Brick Breaker

I posted this in the forum, figure it makes for a good enough review..

Wait, you can lose?
Why make a lose condition? I was hardcore cheating with an autoclicker and only lasted 12 minutes, then boom you lose your save file and have to start from zero?
I thought this was like an idle game where you could go forever and maybe prestige and stuff?
I'm kinda lost for words here, is this the intended gameplay, about 12 minutes till the difficulty just becomes too hard that it's impossible to continue? Or is there some upgrade I was missing? I maxed out click damage and was clicking like 100 times per second with an auto clicker, then put the rest into the ball upgrade.. I have no idea how I am meant to play better than that?

Not recommended.

This game is a clicker / wall breaker hybrid with a bunch of design decisions which do not work together at all.

In a nutshell, the game punishes strong strategies, where strong stands for good damage output and beating levels fast. Instead, you need to increase damage output juuuust enough to stay ahead of the level difficulty while spending a good amount of time on each level. The more time you spend on a given level, the more of the two currencies, BC and EXP, you will generate there. Literally the best strategy is to forever stay on a level with a few immune bricks in the center. Those bricks will periodically spawn standard bricks which your ball swarm farms for BC. Manually kill the immune bricks that super rarely spawn. At the same time, the clock keeps ticking, giving you that sweet automatic exp. Just dump all of it into increased BC reward and you have completed the strategy the game wants you to follow.


A few more design decisions really help sour the player's mood:

Manual clicking sucks. You need it to progress when bricks are immune to all your balls and to pick off stones that have reached the border. But click damage per second is capped. Combine this with failed level designs like level 108 where your ball swarm cannot help you and you are basically screwed.

You cannot go back to earlier levels to farm. So if you save on a killer level you cannot overcome, there is no recovering that savegame and you have to start over from the beginning.

This is just a nit pick, but the game doesn't tell you how many balls of each type you have, making it harder to balance the damage types.

The game over mechanic. Seriously. Die and you simply restart at your last save. And the game over screen deliberately drags out displaying the load save button to rub in the defeat as much as it can. Any resources you gained and upgrades you bought since you last saved are obviously gone.

The game does not save the sound settings AND some sounds always play, ignoring those settings. The sound settings also go back to "everything switched on" when you die and continue from the last save.

No windowed mode.

If the Dev balances and fixes a few things then will be good value for a dollar.
OK concept, clicker more than Auto Battler - Some issues:
Some sound effects are too loud: like the game over sound
The first boss had an ability that froze all the balls, it's blank white screen and very annoying to look at, not fun getting flash-banged when playing a game.
Seems like quite a grind (as most idle games are) but needs too much clicking - can't rely on balls alone, at least in the first 30 mins. So much clicking had to stop.