Bought the music studio, maxed out the upgrades and bought 4 full rows of singers. Reloaded the game and had to buy the studio again. Didn't lose any upgrades or singers; only had to pay the $10M to buy the studio and they were all back. So a minor inconvenience, but I figure it's still a bug.
Really enjoyed this. So much in fact that I'm trying for all the achievements, which is pretty rare for me. I've managed to get all of the ones in the left column, but am still missing one in the right column. The second one down. Just can't seem to figure that one out.
You get this one from being rescued by the Ahopalooses if I remember correctly. to get it : don't meet Louise, don't meet Clusterfuck, and bring some whiskey to the ahopalooses
Pro: lots of features. Con: too many features. Suggestions: pick 1-3 features (e.g. attacking/defending against alien forces, building resource producers, and conquering territories) for the player to control and automate the rest. Tone it down so it's not overwhelming to players or rename the game "Sim Bureaucrat." Rating: 3 stars...5 for being ambitious, -2 for letting those ambitions get in the way of enjoyment.
Pro: simple gameplay, like a horizontally-scrolling shooter. Con: too-small hitboxes on other vehicles & ammo pickups, too long of a delay before you can move again after dying. Suggestions: wider hitboxes, more ammo per pickup, don't make everything in the game a one hit wonder, and allow the player to force other vehicles off the road to get kills (as it is, it costs too much health to even try). Also, this is the perfect kind of game for upgrades, and would give people an incentive to keep playing. Finally, while the controls are simple, I'd prefer to have the acceleration and break keys be something other than the right and left arrow keys. S and D, for example.
Fun, but the glitches take away from the experience. Here's several real/potential ones that I saw: (1) bloodstains remain after you restart/are busted, (2) doors randomly open and close when nobody looks through them, which seems to happen more frequently after you restart [I actually kinda like this glitch because it adds to the horror element...the ghosts of the people you killed are haunting the house!], (3) when I get to the last several people, and go to kill one in the same sneaky manner, it seems like my attack automatically misses and causes the would-be victim to call the cops on me [bug or feature?], (4) after using the table, sometimes I can roam around killing people with impunity, and other times I kill one person and everything goes back to normal.
I don't know if the following are bugs or not, but they definitely seem like they might be: (1) Two level appear to be missing stars. Looking at the world map, the first of these levels is the one on the second platform from the right (no levels above or below), and it seems to be missing one star. The second of these levels is underground, right in the middle of the row of 5. This level does not appear to have any stars in it. (2) I can't unlock the underground level above the level furthest to the right in the row of five. At this point, I appear to have unlocked every other level, have bought everything available in the shops, and have opened all the locked treasure chests in houses. Unless you've hidden something really, really well, I'm stuck in an unbeatable game.
It has been quite awhile since I've played such a twitchy game. The best part of the game was the thin platform jumping maze above and to the right of the center of the keep. It wasn't overly challenging, but it did require a little bit of thought, as opposed to everything else, which required split-second timing. I would've liked to have seen more than three abilities, especially since 2/3 of the abilities in the game are jumping-related. Maybe something like a grappling hook, which could have replaced the wall jump, that, as others have noted, frustratingly ADDS to the challenge of the game. A powerup really should feel like a powerup, not a smack upside the head with the nerf bat. A few more weapons would have been an improvement, too, since multiple weapons are part and parcel of the Metroidvania genre. Overall: fun, but the twitch factor detracts from that fun enough to relegate the game to very good status, as opposed to great.
Being able to filter crafting items/reagents by the effects they confer would be nice. It'd make it a lot easier to for players to find the effect they want to add to an item, and to compare the default potency of each item/reagent that adds the desired effect.
Heroines/femme fatales with red hair, green eyes and substantial endowments (we're talking about her magical abilities, here) are everywhere in today's fictional works. TV tropes has a whole category dedicated to them.
Two requests regarding the Divinity Generator: (1) if possible, could you add a Stop after Finish switch for its upgrade screen, too? (2) How about an auto-add feature that will feed creations into the Generator whenever possible? Thanks for your ongoing attention to updating and improving this game.
Once you conquer the world, your troops serve no practical purpose, but the size of your army keeps on growing. It would be nice if there was way to use all those soldiers to gain more money, and that would help make the end game a little more pleasant. As it is, getting those last few building achievements and last few upgrades means checking the game once every couple of days to see how much gold has accumulated while you're away, and hoping it's enough to get you the 900th of any given type of building or one upgrade. Once the cost per 100 building units or one upgrade get into the high trillions, the intervals--measured in days--at which you can reasonably expect to have amassed enough gold get increasingly longer.
There really should be an achievement for conquering the world, and the game should provide some sort of acknowledgment in the main screen. At the very least, Catherine should show some kind of reaction to achieving her megalomanical dream. I personally think it would be cool if, as you conquer countries, you accumulate the country's flags as trophies on the throne room's walls/pillars. Alternatively, replicate the world map on the throne room floor by adding the countries to the carpet as they are conquered. Once you conquer them all, encircled them all with the word Touria repeated over and over, or with the Tourian anthem.
I was waiting for the Catherine speech overhaul to do something in this regard. It just isn't as satisfying if I just had some small text show in that tiny bubble. ~Taiga
Comparing my experience to the Walkthrough, and it appears that the artifacts you pick up in any given location, as well as the enemies you fight at the first castle are randomly determined. The latter resulted, in my case, making that first castle impossible to defeat, because Ghosts, who can kill 10+ pikemen, arbalesters, or goblins, and 30+ pixies or peasants, in one hit, and whose numbers increase by every kill they make were one of the enemy stacks. I got slaughtered once, then came back two more times with full armies and was slaughtered twice more. By comparison, no Ghosts at the castle in the walkthrough. That randomness element can break what is otherwise a fine game, and that's no fun at all.
I second the complaint about the pacing of the game, and the pricing of the upgrades. You breeze through all the levels until the very last, and getting all the upgrades for all the characters except for the final upgrade to each weapon attribute is child's play. I'm all for final levels with challenging bosses, but not when the challenge comes out of nowhere, and not when the game gives you no indication that you'll need to grind out those last upgrades before you have a prayer of surviving the boss fight. Those aren't fun surprises.
Suggestion about something very minor: set your troop allocation function to round up or down to the nearest whole number. Whenever I send my forces off to attack a nation with a military force size ending in an odd number, I wind up bringing along 1/2 of a troop. That's rather disconcerting, and I'm sure that forcing my army to cart along with them a soldier who's been split in twain is detrimental to morale.
A suggestion about the way you have microtransactions set up. Players tend to prefer permanent bonuses to temporary ones, or at least the option of buying permanent bonuses instead of temporary ones. The choices you have available right now are all temporary. You're more likely to attract purchasers if you add some permanent options, or change them all to permanent.
The game is grindy...until you unlock the Metal Detector. The module's description is poor. Enemies not only drop more iron (they look like diamonds to me) but also more stars. Purchase 3xMetal Detectors and 5xDouble Drone Harvesters and you won't have any trouble buying whatever you need.
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Thanks for that. I fixed it and will be ok on the next version.