How To Grow a Black Hole

AI controversy aside, the game loop is fairly short and there aren't very many upgrade paths. For an incremental game there's not much meat to chew on.

The idea here is great, and the black hole graphics is neat. The rest is very, very difficult to like. The UI is awful, the gameplay loop is a mess and it is an idler that you can't idle. The dev was fairly active in the days after launch and I hoped the game would become something good, but the radio-silence does not bode well. Avoid this like the plague.

At $4, it's really hard to muster hate for this game. It has AI, but I don't care. Allegedly, It has a despondent development team on Discord which again I don't care, but in the end it commits a bigger crime altogether. It's boring. To build a large black hole You need to balance upgrades and pressure. there are a ton of upgrades available and I would say half of them are either unhelpful or outright detrimental to that goal. Whats more, the upgrades that do seem to be helpful don't have any meaningful effect on black hole growth, they just add more bars to upgrade and more numbers to shoot up. I get that this genre of game is built around that principle but when I play other games like this you see more troops, more buildings, more colors, more visual representation you're getting stronger. Here, it's just the jpeg of the black hole taking up more of your screen. It's just not a fun game and even at $4 I can't recommend it.

As other reviews have stated the game runs like crap. First 5 minutes in the game and I thought something was wrong when the game started to freeze up. Save your money and buy something else.

AI slop. It's not even an idler, the upgrades mostly useless or otherwise only harm your runs. No real progression besides unlocking new color schemes for your hole. The worst part is the dev denying the AI accusations. Everything from the menus and UI to the tech tree and hole upgrades is AI.

The Gameloop is a "balancing" act, you feed your black hole matter wich in turn increases pressure, too much pressure and the hole collapses(funny enough thats also the way to prestige) but since your black hole "eats" the matter the pressure goes down over time.Also the more it eats the more it grows the more pressure it takes to cause a collapse Now that sounds fine on paper but matter gets added not per second but in chunks every 10+sec sped up by upgrades. Early game you cant grow your black hole very much since the matter added is to much but "mid" game it really puts emphasis on the mid and lets you bore yourslf out. Matter added dissapears in a fraction of a second and every chunk of matter is between 80 and 400% of your collapse threashold... so your hole get its disk for 0.1 seconds and in the rest of the time does absolutly nothing. You get more ressources normal&prestige by growing a bigger hole yet upgrade the wrong PERMANENT upgrade a bit too much and you insta prestige making the game "softlocked". I have never played a Idler/incremental game where you can softlock yourself. Dont spend cash on this, its not nice to look at its not fun and it doesnt get better. I can already see what endgame looks like and the sunk cost is the only thing keeping me fml

Not well optimized Idle Game AND not well researched (Jupiter Orbits at ~5 AU i'm at 10AU still "Earth Orbit" size not "Jupiter Orbit"). For the fastest growth you want to use the "tidal shear" upgrade that boost income depening on the "compression"(range between "able to reset" to "forced reset"). Which early on is a bit of a dance of understanding what upgrades do and micromanaging inputs. With usually about 1-3 minutes of time to correct, if it starts filling. i say early here because those minutes quickly become 0.01 seconds. Inputs are lumpy, you could get unlucky and get 3 units in 1 second because of "orbits" even when the feed is 1/s. And the Forced limit is growing WAY to slowly, and the Upgrades for that have way too high escalating cost. I currently have a forced reset at ~65mil with inputs of 160mil/s my bar jumps binary from ~60% to 0% with most of the time being at ~0 because of the lumpy feed, WHO tested late/mid game balancing?! there should be at least 2 additional zeros on the forced limit. As someone from the Programming field, this game with what it does, to what it uses (i.E. Optimization) feels vibe-coded, so i suspect the creator is either someone fresh out of school or "vibe-coded" through AI. The Research system feels EMPTY, which only reinforces the vibecoding suspiction. the UI design fells untested, MAX buy doesnt show how many upgrades would be bougth, but the cost adapts so it does calculate. Reseach Tree is DEAD Space with some Nodes in it. [h1]THIS Game is not worth 4€[/h1], i would believe this to be a University Entrance Project of a Programming Student (and thats pushing it, a basic verison of this could be a 3h test), from what i've seen and the potential exploits i have seen this feels like a [h1]MONEYGRAB.[/h1] Not a passion project by somebody unfamiliar with the field.

its peak, i hold click, black hole get bigger, i reset and it get even bigger