Do you like Incremental games? This sure is... one of them!
I absolutely hate giving thumbs down reviews, and I know it feels cheesy to give one after 49 minutes of gameplay, but I feel like it's warranted, because I could not be assed to keep playing this one.
Were it a simple reskin of one of the dozens of great bog simple incremental games out there, just with ghosts and vacuums, it would have done fine, but they put their own spin on it, which, good for them, I just feel like it doesn't land.
IMHO, The skill tree commits two of the most egregious sins possible in an incremental game.
1) It's *way* too big for no apparent reason. There isn't really many unique upgrades yet the tree sprawls around into different "areas" to have multiple copies of the same node you've unlocked in several other areas. Where you would condense the tree down to about 1/10th of the nodes in every other game of this type by having nodes with multiple levels (a tried and true incremental approach), they have gone for a "bigger is better" approach and just spread it over hells half acre. And guess what, the upgrades you click on on the far right side are the same ones you'll see copies of in every other area, in the absense of anything new mechanically. Just more Life, Power, Radius, Etc.
2) There is no real feeling of progression, even after an hour with something like 150+ nodes unlocked, the gameplay doesn't feel any different, I don't feel a marked difference in my damage or anything like that. I'm upgraded, but I feel more or less the same as I did at the start of the game.
That alone is enough for me to be unhappy with the game, but there's also some other stuff:
- At least based on where I am, there is absolutely zero variance in enemies. There's the standard ghost sprite that just shows up in different colours, or there's a BIG GHOST (that also shows up in different colours.)
That big ghost drops currency I've yet to find a use for, so I have a bunch of it and nothing to do with it.
- The game is extremely bad at telling you anything. It's clear that to move into some of the other areas on the skill tree, you need some specific boss items, but there's no indication of where they drop, and everything about the naming conventions suggests that a whole pile of what you're looking for is behind the door you can't open because you don't have that stuff.
- Speaking of those specific bosses, it's incredibly unclear how you find them/trigger them. I think it MIGHT be based off nodes in the skill tree but it's not really explained and there's so many hit numbers pinging on the screen if there's a tooltip in game it's not obvious at all.
Bla bla bla I sure do talk a lot. At the end of the day, if you like incremental stuff and get this in a bundle, you might have fun with it, but if you pay shelf price for it, and/or aren't an incremental games fan, you'll probably be disappointed / bored.
