The First Million

Very fun core loop, its a nice little incremental game. There are some strategies that are just S tier, but the Challenges provide enough variation to push you to try other stuff. The dev seems to be actively balancing which is nice to see. The additional opportunities to remove cards from the pool is great, lets you try things out without restarting over and over again.

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

Summary: Summary: I recommend this game, but don't expect too much from it. A solid indie effort. The First Million is an incremental card-based game where you buy cards and place them on a grid. The goal is to make a sufficient amount of money in the allotted time to move on to the next time gate. There are cards that make money directly, cards that scale other cards or provide other bonuses, and cards that increase global stats or improve other cards but burn out. The game is fun, but relatively easy to solve. This isn't Slay the Spire. There are only a few ways to win, and most cards don't do a ton to advance you to that. Especially on higher difficulties. You'll need to unlock the cards you need (like Subsidiary) and avoid the cards that don't help. The game allows you to block a certain number of cards from appearing at the beginning of a run, and you'll want to use that feature. It's a bit of a feels-bad nonetheless, because one of the achievements requires you to unlock all cards, and you need to complete achievements to both earn meta progression and unlock higher difficulty levels. I completed all achievements in about 9 hours. To be fair, I also played the demo for maybe 6. I lost my first few runs, because you need to unlock cards. I lost a couple of runs trying for the achievement where you don't use purple cards, and I lost my first attempt on the hardest difficulty because I was trying to avoid the most powerful strategy. And I lost a run intentionally as part of completing the achievement where you use the Insurance card three times. Otherwise, I won them all and it was rarely close. This is because the game is all about scaling. Certain cards do that, and most don't. The card pool isn't so large that you can't find the good ones, especially since you can unlock the ability to start with a universal tutor at the start and then buy it again repeatedly later. The developer tries to balance this. If you win a run, the card that made the most money for you will be debuffed for your next runs until you win. There's also a buffed card and a debuffed card that changes daily. The issue is, it doesn't really matter. I lost my first try at a max difficulty run because I tried to avoid the most powerful card (Sacrifice) as it was debuffed. Then I realized that it doesn't matter, and I used my usual strategy the next run and won handily, despite the debuff. This is understandable. In the end, the game is a math problem. The only real source of randomness is which card you're offered. There are a few other random elements but you can either play around them (blue cards that buff a random card of a type) or have so many opportunities to proc that the Law of Large Numbers kicks in and in the end, the behavior isn't meaningfully random (Lucky Chance). There are daily runs that challenge you to make as much money as possible with a small and random card pool. If you want a bunch of replay value, this is how you'll get it. I think it will be a little too easy to identify what to aim for each time though, because again, the game is all about scaling. So if you're the sort of person who really likes taking Demon Form in Slay the Spire, this is the game for you. The game appears to be in active development, so be aware that this review might be very out-of-date later.