Top tip: buying armour heals you, making timing it vital to survival.
A nice idea, but at the moment there's too much luck here, not enough meaningful choices, and no gain from repeat plays.
Lovely atmosphere and touches - but it really is ruined by neglect of the basics of this kind of game - they've been around for decades now - it's not good enough just to use random point-and-click, arbitrarily to force you to speak to characters to open up new actions in zones, and generally fail to learn from thirty years plus of development - it's a GAME - doesn't matter how good it looks or feels if the fun, flow and sense are lacking - please spend much more time on this & make the sequels great....
My goodness me, but this is frighteningly hard. Almost as frightening as the fact that I'm still trying to win the hard badge after several hours of eye-blurring tunnel death...
Can we PLEASE have an Impossible badge for completing the two challenges? There are so few games good enough to deserve one - would be lovely to reward the blood & sweat put into one that really is worth playing that much....
Awesome stuff, thank you. I loved playing this: well-implemented, smart, slick, and really builds on a classic board game in intelligent rather than gimmicky ways. If everything on Kong was this good I'd never get anything else done....
Charming fun, and I rather like the absence of any control during combat: no silly, time-sucking rigmarole of combat to grind through again and again. It does seem, though, almost impossible to win outright the first season - and almost impossible not to become unbeatable soon after that - it rapidly becomes obvious which characters and training optimums are best, and then you rinse and repeat, getting hugely wealthy and buying every upgrade along the way - so it all becomes rote and ends much too fast. I really did enjoy it while the challenge lasted, though.
Tip for the hard badge completing the boss run: I found that the maxed out rocket weapon made this fairly easy due to its big damage level, and the fact that when upgraded it can take out enemy shots and the spinning blades.
Lovely stuff: an object lesson in good design, and in how to develop a good idea into something satisfyingly expanded, layered, but still deeply fun. Channelling the very best of the NES & SNES - can't wait to see what you do next :-)
Evidently influenced by PixelJunk Monsters, in the active character, trees & tower types - and that's no bad thing - finally someone taking innovations in the TD genre and applying them in an interesting way!
Hi: I'm Tom, the lead writer of all the words & philosophical content in the game. If you fancy asking me any questions, I've opened up a thread in the forum posts for it... :-)
I can never quite understand how a nice idea gets implemented in a way that even a small amount of thought and testing, surely, could have improved beyond this kind of execution. Anything entailing this level of arbitrary death and luck needs to be redone to deserve the kind of attention it's asking of players.
Would be such fun if you could scroll the screen; horrible to end a level randomly firing into the void off-screen. And why don't the teams fight each other?
Great fun; a lovely, increasingly frantic simplicity; and great use of historical setting. It seemed to work rather too well, though, to bulk buy opium during low pressure times at the start, then sell and frantically buy up tea at the end. Would be nice to have some ability to profit from tea. I'd love to see a fuller sequel with multiple levels, upgrade paths, etc, while retaining the same core click-tastic simplicity...
Enchanting: lovely to be drawn in simply by visual execution and attention to detail. Like turning the pages of an exquisite children's picture book, just as it should be. Gaming needs more of this kind of delight. Even if the ending is a little, er, sudden, and slightly breaks the spell...
Enjoyed this a lot. Slightly frustrated by how large an element chance seems to play in success or not: so many random elements, with random movements, dungeon content spawns, treasure, etc - just a bit too much watching and hoping rather than micro-managing and fine-tuning - but great fun nonetheless.
It's just a number, going up while you sit and watch. Not a game, barely a software toy. Depressingly little effort designing anything beyond a bare minimum, beyond the slight charm of the conceit.
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