Outhold

This game is a great game, and I love the idea of the game, but my issue with it is the length of how many levels there are. There are only 10 levels, and the demo is 1/3 of the entire game. When this game grows to have more levels, it will be a lot more enjoyable.

[h2]This is a weird review[/h2] The game designer in me loves this. The systems are awesome, the resources and how to collect them are great, the aesthetic is minimalistic but polished, the game can be played in quick bursts. The player in me hates this. Grind-style Incremental games are really annoying, as I hate spending thousands to millions of a resource for 0.1% more of some ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Grinding and replaying "the same level" with multiple goals is annoying - I'm not a completionist. The above two paragraphs are literally dichotomies. I don't think I've ever ran into a game that equally balanced the scales for me. I would usually find something that I appreciate in both design and play, but for this game, I don't know man. [h1]Other kinda random thoughts[/h1] [list] [*]Despite advertising an "incremental" genre, there's very low content depth [*]I'd put this game at 5$, not 7$ [*]Grind-style Incremental games are not my jam. I prefer Scale-style Incremental. [*]Reached end game in about 3 hours. Fell asleep for 3 hours (during demo, Steam hours is incorrect). [*]I don't know if I'll play it again. [*]I experimented a little bit, and saw 80% of what this game can offer [*]Music is fantastic but only during bosses or endgame. Wish the normal music was awesome too. [*]I'm not a fan of the disorganized skill tree. Made it challenging to track nodes in a macro scale. [*]That said, there was good quality of life features to make it easy to track nodes in a micro scale. [*]The demo made it seem like there was a lot more to the game, only for there to be one more new feature. [/list] But I actually still recommend the game. The designer in me loves the systems and how they interact with each other; though the player in me wishes there was a lot more. I am hoping the devs find a way to appeal to turret defense players more. Mixing genres behind skill-walls can cause players of either genre to lose enjoyment. I immediately felt the incremental part of the game during the demo and wasn't sure if I wanted to buy it. But as I played through the demo, interesting stuff kept getting unlocked and I was sold. Then I bought the game, played like two more levels, and realized there was no more interesting stuff. That felt bad. I've never thought I'd say that I feel scammed from a Demo. I hope to see more content.

I want to like this game, but the upgrade map is mostly an illusion of choice. The game is more of a min/max puzzle. You have to puzzle solve the correct upgrades to complete each challenge, which is the only way to get more upgrades. In the beginning there is a fair amount of choice in what towers and upgrades you can win with, but as you progress you will realize that you either need luck or nearly the exact correct choices to complete the run. This isn't an inherently negative way to add difficulty, but its not fun, at least not for me. I like picking towers and seeing which ones work better and which are worse, and some choices should and will fail. This game doesn't work that way. It's mostly a minimum threshold of upgrades, and then you can win. It doesn't feel like skill or choice. Once you beat the final level, you are allowed to complete additional challenges, but these are "thread the needle" challenges. At this point the only challenge is picking the correct combination of upgrades or you lose, which makes most upgrades useless. The skill wall switches to checking the correct boxes. You just need to figure out which upgrades to turn on or off to win. I would recommend this game to players who like to min/max with trial and error.