Sludgineers

Fun game to zone out to. I played the demo and was worried that the full game wouldn't have much more, but it ended up being worth the price. I think it took about 3 - 4 hours for 100% completion.

[h3]Summary[/h3] [b]Sludgineers[/b] [i](Ver. 1.00.03 steam)[/i] An enjoyable “cleanup” game where you vacuum up pollution to save the day. It is a bit on the grindy side and shorter than expected, but was a decent time for the price. [b](6.5 / 10 : Get it for a good afternoon worth of low pressure play)[/b] [h3]Game play[/h3] Your goal in Sludgineers is simple: clean up the pollution / toxic materials in each stage without running out of energy. Buy upgrades to increase your cleanup abilities. Refine the waste materials to also spend towards upgrades. Repeat this until you have cleaned up the area. You are not punished if you fail cleaning an area. You can repeat it as many times as you like and you can repeat cleared areas as many times as you like as well. What may be a turn off is the grinding and the time gate that needs to happen to buy upgrades. You have seven different Money Units (MU) and three of those MU need to be converted. Those conversions are gated by time. This time gate can be automated. However, by the time you can automate the process, it’s likely you’ve cleared the game and are just chasing achievements. This is the balance a game like this has to take on: Make the upgrade path too fast and the game is instantly trivial and not fun. Make the upgrade path too slow and it becomes a slog where you are grinding to just see the end or you put the game down. The sweet spot for this is subjective. I took my time playing through this and cleared the game in about 5 hours. I came back to grind out the entire upgrade tree and built in quests for another two hours. Now I am letting the game idle as I auto process materials to just empty the queue. While I hoped there were more maps than what was presented, I’m fine with my on sale purchase. [h3]Graphics[/h3] Visuals are a bright pixel art environment and it is fine. User interface is intuitive and most things have a mouse over tooltip pop up with more information. Not everything has the mouse over and it may be worthwhile to add that feature in a future patch. [h3]Audio[/h3] It is fine. Nothing groundbreaking. Sounds make sense and add to the game play loop. [h3]Final thoughts[/h3] I’d love to see something that expands game play in some direction to make it have some replay value. A “new game plus”, option might do the trick or a challenge for a maxed out tech tree with some randomization of what you are taking on. More maps in the future would also be appreciated. The world seemed big and then the realization that it was not was disappointing. I’d also suggest adding tooltips for all of the buttons to be consistent.