As with most games in the upgrade genre, the core gameplay is straightforward. You play on a field where robots drop in at random. Your goal is to move the cursor over them and keep it centered long enough to deal damage and eventually destroy them. Damage is dealt in intervals and isn’t directly under your control, but you can monitor when it occurs by watching the cursor recharge. Every kill earns you money, and you have a strict time limit to destroy as many robots as possible.
When the timer runs out, you move to the essential upgrade screen, where you can purchase improvements that help you kill robots faster and more efficiently. At first, you can choose from four upgrades that significantly boost your basic abilities. Once you buy one, lines appear that branch out to new upgrades. These branches are initially invisible, so you never know what the next option will be.
However, the majority of upgrade nodes function as fillers to make the tree look larger. They usually contain the same few upgrades repeated throughout the tree, mostly very small increases to damage, attack speed, or enemy spawn rate.
Some upgrades can be purchased multiple times, though each additional purchase almost doubles in price. The cost of upgrades also rises as you unlock more nodes, which forces you to follow a specific path and prioritize cheaper upgrades first.
A unique element of the game is the weapon shop, which offers around seventy weapons. They are packed tightly into three columns, and many look nearly identical aside from color variations. Thankfully, you don’t need to comb through them, because the next weapon in the list is almost always better than the one before it. Each new weapon provides higher damage along with increased attack speed and a larger area of attack.
The first hour or so is slow and repetitive. Enemy spawn rates are wildly inconsistent, and sometimes half the round passes with nothing on screen to kill. Money rewards are far too low, and you need to grind through several rounds just to afford the next upgrade that actually matters, such as a half-second increase to the timer, a small bump to attack speed, or an absurdly tiny bonus of 0.001 seconds added to the timer per kill.
But if you manage to push through this early grind, the game eventually throws a curveball. Later upgrades become extremely expensive, but they also offer massive multipliers. Those tiny percentage boosts can suddenly skyrocket into one thousand times or even ten thousand times multipliers, turning everything trivial.
The numbers grow so large that the game can’t handle them. A single shot can wipe out hundreds of enemies in a second and earn you billions, often causing the game to freeze. The only way to escape is to press the quit run button, though even that generates so much income that you may have to wait several minutes while the game tallies your money.
Fortunately, this is also the point where you can afford the bottom upgrade in the tree, complete the game, and unlock the final achievement. You can keep buying upgrades afterward, and they appear to scale infinitely, but doing so serves no purpose and only breaks the game further.
