About the only innovation this game has over all those other irredeemable hands-off Skinner Boxes that I'll give it credit for is its decision to have some beefcake pretty boy with an exposed midriff as the login picture. It's almost refreshing after so many big-boobed waifs with biologically impossible figures... then you get to the character creation and see the usual array of macho "I'll crush your face!" guys and pin-up models pretending to be warriors. Damn.
Kongregate should create a new category for this style of game called "Click and Wait". In order to qualify, the game must either have an energy system (5th Planet games) or involve absurdly-long, exponentially-increasing wait times (Backyard Monsters, Galaxy Online, etc.). This category should be on a sub-site with no intersection with the independent browser games that people leave Facebook to find.
Flipline, please stop making these games. Just... stop. I know you're capable of actual decent IPs. Cactus McCoy and Remnants of Skystone might have problems, but there's an actual spark of imagination in those. The average Papa Louie game is just the same tedious tasks over and over again, with no real payoff but more options for future tedium. The fact that these are fast food simulators make it all the more sad since that's not a position people want to escape into. I can't even begin to imagine the existential nightmare of video game developers honing all those computer skills over the years so they don't have to work at Burger King just to program the video game equivalent of exactly that. For the sake of both video game players and developers, please let this be the last we see of Papa Louie.
I think of these games as dog training simulators. "Okay, Fido, go push that button. Got it? Got it? Good boy! Now sit. Sit. Siiiiit. *five hours later* Good boy! Here's a treat! *feeds the dog half a pepperoni* Now, Fido, if you want this piece in less than half a day, go in your master's bedroom, pick up the thick brown thing on the dresser, and bring it to me. Think you can do that, big boy?"
This game barely even qualifies as "strategy". I breezed through with golds on every level simply by keeping my troops bunched up and letting the enemies throw themselves at my unbreakable phalanx. I only had to switch things up for the boss levels and even those were merely different kinds of zerg rushes. It needs some serious rethinking of the mechanics.
Free tip for developers: if your game is just a series of clicking a button to continue to see what happens next, please get something besides a total, irredeemable hack to write your story. There are tens of thousands of out-of-work English majors that would do it for little more than a credit and link to their portfolio. Seriously, you're shameless enough to think people will pay two whole dollars for an energy refill that lasts all of 20 seconds, so why not exploit the desperate writers while you're at it?
Whoever came up with the idea of forcing players to go two perfect rounds against Satan with such terrible, unresponsive controls is probably going to end up with that as their eternal punishment in hell.
The most impressive thing about this series is how after four iterations of the same basic concept across at least two years, it still looks, feels, and plays at most like a college student's class assignment. I know it's just the one guy and he has 32 other games on his resume... but if you're not going to do anything too new, improved, or interesting with a sequel, why bother?
I'll give that this game is at least somewhat less soul-crushing than Flipline's McSlave games just through context alone, but there is no reason the campaign needs to be padded out this long. Seriously, nothing significant changes after you unlock the last weapon type and it just becomes a total grind-fest. Nobody is going to think this is epic just because it takes 8 hours. Think of it this way: if a good game is one where you learn new skills and are tested on them, this is the equivalent of reciting the multiplication tables about a hundred times in a row and about as much fun.
"Hammer of Snor" is about the laziest allusion I've ever seen. Why not just call it Hammer of Thor? It's not like Norse mythology isn't in the public domain.
For the last Axis mission, I've found you can't beat it on hard with anything but summoning the hero to rush the south camp before their heroes are spawned, then nothing but uber-soldats afterward. Their chain lightning is the only reliable way to mow down the masses. It's still all luck in getting just the right opening sequence to build up a decent army.