[h1]A good game in theory, but the execution needs a lot of improvement[/h1]
My Fire is Bigger Than Yours (MFIBTY from here on) is an interesting concept for an incremental game, and I was actually waiting to buy it the minute it dropped. I had a lot of fun during the demo, however now that I've seen the full release, I have to say my expectations were a little too high. If you don't want to read the full review, here's a summary:
[b]The game is way too short with too little content at the moment. It's absolutely not worth the $5 discounted price. Some of the mechanics are poorly thought out as well, but you'll have to read the rest of the review for those explanations.[/b]
[h1]Good:[/h1]
+ The game has a fun and silly concept. Make a campfire larger than the sun by chucking flammable objects into it. It makes no sense, but incremental games rarely do.
+ The sound effects in the game are nice. I especially enjoy the lightning chain effect, as it's so crisp.
+ Graphics-wise, the game looks quite simple. Appears to mostly just be vector graphics, but that's okay, this will come up again later.
+ Optimization in the game actually seems to have gotten much better than it was in the demo. My framerate no longer crashes during long ignition chains
+ The gameplay is relatively straight forward. Place your spawners, click or drag objects into the fire, purchase upgrades. Simple to learn.
+ The upgrades are impactful and fun, though admittedly not wide in variety. The game is quite shallow at the moment, so I assume this is an issue of scope rather than design.
[h1]Bad:[/h1]
- One of the things that wasn't clear in the demo, was that they would keep wiping your progress and changing the map. This isn't optional, it happens in each phase of the game, of which there are three. This leads to more problems:
- Continuously wiping your progress leads to a bit of dissatisfaction. Also, it seems inconsistently done. If they just wiped everything from the map, it'd make more sense, but currently the transition to phase 3 only wipes your buildings from the map if they fall onto the cracks on the planet. This leads to you wondering if you shouldn't have built there to begin with.
- Changing the map continuously means that your previous strategies don't work anymore. For example, in phases 1 and 2 of the game, I would put one of my electric fuel spawners beneath the fire, so that each time it fires it automatically combusts, starting a chain reaction. This is no longer possible in phase 3 of the game, because the fire is now so close to the bottom of the screen, and the fuel spawner didn't shrink by much. There's no more space for it below my fire, so that entire strategy is now busted. Taking away viable gameplay strategies from the player seems like a baffling choice to me. This could've been avoided, if the camera had just been zoomed out a little, which would give the player more room at the bottom for building.
- Cursor size is a really painful upgrade to take, because the dotted circle indicating the area of your cursor, also increases in size. This means that after a certain point, the circle indicator itself is about 200 pixels thick. It looks god awful and the dev probably didn't test this properly. Also, it doesn't contain any indicator of where the "middle" of the circle is, so you don't actually know where your mouse position is inside that gigantic circle. There needs to be an option to reduce your cursor size even after buying the upgrade.
- Score/Income optimization in this game is extremely difficult, because at a certain point the fire gets so big, that you can longer see the elements on your screen and how they interact. You don't know which component is underperforming, because you literally cannot see it. This is a huge problem, especially because of the leaderboard which I will elaborate on later.
- The game is extremely short. I'm pretty sure I beat it in around 1 hour 30 minutes and 109 rounds. This extremely short game length is probably weighing the heaviest on my final review score. I use a standard of $1 : 1 hour, so this game only hits 40% of that ratio, given that I paid $5.40 for it.
- There's a leaderboard in this game, which seems a bit pointless. Everything about this game reads as a chill, singleplayer experience. But suddenly, there's a leaderboard and it's actually competitive. To be perfectly clear, I do not like my incremental or idle games to have any online components. I play them because they are chill, and adding any sort of competitive element to them ruins that immersion for me.
- The leaderboard is broken, or painfully inconsistent. My fire level of 232 is not being recorded, despite having reached that score for the last ~10 rounds. It still displays me at 167, which is a little sad. This could've been avoided if there was no leaderboard to begin with.
[h1]Overall: 4/10[/h1]
I liked the demo a lot, and was very excited for the full release. However, seeing how the game changed across those two versions was a little disappointing. Seeing the strange progression, the online leaderboard, the extremely short game length, and lack of polish in certain aspects, is making me consider a refund. I'm not going to pay $5 on the hope that the game will eventually be good, I've been disappointed by enough games to learn that lesson. I want to pay $5 for a good game, then pay more for improvements later down the line.
