Hard mode may have been fun if you added a "pause animation" button or something... as is, things move WAY too fast in some of the levels, making the whole thing more irritating than anything else.
gem combines are rather stupid - you get a slight boost to the average value. it should be a boost to the highest value, based on the quality of the other two gems (otherwise it's entirely possible to combine e.g. a tier 7 gem with 36 energy into a tier 8 gem with 34)
annoying bug: you don't respawn at the monster that killed you or the nearest heal-point, but the last heal-point that healed you. however, now that you're at full health, you don't get healed by the nearest heal-point, so getting killed over and over again means having to run halfway across the map time and again...
overall a pretty weak addition to the genre - it's too easy to accidentally move your mouse out of the window, resulting in poor controls, the flight view is way too small so you operate more by luck than any sort of skill, lack of different TYPES of upgrades make progression seem weak (e.g. i can't suddenly buy some sort of bird-shooting gun, or magnets, or a radar, or...), and overall i am bored by it, and only playing because of the badges.
the crafting system is... weird. why does a cyan neutrino barrel require yellow-circle crafting components? needing to hunt and peck to find what upgrades what is annoying! maybe add a little preview image of what can be made with the inserted pieces, even when it's not complete yet?
kicking you back to the map and forcing to go through the whole rigmarole again when you die = insanely annoying, especially when you die with full health when falling into a pit (with all the additional animations, it takes an extra 10 seconds per death) - why not just respawn at the last checkpoint immediately? i can always go back to the map from the menu
pro-tip 1: pause the game as soon as it starts to build at leisure.
pro-tip 2: once you get the miner ships, don't bother building anything else - spam them, they produce *so many* resources that you can keep rebuilding them AND create a titanic infrastructure off the income.
art: 5/5
gameplay: 2/5
speed: 1/5 (BattleChess taught us that gorgeous combat that takes too long to actually watch is unplayable back in the early '90s. FF7 reminded us of this problem. Apparently some people still haven't learned that lesson)
PVP: 1/5
Bugginess: 1/5 (I can't even finish the tutorial in one go!)
Money-grabbiness: 1/5
overall: 1/5
Dull, repetitive, and one of the worst-designed interfaces I've seen in a while... (I can't compare items to the ones I have equipped? I need to click Close in combat to access most of the menus? the ginormous game window is cluttered with huge objects placed in random locations? counter-intuitive placement of things - e.g. instead of having one merchant that sells everything, you have Merchant for equipment but Coraline for bait, which took a while to figure out, etc, etc)
also, level 40 boss kills me for no apparent reason - are the projectile tails really THAT long? (i'm behind him, he finished shooting 10 seconds ago, and suddenly i die)
boss fights are ridiculous. no health indicator for the player (3 hearts too much to ask for?), and the score + boss hp indicator block out the top+bottom of the screen and you're *behind* them, which makes dodging... interesting.
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