Alright, I have to disagree with gijsenij. I just got the 175k/hard mode badge, and focusing on sending in waves doesn't really increase your score in any real way. What increases your score is combos, and combos have nothing to do with how many enemies get hit/killed at a time, they occur when a single enemy gets hit by multiple traps right in a row. Thus I recommend "point farms"; palm trees and sideways swings going diagonally upward (or downward w/ log traps). You have one trigger at the beginning (end w/ logs) and link them all up so enemies get knocked up, over, up, over, and so on. Have a couple of these going across the field. Then slap a number of hot coal pits at the end to finish enemies after you've 'extracted' points, so to speak. Idk, on my 1st attempt using that method, even when it was very messy and experimental, I still easily got the badge after failing it by a long shot multiple times trying to just spam in waves as fast as I could.
I'm confused. Nobody else seems to be saying this, so I have to ask; is there a way to pause so you can lay down traps without enemies continuing to roll through? Because being in an absurd rush to lay down traps, leading to placing them wrong, is a great way to mess everything up. Again, nobody else seems to be saying a single thing about the issue though, which I doubt would be the case if you were truly expected to just lay down traps on the fly as waves kept rolling in. I realize that the game pauses itself when you're doing linkage, but that's exactly why I'd assume being able to pause/set traps otherwise wouldn't be any problem...
Wow, the first 4 challenges are an absolute cinch. I ran through them without even getting close to dying. Then suddenly you get to the 5th one and it's god damn ridiculous. Even with nothing at all producing smog, by the first night you're still at around 400, and they just swarm you.
My primary issue is ok, so we stick to the closest magnet...except just kinda guessing which magnet will be close enough at a given point in the level doesn't work, and all it takes is a single unexpected switch to mar an attempt. We're often working pretty quickly, we don't have time to sit there carefully examining magnet layout in relation to us, and being forced to guess where a magnet's influence starts/ends works directly against the forethought many levels require . What should really have been is that the entire thing was mouse controlled, with the magnet closest to THE MOUSE being the active one. There are other smaller issues, but imo that's the real game-breaking one.
Alright, anyways, the ability to drop costumes would be nice for one primary reason; for some reason the dev decided to make a ninja bomb take, like, 10 seconds to detonate after getting stuck to an enemy, so you're often better off with regular bombs. See, enemies can sort of hurt us, and we're timed, so taking that long to die is really a problem. Seeing as regular bombs knock down flying enemies then land next to them, again you're often much better off without. Others like the bee costume and penguin costume confer some situational disadvantages, but far, far less than the ninja costume. Lastly, making people play through the game 2 times to unlock the highest difficulty is insane. Nobody (aside from me, because I have a lot of issues I won't go into ATM) will want to do that. Make it so you can access hard mode originally. Playing through twice to get all stars is still a bit of a stretch, but it's way, way more realistic than 3 times.
Alright, it's ok, but a few things; first off, I found that as the game went on it actually got significantly less enjoyable; the problem is that by the 3rd and 4th area, you're barely actually using bombs anymore. Imo that robs the game of a lot of its appeal. It just converts into an uneventful platformer when one of the more enjoyable elements originally, at least imo, was the strategy required to efficiently use bombs. Secondly, the way that costumes work is very, very annoying; not only should there be a button to pick up costumes, but there should be one to drop them as well. Having to dodge costumes lest they switch out and force me to just sit there waiting until it cools off and I can switch back get pretty frustrating pretty fast. Man these boxes are small, I need to use another one...
Hehe, yeah, I'll dive into her matrix alright...then again I'm sort of wondering if that wasn't already an implied joke, so I might have been beaten to it. If that's the case then ignore me.
Yeah, some of these levels are actually exactly the same as the first one. I got that feeling at first, but then when I came upon level 14 I knew it fo' sho. I remember that level well.
