Neat game. I think the difficulty jumps are a little abrupt. I alternated between periods of conquering city after city is a mad rush with periods of not being able to conquer anything, scrimping and saving for the next round of upgrades. I generally had to buy the Corporate Capacity upgrades before my income was high enough to *quite* cover the increased salaries, so I had to wait around for a few days to generate a nest-egg, take the upgrade then spend all the money allowed to upgrade my marketing and fill the gap. It would be helpful if hovering over the Corporate Capacity button told what the daily expenses will become if the upgrade is taken. Early in the game I ended up with a *major* deficit situation because I thought the increased salary would only apply to my new hires. Also, if you've hired all the employees that are currently allowed, the only way to figure out your employees' current salary is to count your employees and divide your daily expenses number.
I agree with other comments that level 10 is definitely the hardest - not level 11 or 12. From what people said about it, apparently people found a wide variety of ways to solve it too! One person suggested starting with the left light so you can jump to the start position after (I started with the right), and another person saying that they actually used recursion (a function invoking itself) - which I never would have guessed would work in this game - not that I tried.
I think it's a bug that the envyometer drains almost immediately as soon as the window you're looking at goes out. By the time I pan to the next window I'm lucky not to be starting from scratch. I'm giving up now even though this is the only thing between me and the Mardi Gras challenge. Maybe it's just a Mac bug? Dunno. Regardless, this is the sort of game I wouldn't play for the fun of it anyway, and since it seems unattainable, I'm done with it.
If SOPA passes, a more likely result will be that Kongregate will have to either shut down, or stop accepting game submissions from unknown programmers and comments from players. If charges were leveled that someone (player or developer) posted anything copyrighted, Kongregate could be shut down until they prove in court that it isn't true. Nothing that isn't thoroughly vetted by Kongregate could be posted.
The "Junk" button is a great feature. It took me a minute to figure out what "junking" items actually did, but it was great to be able to drop items from consideration. I also liked that new items appeared at the top of my inventory. I took a while to figure out that items that DON'T appear at the top of the list are ones that had already existed in my inventory, and longer to figure out that new items that didn't appear in my inventory at all had been junked because I had junked a matching item.
I probably would not have chosen to play a warrior if I had realized that I would have only one teammate throughout the game and that he would be a warrior (for diversity). I did find that my character ended up much stronger than his partner because the automatically-selected updates were not always well chosen. The NPC chose a number of nice special move abilities, but didn't have enough points to use them all, and lagged behind my player character in both offense and defense.
Very fun. We've been seeing a bunch of gem-swap match 3 games recently, so the row-sliding style comes as welcome variety. The "gotta match em all" achievement seems a little off. I fulfilled the requirements of the achievement, but I wonder if having all 24 matched tiles be of the same type is an unwritten requirement? Mine were 16 of one kind and 8 of the other. I don't want to fuss with trying to get 24 of one kind in one move... so the mystery remains.
After 50 jumps I've decided that the easy badge is not worth my time, let alone the BotD medium. People are suggesting that the "trick" is to make perfect launches, but there's no explanation of how those work and I haven't accidentally managed one. (I made the guess that you're supposed to stop running when the first gage is dead center, and start pressing up when the second gage is, but they both fill nearly instantly, and I haven't gotten close, so no testing that theory.) Maybe once you have monkeys and a big yellow bat to hit them with this game might get fun, but I'm no longer interested in grinding long enough to find out.
This game starts out fun, and starts to slow down. I got as much good play time as I might have from some very nice, shorter games, so I'd like to feel that I enjoyed the game. The problem is that it's hard to describe an experience as positive when it ends with frustration.
This type of game is, in the end, designed to frustrate players, and almost all will eventually quit feeling frustrated instead of victorious. As the game play slows down, players who are willing to spend the money can keep the game playable longer, but as the game's challenges become more demanding, more and more cash is required to continue. In the end, the spenders, too, will quit in frustration.
Nice game! If the developer gets a moment, it might be a good idea to rephrase the skill Architect description. It currently says "Decrease tower build speed", which is hopefully the opposite of what this skill does.
I'm running XP, Firefox, and flash 10.3. I got to level 4 where the water cooler is introduced, and it isn't working. When the 3x3 grid pops up showing water in the upper left, I click on it, and it tries to place the water cooler directly under where I clicked (on the 3x3 menu). As a result, I can only keep workers near where the menu pop-up allows me to place the machine. This may be a bug connected with the new Java version?
I think that the door bell and order station visual hint are being suppressed when a customer comes in just as I leave the front of the restaurant. Maybe this is an error, or maybe there's an assumption that I'm aware of the customer even if I didn't see them come in. One day I served my final customer of the day, and was confused when the day didn't end. I went out front, and discovered one of my grumpy "closers" standing there waiting to order.
I agree with the badge title. "Meh, close enough." If I needed to find all the combos to win the badge I might not have bothered. I have significantly more of these elements than was worth my while as it is. Maybe they should make a 60 point impossible badge for getting them all. It would be an interesting test of how willing Kongregate users are to endure tedium for points that don't actually buy us anything.
It doesn't matter whether you do well in the training mini-games - you just have to play more times to get the skills you need if you suck at them. The first and only time you have any minimum performance level to succeed is in the final race to win the game. The only real choice you make in the entire game is which type of duck you want, and that doesn't actually make that much difference. In the end, the player seems like an almost unnecessary part of the game.
A quick fame tip: You get more fame when graduating students with better weapons, so if you have money to spare, you can convert some of it to fame by upgrading your students' weapons - even right before you graduate them.
I started Endless Mode thinking there might be some progressive difficulty, but apparently it just continues until luck or carelessness trips you up. When I finally guessed wrong after 105 cases I was somewhat relieved. I wanted to see how far I would go, but after a while I was resisting the temptation to throw the case.
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