Vostok Inc.

Don't let the trailer fool you - this is a cookie clicker game; not much in the way of good gameplay sadly.

Not a terrible way to pass time but certainly not particularly engaging.

Also, DO NOT buy this unless you have a controller to play it with, keyboard is a mess.

Vostok Inc. is the combination of a mediocre SHMUP and a mediocre idle/incremental game.

Edit to add detail:

A lot of my play time was spent idling to gain cash since you don't gain cash when the game is off and it would take a lot of grinding to advance. If the grind is fun, then I'm OK with grinding. It is not fun in this game.

Travelling is tedious, and you have to do it constantly to upgrade buildings on different planets. I'd like for either a) travelling to be more fun or b) to be able to upgrade without travelling.

The camera is awful. Most of the time my ship would be at the leading edge of the screen while travelling so I couldn't see what was coming. Often times I'd be surprised by colliding with an enemy and dying instantly.

So many times my view would be obscured by text or a results window (after a challenge) while enemies are attacking. If you're going to force an unskipable results window in front of the view then at least make it so enemies don't spawn while it's being shown.

The weapon variety was good, but I found most of them to be useless. If there's a variety of weapons to choose from then I'd prefer to be able to pick the weapon that fits any given situation rather than just select the most powerful (which is a gun that fires unicorns in this game).

There are a lot of upgrades for buildings that are expensive yet completely useless because if you can afford them then you can afford better buildings/upgrades that produce way more. So I think that the idle portion of the game needs to be re-balanced.

It's a great game that mixes two genres quite organically. Get it if you own a gamepad, otherwise the controls feel a bit clumsy on PC.

Video, if you'd rather watch

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wx8FaYbM6cM

About The Game

Vostok Inc. is a peculiar mix between an incremental game (think realm grinder) and shoot-em-up. In this game, you fly your ship and try to establish an intergalactic corporation. You go from planet to planet, build buildings and fight enemies while in space.
The freshness of the idea contributes to an engaging gameplay: you can spend your money on making your ship stronger or build your colonies. You get money by killing enemies, but the planetary bases give much more resources, and you can’t both at the beginning. This creates an interesting balancing/optimization choices for the player. Go for the first, and have a strong ship, but not enough passive income. Go for the second, and be richer, but have harder time surviving enemy encounters.

Battles

Speaking of enemy encounters: they are pretty straightforward. If you go through the space, you meet various enemies (depending on the galaxy you are in). They will chase you and shoot at you, and if you die: you must get to your base in an escape pod or you end up losing money / middle managers that improve your production output by a percentage. The battle controls are similar to other twin-stick shooter games: one stick to move, another to shoot. The player can have up to four weapons that can be switched between each other. The weapon system is different from the other games of shoot-em-up genre: your ships has three weapon slots. There are three possible weapons: beam, bullet, rocket. By combining those weapons, you get a new weapon type.

The shooting actually feels great: the bullet collisions are clearly visible and understandable, the enemies explode in a spectacular way and your bullets make nice sounds. On the down side, most weapons feel redundant or unnecessary: I’ve progressed in the game by mostly using bullet weapons. Other ones just did not feel powerful or did not help to solve any specific problems with the enemies: you don’t need homing rockets if you can turn around at any point and shoot shotgun/minigun at upcoming enemies with much faster rate and damage per second. The most basic beam weapon also felt like the best one to fight the slowest bosses: one projectile hits the large bosses’ bounding box multiple times, accumulating your combo meter VERY quickly and allowing you to do huge damage, ensuring quick boss kills. Actually, it feels like a problem with most large projectiles / large enemies: your hits get counted multiple times, and so it’s really easy to get max combo on slower bosses or enemies, dealing tremendous amounts of damage.

Business

The incremental part is well balanced and allows for the smooth progression: you won’t be a billionaire straight away, instead you’ll have to gradually work for it, meticulously building your bases and purchasing upgrades. This base building part provides a good relaxation from the space fighting. There are also minigames like racing and collecting managers in space. Managers enhance your production percentage and offer some more minigames that imitate retro-gaming systems. Overall, this salad of features is what keeps Vostok Incorporated interesting.

Cons

However, when you get 20+ planets, a problem appears which I love to call “Fallout 4” problem. If you remember Fallout
4 base building, you got your homebase first, then you could go and help bases all through the commonwealth and get more villages under your protection. However, once you got too many of them, it quickly started to become a chore going from one place to another, fixing and improving things. The same thing can be observed here: going between 4+ system and visiting multiple planets becomes a chore. It would help to have an ability to build bases on planets remotly, but alas, there’s no such thing.

Speaking about the cons, I must mention that the settings are very weak: no mouse support in the menus. No resolution / display selection. The game was clearly designed with consoles in mind. The gamepad controls are very convenient, but even keyboard key rebindings can’t save the UI from the lack of mouse support and awkward menu switching.

Summary

While its not perfect – it is an engaging attempt to make a fusion of two game genres that succeeded. Vostok Inc. brings the new mechanics to the table, combining it with nice aesthetics and polish. Get it if you have a gamepad.