(cont.) Being an "anonymous" player, I can't host a server so I can't really comment on options but from what I've seen the only notable option is the destructible "trees". The game doesn't offer a look at the type of equipment or skill level of the opponents in the room, so new players might end up with instances like being a person with Lv2 access and barely tossed grenades vs. Lv9 access with RPGs; in other words, it's not very newbie friendly. Lastly, if I wanted to quit an unbalanced match, I'm stuck with a frozen screen, not a loading screen and I have to wait until the game is done loading the next section to even switch pages afterward. In my opinion, I know that it's still in beta, but this game does not deserve its current 4.21 rating.
Logging into the game for the first time, it didn't register that I was on my Kongregate account. It didn't register the first few times that I refreshed the page, so none of my progress is saved. I started up a practice server and approximately 10 minutes into it, still nobody joining, but in that time I found that the movement was rather daunting. There is no run or jump function, which means if a rock is positioned just above the water just high enough to be jumped on but not high enough to be walked on, you might end up drowning; scaling the mountains and getting over knee and waist-high barriers is another story.
I have to disagree with AngryCyc, because if you've been diligently attacking all the enemies in your way and picking up all the power-ups and fragments you can find, eventually you're going to start to see that you can kill those enemies that were previously unkillable (i.e. the boxes can be killed by anything and at later levels you can also kill those spiky metal ones with any magic spell instead of picking the spell that's represented by the middle circle.) As for charging through enemies, I'm finding that a charged water spell is like a magical shotgun. Works like a charm when looking for those last few items. I do agree though that a tracker would be nice and that the map should not be wiped after leaving the game and continuing later.
It's happened to me a couple times. I don't know about you guys but I personally find it a little annoying when you're so close to getting a gold medal and you can't defend yourself from an alien literally spawning from the wall. It wouldn't show up the previous turn and you can't shoot at it until it shows up on the map. I was caught off alert mode more than a few times due to wall spawning and it cost me a gold medal. Ah well. Doesn't hurt to keep trying.
In the menu there is a restart button. Utilize that button to the best you can. I just recently got the hard badge with 1083 ft. The setups from the other comments are good but it's partially about how good of a run you have. If you get a bad run then quickly press ESC and restart. (Run 1 - 760+ feet, Run 2 - 900+ feet, Run 3 - 1000+ feet) You can use these distances as points of reference to see if you have enough money for the next round.
For the rooms, can we have the entry message and room description blank by default? I know that I have a tendency to just remove the text and I know that people who do want to put a room description or entry message would have to erase the text anyway before putting one in.
I technically "earned" more than 130 stars and I can screenie showing that I got under par for at least 10 levels on the level select screen, but the game does not record stars "earned" but rather stars "unused" at the moment. I don't think I'll be able to get the hard badge without locating and deleting the save data for this game and starting over completely from scratch, if that's even possible.
I played this game before, but then I played it again here to find that the solutions I remember don't apply anymore because the coin locations have changed from before.
For those of you trying to get the harder badges, an easy way to get upgrades fast is to start off with upgrades that increase your loot and then later switch them off for attack and fire rate when you don't need/want so much loot.