Line Go Up

The game can suck you in the longer you play. With you slowly growing out of touch to the implications of your decision. Great game!

Line Go Up is a tiny turn based strategy game that takes stock trading and turns it into a short puzzle about recognising patterns. I have 10 turns to build the largest portfolio I can, and every round I submit buy and sell orders before the market moves. The interesting part is that I am not simply watching prices and reacting after they change. I have to try to understand the market conditions and make my decision before I know exactly what is going to happen. That gives the simple stock market idea a surprisingly strategic feel. The main mechanic I like is how much of the game comes down to recognising patterns. Different market conditions reward different approaches, so a strategy that works perfectly in one situation can fail badly in another. I have to look at the information available to me and work out what is likely to happen next. The 10 turn structure also keeps everything moving because I do not have endless time to slowly build a portfolio. Every decision matters more when I know the game is going to end after a small number of rounds. The Strategy Creator is probably the most interesting feature for me. I can create strategies using IF and THEN statements, then test them through thousands of simulations to see how well they perform. That changes the game from simply making individual trading decisions into something closer to programming a trading system. I like experimenting with a rule, running it through different conditions and then changing it when I find weaknesses. It gives the game a much more logical puzzle feeling than I expected from the stock market theme. The biggest weakness is the small amount of content surrounding that idea. The core system is clever, but there is not a huge amount of story or presentation to keep me interested outside the strategy itself. The minimalist pixel style fits the game, but I am basically looking at market information and making decisions for most of the experience. That is completely fine when I am interested in solving the puzzle, but it means the game depends heavily on whether I enjoy analysing numbers and testing strategies. I cannot rely on exploration or character progression to give me something different to do. I also think the online PvP option is more of an extra for me than a major reason to play. The game works perfectly well as a single player strategy challenge because I can spend my time testing different approaches and trying to understand the market conditions. There are also 34 achievements, which gives me some extra goals, but the main reason I would come back is still to improve my strategy. At its low price, I think that is a fair trade off as long as I am interested in the concept. The biggest thing I would want from the game is more variety in the market situations and more ways to make the strategies evolve. The basic system is genuinely interesting, but because each match follows the same 10 turn structure, I can imagine reaching a point where I have already worked out most of the important patterns. The Strategy Creator adds a lot more depth than the simple presentation suggests, but I still think the game would benefit from more situations that force me to rethink what I have learned. Overall, Line Go Up is a clever little strategy puzzle that does more with its stock market idea than I expected. I like the 10 turn structure, the changing market conditions and especially the Strategy Creator because it gives me a reason to experiment rather than simply guessing which stock will rise. The limited presentation and relatively focused gameplay stop it from being one of my highest rated strategy games, but the core idea is strong and the price is low enough that I think it delivers good value for what it is. It is simple on the surface, but there is a decent amount of thinking underneath it. Rating: 6.9/10