Alright, it was fairly fun. The only problem I have is that the cursor thinger gets caught really, really easily. It needs to be able to slide past things a bit better. It also would've been nice if it was a bit longer; I felt like we were just getting into the swing of things by the end.
Hey, for all those other curious people out there, unfortunately the purple light at the end of levels is nothing. At one point I tried flying all the way out and just before I transported back I saw a boss health bar flash up, which made me think there must've been a secret boss. I made it my mission to find it. Well, after eventually restarting the game just to figure out what that was, I loaded up on fuel and flew all the way out. About another 2/3 of a progress bar above the actual bar your ship stops and a boss health bar appears...but it never fills up and nothing appears. You just sit there. I was pretty disappointed, needless to say. Why the heck not have us auto-transport back a little bit after beating the last boss rather than leaving us hanging like that? And most of all why the hell have that purple light if there's nothing there? Way to lead us on...
Oh yeah, and one thing about the star ratio and the gears; since the gears count as ore (this I'm positive of at this point) and thus allow you to get unlimited ore essentially, keep in mind that if you didn't have a lot of stars, you'd wind up running out if you were stuck somewhere, as I'm not actually sure that enemies drop stars forever. At first they do, but I think once all the stars in a galaxy are gone they don't do so anymore. Regardless, you need all those stars. At first it may seem like a lot, but I'd rather have excess stars than need to restart the game any time I got stuck without proper items.
Ok, now I'm almost positive that the gears count as ore. Last level I was in a galaxy with zero ore, so I know I didn't collect any, and yet it still says I got a number of ore, so I'm assuming that's the case.
I think the gears might possibly count as ore, so they'd be like ore only dropped from enemy ships. That's always where they come from, and I can't see any other purpose, but it does seem like when I pick up a lot of gears my ore count winds up being way higher than I'd anticipated.
Tack shooters upgraded into sawblade launchers, with maxed range, seriously pwns face. I played all the way through and got the hard badge using 100% sawblade launchers and rocket launchers. Well, there was a monkey beacon in there, but still. The thing is that overall when comparing potential popping power per (alliteration ftw?) tower vs. cost, upgraded tack shooters are rather efficient. Yeah, a fully upgraded super monkey may destroy way more balloons, but you could buy, like, 8+ fully upgraded tack shooters for that...
Oh yeah, and just as I said that last comment; I'm up by 2.1k, at 10k on the mark. On the last roll cautious gets 3 free rolls in a row and beats me 11100 to 10k, moments after I literally said to myself "there's no way they're going to beat me here. This time I'm finally going to win. I'd lose my damn mind if they freaking somehow pulled this off". Well, I lost my mind. I'm leaving. Screw this. I'd say screw the developer too for making such an ungodly frustrating game, but they're already kinda dead, so I suppose I'm not allowed to say anything mean about them.
This bullshit is rigged man. Rigged. I play EXACTLY the same as cautious, and yet it beats me every time. Last game I was like "Alright, well I'm up by about 3k, only 600 more to go to win, this should be no problem". Well, it was a problem. It's cool, because the game before that the computer scored 5k in one turn then 2.5k in the next, leaving me at 2.9k points and him at 9.7. I was honestly tempted to pull out a pad of paper to record rolls in order to definitively determine that it was rigged, but then I realized I'm being a god damn lunatic and stopped myself.
Alright, there's a fine line between requiring a reasonable amount of luck vs. essentially being a glorified slot machine, based 100% on luck. Most of the challenges are the latter. Oh, and to thesecondzohan, the primary theme was always supposed to be the idea that humans are caught up in their own lives, never considering the horrors that lie just beyond their sights. Humans were never pawns; in his stories they're generally just weak, oblivious little nothings that often meddle in things far beyond their comprehension. Saying randomness has anything to do with it is a huge stretch. No, the game captures the meaning of the stories by often having the player themselves being harmed by their magic just as much as their opponent due to humans lacking the capacity to control such immeasurable forces. I think the randomness is just an annoying result of poor planning on the dev's part.
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