I know some element of "AI cheating" is necessary in games like this, but when all my upgrades are level 3 or higher, and I'm still fighting tooth and nail to place *3rd* on the first course, something's gone horribly wrong.
Unplayably laggy when there's lots of units on the screen, which means most missions starting with allies you have to wait until they're all dead before being able to contribute to the battle at all.
Great, so I hold onto the warp core through all the main stages, only to find that I still can't use it for *whatever it does* until I beat the boss run, at which point there's no point in using it for anything since you've already done it all? Screw that-- I should have sold it at the beginning and sped up the journey!
Very fun game, but the green 'random ally/mace' stages really make the game grind to a halt in later levels, by removing 90% of the customization that makes the game so fun. Focused on food income, or mana efficiency? Too bad! You didn't upgrade turtles or monkeys, so your progress is brought to a screeching halt until you go back and farm up another 250k gold to invest into them!
-1 for the boss fight. Not only are you forced to wait through his pattern before damaging him at all (even if you 'trick' him into your shots he takes no damage), but you can only hit him once per rotation, encouraging you to waste ammo from your rapid-fire gun before you discover this. And since you have to spend so much time in the boss fight -waiting-, all the Gun Power upgrade does is adds another chunk of cash that you have to accumulate before beating the game is possible.
I've been waiting for another good game along the lines of Motherload to come out. Unfortunately, this game suffers from too many flaws to live up to its potential.
1) The interface is slow and unintuitive (hitting Esc brings up a 'restart' confirmation that requires the mouse in a keyboard-driven game)
2) The pixel-art font makes all the dialogue slow and cumbersome to deal with (not to mention the huge "PUSH X" plastered over everything, when I had to refer to the page instructions to find C cancels)
3) The upgrades top out far too quickly -- you pretty much have to max Coolant in order to finish the last few quests.
4) Speaking of quests, only the first few mention how many of anything you need to collect to complete, and it's all-or-nothing. "Only have 19 rubies in your full hull? Too bad-- I want 20! You have to sell them all and start over!"
Unfortunately, all the enjoyment of the game that had built up to that point bled out once I reached the live wire course-- way too tedious for this style of game :(
Strategy has nothing to do with it, when you scout every single square on the board and no daimyo turns up. Random "you lose" on top of a completely luck-based game to begin with.
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