The First Million

Fun roguelike deckbuilder, challenging at first, but forgiving enough that it gives you some leeway to experiment and still win, which is a huge positive for me and keeps you coming back for another run. The game will require some fine-tuning as there's a few builds that are extremely powerful, so as you near the high-tier difficulties you might find yourself searching for that one card that will completely change the run, as there's a lot of RNG. However the dev is super active in the discord and some nice QoL updates have already come through. 100% worth the money.

Number goes up. The simplicity helps it be an addicting iterative experience

This game is great for the price-point. I love the visual and sound design, especially the music. The meta-progression is really important, as you simply will not be able to scale without unlocking some key cards and mechanics. If you feel stuck, grind out a bit of silver and start unlocking new cards! The cards and mechanics feel intuitive and straightforward, and for the most part everything you do just makes your run stronger. There are only a few cases when you can leverage a risky disadvantage for a long-term mega advantage, and I think it would be fun to play around with that a bit more. There are a handful of ways to go infinite, which is what I love about roguelikes, and I've had a good time exploring different strategies. Overall, I think this is a great addition to the genre and I haven't seen anything quite like it yet, although there may be some predecessors that I am unaware of. I am curious to see whether more content will be released that could add wrinkles and complexity to the game, but it is solid as-is. 8/10

Слишком скучно, слишком решает рандом - покупать или нет решать вам

Fun little time waster

Nice little incremental card optimization game with a decent free demo to show you how it plays. Unlike a lot of other reviews, I found that it wasn't really grindy at all: There are several builds that can consistently win runs (and this is without simply getting infinite time to make money through a set of good synergies). A nice little "win penalty" on one of the Asset cards you used to win your last run with is a nice little encouragement to mix up your strategies at least a little between games, and it's fun trying to beat all the little challenges to unlock stuff. It does need to be said though: You need to be careful about unlocking cards before you build a good banlist, or each unlocked card might make the game [b]harder[/b] by making it harder to get the synergies you want. The dev's definitely made it harder to fall into this newb trap by giving you 5 free bans when you start and making card costs scale, but beware because you can still kinda "brick" your save if you don't focus on upgrades, too.

I'll put this at a slightly positive because I don't think it's BAD exactly, but it needs work. I really like the concept, but it seems like the balance needs a pass: so many of the strategies require getting the exact right cards at the exact right time and only barely work if they do hit, and I suspect many of the strategies are just ultimately doomed. There's this idea of "oh man if I get X Y and Z I can set up a super cool synergy" and then you won't get the cards in time, or you'll get it but it can't scale up in time and you lose to the timer. The runs feel about the right length, and the scaling makes sense, so maybe the base tick rate of cards just needs to be faster so that the builds can do their thing in the allotted time. I don't mind the meta-progression, but the upgrades feel kind of anemic: you're spending 1-2 runs of silver to go from 2% crit chance to 3, which isn't exactly going to do anything crazy. Maybe tying back into the idea of the strategies not really working, but it feels punishing to unlock cards and dilute the pool for stuff that is much worse than what you'd otherwise be doing. Progressing should never feel like a downgrade, and the fact that blocking cards is a meta-progression thing kind of illustrates the problem: you could get a lot of silver worth of card blocks if you just strategically identified the best cards and didn't do unlocks once you had them.

Very well implemented and active developer support - for weird bugs, but you can pull this off in a lot of unintended ways.

The game has a major flaw: the more cards you unlock, the harder it gets. I would implement a simple fix: be able to remove cards freely. There's a perk to remove up to 20 cards, but it is too expensive and there are way too many cards to lock them all. Nevertheless, I give this a thumbs up because I had fun with it. If you buy it, be aware, do not unlock many cards or you're f**kd. There's a "trick" you can close the game without choosing card to make it reroll on next try, Bad, but works.

Fun stuff make money