Scaling Up

I hate to leave a negative review, but man, this was such a disappointment. I enjoyed the demo for this game even though it was a bit buggy, but when I sat down with the full release, I found it to be a tedious, frustrating grind. (I actually didn't experience the bugs mentioned by the other reviews.) TL;DR: - food, resources, currency are all wildly unbalanced - most of my gold came from random idle-style bug catching rather than my elaborate, labor intensive snake farm - progression is restrictive and horribly linear - building anything requires tedious obstacle clearance - (not discussed below) extremely clunky UI/controls i'm not sure how much really changed from the demo to the full release, but the game's economy feels much less balanced now, particularly looking at the amount of food the snakes consume compared to the amount produced by fishing huts and hunting. The early game kept pushing me to expand and add more snakes when I couldn't feed the ones I had. Gold, the game's actual currency, also felt incredibly unbalanced. The game acts like you're farming snakes to sell their scales, but I ended up needing to hoard most of the scales my snakes (SLOWLY) produced because I needed them for building and research. Instead of having some periodic prompt to convert scales to money in a way that felt natural, like throwing produce in a shipment box in farm games, I would just have to open my inventory and desperately sell as much as I can -- scales, bugs, grass, manure -- when I needed gold for an upgrade that might make my snake farm slightly less impoverished. The only way I ever really racked up any money was through the bug catching feature, where you can click on bugs that pop up randomly as you wait for your dragon and snakes to work. I made more money selling a handful of rare bugs that randomly appeared than I did selling scales. I did think it was a neat idea to give the player a reason to watch the screen and look around while the farm runs, but it shouldn't have been my primary source of income -- it made my actual farm feel pointless. My last beef is with the game's progression, especially through the research system. Usually when a management game offers a player research trees to unlock, it's a chance for the player to choose which new features their production needs right now, so they can progress in a way tailored to their play style. However, although Scaling Up displays two seemingly branching paths on its research screen, I soon discovered that I would have to research upgrades in a linear, set order, because I needed the items from branch 1 item 1 to unlock branch 2 item 2, which I needed to unlock branch 1 item 2, and so on. This was a big theme in the game's progression in general: even before I unlocked the research table, my path forward was always tightly constrained by which scales I needed to build whatever building would unlock the next feature. I found myself repeatedly pushed to invest money, materials, space, and food in snakes that I didn't really want or need for the mechanics of my farm, because I couldn't build the building that would house the snakes who would offer mechanical upgrades without them. I swear that in the demo, I had the option to upgrade my buildings to house more snakes and allow them to work more efficiently. But in the full release, not a single building can be upgraded until you've been railroaded down the linear research tree, so my only means of improving my productivity would be to build more buildings and add more snakes -- buildings I couldn't afford to build, snakes I couldn't afford to feed. Not to mention that even playing on max speed, it took a miserably long time to remove the obstacles that prevented me from laying out buildings as I wanted. And I made the mistake of playing with the tutorial on, so I wasn't even allowed to START the research system until I'd put in the grinding to build everything else the tutorial asked of me. Why research the bull snake? Because you can't unlock the algae snake without its scales. Why research the algae snake? Because you need its scales to unlock the level 2 serpentarium. What's the level 2 serpentarium for? Keeping more bull snakes ... Well, at least the algae snake can go fetch resources from the aquatic area, right? Sorry, your algae snake is too weak for that area.