My experience: gets pretty laggy if left up for a while (e.g., overnight) in the late-game. What's worse, it makes my entire Chrome session lag, including any other Flash game I may be playing at the time.
@Skeelz98: Yep, several times. I find "shove them all in marketing" is a pretty decent use of my staff right now (after some AI upgrades), since achievements get me acumen without resets.
Great. There goes several days of progress because the game chose to load a several days-old cloudsave over what should have been a far more recent local one. Oh well, I guess I'm not getting all the bonuses and stuff.
@erythorban: You get four coins from voting per day - it has nothing to do with the number available to vote on. I've had days where I log on and click "vote" - and there's no puzzles, so I get my coins for free.
Two big critiques. First, it could benefit from some playtesting - get people to play it and tell them to ask questions. See what questions they ask. Some I suspect they would (because I had them): (1) "Can we jump on the enemies?" [Esp. since you don't have a weapon yet.] (2) "Will that lantern-thingy hurt me?" [Esp. right after, plausibly, dying to jumping on the enemy.] (3) "Are those spikes?" [It's unclear whether they are deadly or foreground, IMO.] The forgiving checkpoint mechanic makes it easy enough to learn those lessons, but the game would be better for making those more immediately clear through some subtle hints. Second, the controls feel a bit clunky. The weapon is a bit slow to swing, and since it moves you forward a little bit, I can "jump and swing" and fall off an edge on the way back down (or ascend to a higher edge) in a way that doesn't make it immediately clear why I fell (it took me most of the game it realize why). That said, still a good game overall, so 4/5.
Minor issue: The "Monster Breeder" quest just tracks total level, not relevant level, so, e.g., I have 120% completion right now for the second one, because two are above 25 and the third is under.
Minor bug: if you defocus and come back in, sometimes the controls wonk up. E.g., if you're holding left when you defocus, but not when you refocus, then you will continue moving left regardless of your control scheme. (The same thing will often happen if you're directing a joystick when you plug a controller into a console; something to do with a bootup = neutral assumption.) Still, good game, 5/5.
Holes in the wall to stop brick-against-wall problems = instant 5/5. Agreed with other comments that it's easy and rather generic, but anti-frustration features (for non-death frustration) seriously needs to be encouraged.
Needs a "reset to beginning of level" option for player levels. Too many levels where you can get stuck and can't die because you can't go back a room.
FINALLY beat the expert level. A little laggy here and there, but not so much as to have the aggravation exceed the legitimately enjoyable challenge, so 5/5 regardless.
Balance suggestion for permanent upgrades: don't have them all scale the same. In particular, some (e.g., multishot targets) are particularly valuable due to their expense/in-game scaling, so perhaps having these "significant" upgrades up by one every time instead of every 5 is justified.
4/5: 5/5 for design, -1 for sloppy execution. Good graphical look. Innovative puzzles. However: Lags a bit - problem with garbage collection, I think. Slippery controls. Star method makes R for reset a necessity, which this game lacks.