The game itself is relatively solid. The sound design isn't terrible. There's the potential to get sucked into playing it for quite some time.
The game pauses if it loses focus. This is a HUGE negative if you, for example, pause the thing you're watching to take a phone call, have a conversation, feed your pet, hit the bathroom, etc. Like, literally anything you do where you wander away - if you don't remember to intentionally click it BACK into focus, it'll halt.
If you DO remember to re-focus it, your helpers all die in a matter of a couple of minutes. This is supremely fekkin annoying, because you'll be placing them elsewhere, doing the whole expansion thing that's the point here, not realising that the price has reset down to cheap because all other planets' helpers are dead and the planets are producing no income. So you CONSTANTLY have to bring them back to life by clicking on their graves, which is an annoying maintenance step, or intentionally REPOPULATE them, making sure you scatter them across all your planets again.
There is literally no reason or incentive to expand beyond the first couple of planets, since you can keep them on-screen at once. You're actually punished for having more planets, because you can't babysit them nonstop like they require - they're off-screen. And they are constantly hit by flaming asteroids that destroy all the things you need to click to get money. Also there is absolutely no defence against this.
There ARE save/reload issues with the game. I actually got to a point after about 6 hours of play time where the game would load my save, then just completely crash after less than a minute of play time. I think it's because it could not handle the sheer number of sprites (ie. trees, shrubs, etc.) across all the planets. If that's the cause, terrible, crap game design/code. If that's NOT the cause, terrible, crap play-testing. It's literally a linear part of the game that isn't optional so there's no way to 'miss' it when bug-testing.
The graphics are simplistic and not at all clear. The pictograph 'instructions' are pretty unhelpful. Like, what's the difference between helper A and helper B? This one's got different symbols in the background but I've no idea what they're supposed to represent. You can only zoom out so far (to get a few planets on screen), but if you DO, the things you're supposed to be clicking on scale down to be literally a handful of pixels so they're nearly impossible to hit.
The interface is annoying, frustrating, clunky, and poorly-thought-out. I can think of several better ways to arrange things. The menu when exiting the play state is atrocious, same with when exiting the game itself. Most of the buttons on most of the screens are SO small that I didn't even realise they were there at first. In very many games like this, you can hold SHIFT to repeat-stamp a thing you want to buy more than once, but not this game!
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I get that it was an effort by a single person and I'm trying to not be overly critical. There's just so little positive to say about the game, and I feel bad for it. I would hate to put a ton of work into something to have random people crap all over it. I wish the dev would revisit their design choices and fix some things that pretty much are universally hated.
On the plus side, you can get ~85% of the achievements in less than 8 hours, if you're a hunter. The fact that I had all but 3 was why I decided to revisit this game after 6 years. I just honestly don't know if I can tolerate the things I dislike long enough to get the other 2 I'm still missing. I don't honestly think it's worth the asking price, though. It hurts me to say that, because it's only a couple of bucks, but you might get through the first 2 hours (beyond the refund point) before you decide it really isn't worth it and then regret having bought it.
