I think this is a good free-time based game. Despite many of the comments, it is perfectly possible to play this game without spending any money. If you are looking for instant gratification, this is not your game. If you are looking for a full story line and game you can play over time, this is it.
Game becomes a pointless endeavor quickly; the movement becomes a non-issue as the ship becomes massive and there is no real incentive to move, and then its reduced to simply buying the upgrades.
The game gets frustrating, not because you don't know how to piece together the clues, but the game is finicky in figuring out what to click in order to progress.
It seems the difficulty jumped significantly when it hit Royal Rumble compared to the prior four levels. You may want to have the difficulty graduate a bit more so that it builds up to Royal Rumble as opposed to leaps to it.
Its a fair strategy game, but one of the issues with it is that its based around the build mechanic so much that for most maps, I never even saw the enemy base; I was too busy building. Often times when I won, I never even knew the enemy base was about to be destroyed.
The game was decent overall, but had some significant issues:
-The Peyote character could not effectively collect coins during its special attack (i.e. stationary special) making it unable to do chains
-The three characters other than the pirate having a somewhat weaker special attack compared to the starting character
-The Bowser like boss taking far too long to kill with 3-shot (I cleared the entire background around him, thus making the monotonous process to shoot at him like watching paint dry)
-Occasional unresponsive special attack
-The 3-shot upgrade reducing your frontal attack ability from 2-shot
Coin collection issue that everyone talks about is really a non-issue because money becomes worthless quick. Doesn't really allow you to learn enemy mechanics and build, so it becomes a button mashing fest quick.
Nice game, but it seemed somewhat anti-climatic. Also, given the time achievement, it essentially sets the game up for a rush approach - you lead a small powerful group and you kill every building in your way before anyone can build an offense - dropping healing spells as necessary. However, with this said, despite being designed for rush tactics your troops seem to ignore a building after its health has been depleted, it costs valuable time to redirect them to capture.