Astro Prospector

I hate this game... A lot... Like a lotta lot.
So why am I recommending it?

It's not what I expected when I bought a pack of incremental games. I was expecting, y'know... chill idle games. This isn't one of those.
Instead it's one of those bullet hell games where you spend your entire time struggling to navigate between massive beams of death all around you. Or lot's of little beams. Or circles, or asteroids.
You're trying to get resources to upgrade, there's a lot of upgrades, new weapons, power ups. You eventually get damn powerful. But even then... it's still really hard.

The game occasionally insults you if you play badly, telling you to look at the screen. This is another thing I hate in games. Don't pull the piss out of me when I'm playing badly, I don't enjoy that.

But.... I have to mark this as recommended... because I know a lot of people love these things, and I know I will be recommending this to friends who like this. It plays well, it does what it's supposed to, I only found a single bug.
I won't be getting every achievement, because the last boss is absolutely horrifying. But I did manage to beat the boss, that's enough for me.

The single bug I found, was that the game locks the cursor to the screen, even when you tell it to stop doing that. To unlock it, you have to relock it, then unlock it again. Not really a bug with the game itself. But pretty annoying for myself.

If you play it, I hope you enjoy it more than I did.
Thanks for reading, or skipping to the end.
Have a lovely day. <3

I don't review games. Ever. I think I did a random meme review for the steam achievement and that's it. That being said, I had to review this game. This game is so amazingly well done. I have played many incremental games and I am really bad at bullet hells, but this game blends them together perfectly.

1) The "hell" in bullet hell ramps up slowly, so you don't feel overwhelmed at all. I feel like I had more than enough practice as things got harder and never felt a level was impossible.
2) To follow the feeling impossible bit, the incremental removes that fear. "Shucks, died to the boss again, let me go spend my money and take another crack at it!". I haven't run out of upgrades while unable to beat a level, so I know there is more room to get stronger and the boss is still beatable.
3) The upgrades. Wow. I love the skill tree. Not only does it keep the game fresh, but it gives choices and makes seems to pace the game EXTREMELY well. I have never had a game where I am thinking to myself "yeah but it would be really cool if.... oh, that is a thing. Awesome!"

This game feels like a passion project that was built *incrementally* (heh). Like the devs played the game and kept adding to it as they played. Built the train tracks while they rode the train, so to speak. It's really well done.

Amazing job. Amazing game!

Finally, some meaningful variety in the incremental game genre! So far we've had clickers and idlers which then spawned Survivor-like hybrids such as nodebuster... and Astro Prospector takes these but makes it a bona fide bullet hell game instead. Bullet... heck?

Yeah, let me mention the difficulty real quick. You need to pay attention, this isn't a game that you can zone out to. I consider myself somewhat crap at bullet hell games, I can't beat a single Touhou game - and I found it high, but manageable. Later on you get real danmaku (one of the recurring bosses is outright called Kaguya) - including a danmaku that is literally just "F*CK YOU!!!" in bullets. Definitely a moment!

For what its worth, your hitbox is tiny, so once the bullets start helling you'll often find yourself narrowly dodging stuff all the time. There are tools to clear the screen and you can upgrade your ship to be able to take a lot of hits - but still, you -will- have to dodge. I got stuck at a certain boss, some people got stuck at the final boss (which I found relatively easy); point is - skill is mandatory. No amount of upgrades will cruise you past incompetence.

The upgrades themselves aren't too crazy, but they're not bog-standard either. There's enough tactical width to keep things varied - and all weapons bar the screen clearer fire automatically/situationally, so you can focus on dodging bullets and collecting loot. Oh, and collecting Flow Rings. That's a very interesting mechanic.

A Flow Ring appears every few seconds (by default). They don't do much by themselves, but a lot of your upgrades give you mid-run bonuses for every ring. +2 base damage per ring, +3% to final loot multiplier, a layer of shield every X rings and so on. And that's what keeps the game, heh, flowing. Mixing dodging bullets, collecting stuff and going after rings like a 90s gaming mascot and there you go, all juices flowing at optimal levels.

And should you beat the game, turns out there's a completely separate second game in here - "Endless Coffee", which takes upgrades from the base game and turns the whole thing into a roguelike. I'm not going to talk about it because it's a completely different thing - but it's also lovingly made, and an excellent place to continue playing after beating the main mode.

What's that, completion stats? 56% beat the main game. That is an outstanding result, and it's also all I have to say. Enjoy!

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