For the price, it's not that bad, but it needs a LOT of work if the developers want replayability. If Steam offered a Mixed review, then that's what I'd choose, but I'll sway towards positivity for this review.
After having finished a run which took about 7 hours, it definitely ended way earlier than I imagined it would. You only get so much time before the score attack mode completes, which is your only opportunity to try for the best score achievements for which I have no clue what score you need to get for that - I got the 2nd best achievement at just shy of 1.3M points. I could have squeezed out more score had I known for sure that it would count forge upgrades and weapon patterns since I had a ton of money leftover, but I had no clue the game would abruptly end like that even with the warning that you're in the final year.
Anyway, on to the review. The game is a mix of the game "Codebreaker" with some economic management elements. The weapon forging parts are entirely a guessing game, but as you craft that specific weapon pattern more, you learn more and more about it so you know where the sweet spots are, just like in Codebreaker. This is fine and all, but my biggest gripe and the one that seriously impacts my view of the game is the fact that the game does little to help you with memory. The only things that gets "saved" are the last configurations you inputted for the 3 phases of forging, and [b][i]sometimes[/i][/b] the inputs you have attempted previously -- for some reason, this isn't always consistent and the game doesn't tell you why, but you can absolutely accidentally use an input you have already given and not realize it. What I would like to see is the game providing you with loadouts, especially since you can put 6 different elements on the weapon pattern which changes where you need to put the sliders that are only "weighted" (the slider with the scale icon), and sometimes a faction will request item with an element that you know is considered awful for that weapon pattern, so if you craft with that in mind, then you will overwrite your last-known configuration even if it was a 10/10 mastercraft result.
Another gripe that I have with the game are the guild upgrades. A lot of them are useless purchases, [b]especially[/b] since the stock market for personal crafting supplies doesn't unlock until around the time you get Forge Level 2, but there are like 15 guild upgrades (each with 3 tiers of upgrade I think?) that pertain to the stock market stuff that have an exorbitant and increasing cost that don't do anything that helps you - it doesn't affect market prices or increase how many materials you get passively from faction bonuses, all these upgrades do is affect your storage capacity of them. What good do all these upgrades do me when I hardly ever use the automation line because those upgrades are just as outrageous in gold/guild point cost when I need to make sure I don't go bankrupt also? Sure, the automation line is nice for supplementary income, but the main focus is in the forging and completing contracts.
That brings me to my next points: selling to the guild as well as the weapon storage (the slots above selling to the guild) and its associated upgrades is a completely useless system. They have practically zero value to you as the player: anything you craft is crafted for a purpose, and early on in the game, you have no reason to sell to the guild nor hold onto any stock, especially when random market sways are... random! The fact that there are upgrades to increase your completed weapon storage capacity that cost an arm and a leg and require Forge Level 2 and 3... just why? Why would you sell to the guild at a guaranteed net loss when you can just sell it to literally any faction for a guaranteed net gain? They feel like dead systems in the game that were forgotten but left in.
In the future, I would like to see some upgrades that have meaningful gameplay effects, something the player feels good about when they buy them. The only upgrades that I found were the most impactful were the production speed upgrades (crafting faster helps me prototype new weapon patterns that a contract wants), the batch production upgrades (for contract fulfillment), and upgrade that automatically acquires sales money (this shouldn't even be a thing, all it does is remove unnecessary clicks). To go back to my first gripe, why not provide upgrades that help the player estimate how much each slider could potentially affect the forging meter? One of the biggest issues I had was understanding why red would overtake purple despite me applying "4 red - 1 purple - 3 purple" -- this should be an equilibrium, but it's not. In fact, if you try this logic for Forge Level 1 weapons, it works out just fine, but for Forge Level 2 and 3 weapons, this stops working once you start approaching the extremes of either purple or red on one of the sliders. This is not intuitive at all, so being able to purchase upgrades to assist with this gives something the player to work towards rather than simply having "money go up, good factions stay alive" on your mind all the time. I could think of 20 more upgrades that would be far more interesting and also engaging then what the game currently has.
Then there's the clicker stuff strewn about on your island - the thing that Hearthstone popularized for clicking on stuff, but this game rewards you with 1 coin apiece which is very nice for surviving the earlygame. Why not some upgrades for those, like only needing to hold LMB instead of needing me to use an autoclicker or wearing down my mouse's switches? Instead, the game takes those away as you buy guild upgrades - an upgrade should [b]never[/b] detrimentally affect the player, especially if the player is not notified that it would do so. Why not make it so that the forge upgrades gives you better clicker opportunities, or change it up a little, like needing to drag open a cauldron door to let the molten metal pour out into the mold? Give me something for exploring the game world, throw me a bone.
Something I want to throw in here: I really have no clue what the player can do when it comes to faction-faction relationships. If there are two factions that I want to get rid of, the only thing that I know to do is to pray that a faction that I like has tensions with them and that tension state progresses into a war, then I feed the side I want with weapons or feed the side I don't want with tainted weapons (from elixirs). However, I don't know if there is even a method given to the player that allows them to sway the opinion of one faction and what they think about another. I don't know how to break tensions between two factions that I like - the game hints that it's possible, but doesn't explain a potential mechanism for doing so. I really feel like this system could be fleshed out a little bit more and provide the player with more/better feedback for their actions as well as give the player more agency to engage with the faction system. Maybe allow the player to bribe the faction, or lobby against another faction, or pay a faction to send spies to economically harm another faction's resource(s) to raise/lower the prices.
All-in-all, I know I had a lot of complaining in this review - like I said earlier, I wish I could leave it as a "Mixed" review, but I'll leave it as positive because at least the game was interesting enough for me to play it to completion, and all I spent was $10. I've experienced far worse at far worse prices and time investment. Plus, all of the complaints I ranted about are easy to implement, but it's up to the developers if they want to implement them.
