BAR

I really, really, really wanted to enjoy this. The incremental systems involved seem so much fun: There are swatches you unlock, machines you unlock, upgrades in the "system" that you unlock. All of these things can be upgraded. There are over a dozen different types of number that can be applied to the bar you're fighting. There are like 100 swatches with different effects. Dozens of different objects that help you fight the current bar. And I want to experience that and upgrade all that and be invested. But it's very slow, even at 4x speed. You aren't going to get any kind of meaningful reward unless you get far. "Getting far" can be an hour long. Both early game and mid-game you can encounter obstacles that hard-counter you and effectively stop your run instantly. Due to the nature of the game, there can be a hard-counter to literally any object you have. Most of the objects are more "conceptual" in nature. The swatches are the same way. What I mean by this is, there is every possible combination of "thing" and "effect" and "mechanic", which is cool, but it also means that 75% of them are basically useless. Even if you had a build designed entirely around (thing), object or swatch that affects (thing) will STILL be useless. And that's assuming you have some kind of cohesive team/build that would be benefitted by that thing, which is very unlikely. Even if you did have it, it would get hard-countered almost instantly in the early game, and so you wouldn't have that thing anymore, because you lost and had to restart. As a result, only a couple builds actually work, and so the objects and swatches that actually have any meaningful effect go down from 25% to 10%. The game has activated skills, which have one use: "activate them all and hope it gets you past the hard-counter you're experiencing". The game, very politely, has a crosshair ability that lets you spam click on an item that requires spammed clicking without you actually doing it. Very nice thing to include when your chief source of progress is "button you click really fast". However, even that has a struggle: when you click anything on the screen at all, the crosshair vanishes. After all, you can't use the autoclicker AND click on the item, that's getting the effect twice. Problem is, when I click on the screen it's to upgrade something, or use the help command to see what something does, or to interact with an event on screen. Still, doing any of these things makes the crosshair vanish, which means you have to go back and pick up the crosshair and put it on the item again or it sits there doing nothing. Which means you must avoid interacting with the game to properly use it. Even the minor details make you not want to interact with the game, it's painful. There's so much cool ♥♥♥♥ but all of it either doesn't do anything or you can't enjoy any of it.

great game

Though BAR has a slow early game, the mechanics set in place allow the progression rate of the game to increase over the time. The tools at your disposal feel like they were meant to be used together rather than just being in the same game. If you want to fun rouge-like experience like no other, I recommend BAR.

A project that should not have been released for sale. Neat, but incomplete with a lack of instructions or guidance so complete that Miyazaki would cringe and uninstall it. 1/5 - Good project, not a game, and definitely not complete enough to warrant a price tag.

Way more of an incremental game than a roguelike (the meta progression is crazy basically). Has a nice sense of tension when you get later into runs and are just barely scraping by the quota, but I find the early game to be a bit dull, which also enforces that this is really more of an idle game than a proper roguelike. The addition of roguelike aspects does make me like it more than other incremental idle games i've played however, but it's not really anything revolutionary. It's ok, basically.

pretty cool game i would not say its better than loot train but this is something that needs to be experienced especially techiemay mixing both incremental and roguelike together 2 different genres that are far away from eachother makes the game interesting

BAR has a pretty simple premise but really shines when it comes to how you approach it. Between widgets, swatches, colors and a plethora of other upgrades and mechanics, you can customize each run into something that idly ticks away at the bar in the background to something you're constantly engaging with and managing to plow through rounds as fast as possible, with a pretty nice middle ground. One of my favorite widgets to pick up is one that you click on to fill your bar relative to how much your idle tick effects are outputting. There's loads of synergies and strategies to be found as you progress too, like focusing on racking up status effects or destroying both the AI's widgets as well as your own. The sound design is pretty nice too, much like BTD6 I always look forward to the weirdly satisfying cacophonies that the lategame brings