The First Million

It's a game where I think the demo was more compelling than how the full game played out. Here are some thoughts after getting the first difficulty completed: - The game offers you two meta currencies: silver and gold. Both can be used to buy new cards or flat upgrades. The page where you can buy new cards is presented first and, for silver, the per card cost is significantly lower than the per upgrade cost. I would have been much happier unlocking cards for achieving in a run vs. the current system. - Buying new cards before upgrades will make the game significantly harder to progress. In my opinion, either the upgrades should be front and center to encourage buying those first or (and probably better) these aren't on the same currency. The developer has since added a note in game to encourage buying upgrades first but it's still very easy to mess this up and have to crawl your way back. - Each meta upgrade takes an escalating amount of currency to purchase and each one feels very minimal (2% increase to this, 0.01x that). On the whole, they will matter but per upgrade they're both boring and minimal. The best way to overcome this is to build "silver farms," which are essentially throw-away runs for the express purpose of grinding currency. - Many of the unlocked cards feel counter productive initially. I'm sure that gets better later with upgrades and synergies but until you get to that point the game just gets harder every time you unlock another card. Overall, I had a good time with this game and I was excited to see more after the demo but was disappointed at what was there.

Not a super well balanced game. It's totally possible that the solution is "git gud", but I've played around with 7ish different builds and have gotten pretty much perfect conditions for several different solves to the exponential scaling of the difficulty. Only one of them worked, barely, and then the game nerfed the core card of that build because I won with it. The Bull and Bear mechanic is clearly meant to diversify build options, but the game cycles so quickly (~5 minutes per run when at max speed) that it ends up feeling like a drag. I've had one card in the Bear position for several days now... so I just haven't played it. If it cycled after every run it might be more fun. Part of the issue is that even for an incremental game, it feels like an incredible slog. A lot of the core mechanics are locked behind meta progression that you have to sacrifice runs in order to speed up progress towards. Incrementals generally feel good to me because I get a little further on every run. There's a sense of constant progress. This game feels like it *should* have that sense of progress, but it doesn't. After a dozen or so runs, your meta progress grinds to a halt, locked behind time itself (meta progress tokens are received every 20 seconds; you need 100 of them for the cheapest upgrades). At the end of the day, I don't feel like the game rewards you for trying to win, but rather for spending time in the game and completing a laundry list of tasks to make your runs unexcitingly better (e.g., +0.01 to your speed multiplier which starts at 1.20, amounting to a 0.83% increase in efficiency at best). Some of the cards are also pretty unsatisfying to stack up. Like there's a card that increases its value every time it's played. Classic linear rate progression. When you stack multiple of the cards, it increases the BASE value instead of the rate of increase. This punishes stacking the cards because you essentially halve the amount of value you get when you stack them. The mechanics feel like they're working against each other in that case, and this is not unique. To be absolutely clear, I like the concept. I think the tile placement is a fun puzzle and a lot of the cards are really interesting. The theming around speculative markets and day trader culture are really clever and cute. But when recognizing synergies and executing on them with good luck and clever card placement yields failures that feel pretty damn similar to when you get ♥♥♥♥ luck and pull random crap that barely synergizes... it's just not satisfying. I'll revisit and reconsider the review if there's a balance overhaul.

Very unique incremental game, lots of strategies and combos to try but what made me kind of not want to play, is that the more cards you unlock the HARDER it becomes, made the mistake of trying to unlock every card first, now the good useful cards are rare since I keep getting bad cards simply because I unlocked all of them, could progress further at the start when I had better card choices, currently theres no way to turn off cards once you buy them

It's an interesting idea, but I agree with other folks that I found it really hard to get hooked. It's sort of fun in the beginning as you're messing around, but it quickly becomes a slog to just get a few cards that have synergy. Most runs die early due to not having cards that are very good. There is "progression" in the form of permanent unlocks, but the benefit they provide is extremely marginal compared to the amount of grinding required to actually unlock them. It's got some potential, the idea is definitely interesting, but the execution leaves a bit to be desired. I probably won't play it again unless there are some balance changes to mix things up.

Really trying to like this as "big numbers make brain go brrr", but like others say it feels like unlocking more cards actually makes things harder. The runs are dead in the water unless you get specific cards, and it feels too much like a slog to get anywhere half decent currently. I want to like it, I really do, but in its current state I just can't get hooked.

НЕТ! Это плохая игра. Это одиночная игра, в которой разработчик вдруг решил вносить какой-то баланс, который напрочь не нужен в одиночных играх. Он раз за разом выпускает обновления, которые постоянно ослабляют используемые карты, давая игрокам всё меньше и меньше места для манёвров, всё сильнее и сильнее ограничивая доступные решения для прохождения уровня. Зачем так делать? А некоторые карты ещё и получают ослабление, если вы с этими картами прошли уровень. Представьте: вы собрали удачную комбинацию, прошли уровень, но на следующем уровне эту же комбинацию вы собрать не можете, потому что вдруг одна из карт получила -20% к скорости. Б - значит БАЛАНС. Я видел очень много примеров игр, где разработчики вдруг решили вносить "баланс" в одиночные игры, ломая напрочь то, что хорошо работало, в угоду каким-то своим представлениям. И такие игры скатывались в итоге в статус "мёртвоё гуано". Есть ощущение, что и эта игра вскоре получит такой же статус. Не покупайте ЭТО.

Игра как минимум стоит своего того времени что я ней провел, да есть тактики с помощью которых можно пройти всё. Будем ждать дальнейших обновлений/изменения баланса и т.д.

GOTY

Very fun game that I enjoyed completing. I am eager to see updates that balance and add to the difficulty & complexity. Will happily revisit if achievements are added and I lose my 100% completion status.

Yes please