Nanostorm

This one is a little rough around the edges, but in the end I had fun. Oh, and I probably should say that I got a key from the developer.

The idea is simple: it takes the incremental pseudo-idlers such as Nodebuster and makes it instead a pretty active 2D side scrolling shooter. Enemies drop essence, you use it to upgrade your sh*t between stages, further stages have essences that are worth more. Apart from essence value, the only difference between stages is what enemies you'll find there and in what amount; you can't go back once you beat a stage - but that's not a problem.

What is a problem is, well... the pacing isn't all that good. Towards the end of the game it slows down a little bit too much, and the game is roughly 10-15 stages longer than it should be. But don't get me wrong, incremental games run into this issue all the time and almost none of them get it right. This one gets it wrong, but not by a whole lot.

The weapon progression is a little weird, too. You have three general weapon types and you can choose which one you select for a given stage. The latter weapons are pretty clearly superior, but... not initially. There will be a moment when getting the new weapon is about as expensive as upgrading your current one, but you won't be getting much value if you decide to get a new one. They're more like investments, you could say. Buy them, upgrade them, and only then switch. It's weird.

The prices and upgrades are weird in general, too. Feels like not that much playtesting has been done, which, honestly, I can't blame the dev for. This is clearly a small passion project. Some tweaks are in order, and luckily for everyone involved, this part of the development process is relatively painless. So perhaps we'll get a rebalance patch down the line.

(also, dev, if you're reading this, they weren't kidding with the "teenager trying to be seductive" stuff. I suggest adjusting the volume levels on some lines and adding some strong filter to make it sound more robotic or aetheral, the lines themselves are fine)

Don't come here expecting some kind of epic space opera. This is a small game to chill out after a long day. Treat it as such, and you'll have a nice time.


Curator Page

It's not incredibly polished, but it's a short, fun incremental shooter. Start out with a slow laser, terrible movement, and no special abilities, end as a rainbow afterimage screen-clearing contra spreadshot spamming god as you smash through screens full of enemies, trying to finish the game and get off the planet. decent skill tree, until pretty late in the game most runs, even failed ones, should net you enough to buy some kind of upgrade each time, and towards the end you can really earn a stupid amount per run that the grind is pretty small.

nitpicks, mostly trivial ones, but still:

- Upgrade menu does not have a "start mission" button, you have to move down to get to the start mission button
- no controller mapping menu ingame
- making it so the default spot on the skill tree isn't the laser, so hitting buttons when you game over/finish a mission doesn't weapon-swap you to it would be nice(or having an option in-mission for swapping weapons on the fly would be fun)
- the weird ASMR-style voice of the dude who tells you about powerups you pick up and stuff, an option to disable that or have a robot voice or something would be nice. I don't like it
- being able to skip past things like the mission clear window(or hitting a button speeds it up at least) would be fantastic
- similarly, a quick mission restart option would be great. on the missions with the bosses involved, if I botch it after using some bombs and such, I tend to just quit out and restart the mission fully stocked. being able to do so without having to go back to the skill tree would be nice.
- the biggest issue, enemies spawn in right on top of you sometimes and can just instagib you with no recourse, most common with the large asteroids. some kind of bubble around the player that prevents spawning would be ideal

I know this seems like a ton of complaints, but it's a pretty great game for only $3!

While the game hasn't been out long enough to beat it, I am a caregiver for cats and ended up getting over there an hour late due to being addicted to Nanostorm. That's the sign of a good game and all you need to know.