Incremental Dice

I wanted to like this game, because most of the elements of a good incremental game are there. However, it does not respect your time. You can build up all of the money to buy a certain tier of die but then you have to sit there and wait literally hours for one die to build, when you need several die of that tier to ascend. You then ascend, and are rewarded with very minor meta-upgrades and the cycle repeats. Right now I am on Ascension 24, waiting for a tier 20 die. My tier 17 die currently takes over 2 hours to build, I can't imagine how long the tier 20 die will take - and there is NOTHING else to do during that time. It also seems as if you can choose the "wrong" upgrades when ascending, which makes me think it should be reworked into a skill tree with a reset feature. There is no way of knowing which upgrades you will be able to choose in the future, or what the next ascension's requirements will be, so you cannot make meaningful upgrade choices. If you don't choose the autobuyer/autoupgrade upgrades when ascending then the only other way to speed up building a die is through "meta dice" which are poorly explained and take far too long to farm, while only cutting the build time in half. If you want a good incremental game that actually respects your time, play Nodebuster or The Gnorp Apologue or To The Core.

There's a lot of potential here, but sadly the game isn't worth it in it's current state. It does start out as really fun, especially when you're blowing through ascensions and figuring out how the game works, but once you get to a certain point, progress grinds to a halt. The core concept of the game is, buy dice, merge dice, roll dice, repeat. It's an extremely simple, yet addicting game play loop. There appears to be 29 tier of dice, but the highest I've made it to is Tier 18. Each tier of dice takes 2 of the previous tier. You eventually unlock an auto buy and auto upgrade feature, but they are dreadfully slow (I think auto buy is 1 tier 1 every 8 seconds, and auto upgrade is 1 upgrade every 12 seconds at it's base). You can upgrade these to work faster, but it's a waste because you're missing out on income upgrades which are sorely needed to push higher ascensions. At some point you unlock an auto-buy feature, which allows you to automatically buy and merge one dice of whatever tier you click, and it's the fastest way to both buy and merge dice, rendering the previous two upgrades completely useless. For example, one Tier 17 dice takes me 1 hour and 8 minutes to make with auto buy, but when I left the game running for 10 hours while I went to work with just auto buy/upgrade running, I came back to 1 tier 12 dice. Herein lies the core problem of the game: it gets dreadfully boring once you have to start waiting for merges. I'm currently on Ascension 24, which means I need exactly 1 Tier 20 dice in order to progress the game. There are 30 ascensions total I believe, so I'm almost through the game. The main issue here is, it's going to take an egregiously long time to complete this ascension. Tier 20 dice need approximately 524,288 Tier 1 dice to merge. in my 95 hours of game play, I have purchased 455.70k dice TOTAL. There is NO way to speed this up, or to upgrade your starting tier of dice (so being able to instantly buy tier 3 dice instead of tier 1 or something), plus when you are buying and merging you have to wait for the animation to complete. The only way to affect this process is a random power up you can get which doubles the in game speed, but the power up requires you to be actively paying attention so you can click on it. When I have to start waiting 20 hours between dice, I'm not going to be looking at the game. This brings up my 2nd biggest issue with the game: Active play isn't rewarded nearly enough for an incremental (not idle) game. There are a few bonuses that appear when you play actively. A single golden dice will appear from time to time, and clicking on it will reward you with the aforementioned 2x game speed power up. The golden dice is exceedingly rare, and the power up only lasts I think 2 minutes total. The more common event is several golden dice appearing, and clicking on those will get you what's called "Meta Dice," which are a way to give you bonuses which I'll talk about shortly. The last is a little dice guy showing up who will allow you to buy 3 Meta dice, and 3 temporary power ups if you click on him. All of these events require active playing, and they're also the *only* way to get Meta Dice, which are the only way you're going to be able to push later ascensions. Meta dice are also worth mentioning. They're really fun in concept, but they're so exceedingly rare, and consumable, to the point you have to worry about using them up. There's also no in game explanation on how they function apart from their description, so you *have* to experiment with them to figure out how they work. Normally this would be okay, and part of the fun, but the issue is that they're *rare*, and *consumable*. The multi-golden dice event that appears only gets you 2 random meta dice every time. If you close the game and come back later, you're rewarded with a random 2 (or maybe 3?) meta dice. And the shop guy lets you buy 3. The meta dice function by playing them in a 3x7 board, where certain dice synergize with each other, and increase the score you get by rolling them. It's a very fun feature, but the dice need to be MUCH more plentiful, and there has to be a way to get them consistently. My last issue is, there's just nothing to do once you start approaching endgame. As I mentioned, I am currently waiting for a Tier 20 dice so I can proceed. One Tier 17 takes an hour and 8 minutes, which means I'm going to have to wait a *total* of 8 hours to get the die I need. I have 6 ascensions left, and the "have x number of Tier y dice" usually jump 3 tiers, and sometimes you need more than one. If one ascension needs 2 Tier 23 dice, as an example, this would take approximately 72.5 HOURS to complete. 72 hours of just sitting and letting the game run, unable to do anything to speed it up even slightly. The game needs more work, desperately. I would love to see an easier way to get Meta dice, and definitely a way to accumulate them automatically, instead of requiring attention. I would have also loved to see some sort of passive upgrade system, like a shop of some kind. Some way to increase your starting dice tier, so instead of starting on Tier 1 every time, you can start on tier 2 or 3. It could also have upgrades for increasing your income, the likelihood of higher rolls, the crit multiplier, etc. The possibilities are endless. I'd also love to see the animation of merging dice removed or drastically sped up. This is the reason you have to wait so long for upgrades (well, that and the fact you need to buy half a million tier 1 dice). So yea, tl;dr is: it's fun for the first dozen hours, but once you start being gated by not having any Meta dice, or having to wait 8 hours for a single upgraded dice, the game gets beyond stale.

Extremely slow with no strategy to plan. Upgrades are select 2 from list of 2 - 4 per ascension. Each ascension is either reach x total, y highscore or z tier of dice. Which take literally 10+ hours at the final few ascensions of just waiting for slow purchases and merges to occur, even though you have enough money to pay for the entire process... Needs proper skill upgrades rather than this select 2 nonsense. Needs instant purchases if you can afford them. Needs some real choices beyond the facade of a game.