a run to get a single rank of the upgrade. Meaning going for the "unlock all upgrades" achievement will take about a dozen extra runs after you've done everything else just to fill in the missing traits, which were bad to begin with and even less important at that point. [*]Annoying, grindy, pointless 'completion' achievements. "Unlock all upgrades" only exists to waste your time long after you've completed the game. [*]Bad implementation of the systems. Upgrades don't scale well with each other, so one system that's meant to automate the process slightly more will always be either too fast or too slow, creating bottlenecks that require constant manual upkeep. After being unlocked permanently, Mundo starts out too slow to be used to handle early game tickets, slowly gets up to speed, then gets outclassed in the endgame once more. [*]It feels mean to rag on the artwork, but like. A lot of it is just... bad? It's definitely not AI, so good for you on that, but the pixel density varies between icons, and a lot of icons just look like they were given maybe two minutes of effort. [/list]