▼ Not recommended
15 hrs
The game is overly monetized. It's possible, although annoying, to get to planet 50 without paying money, but planet 60 isn't really feasible. Specifically, dark matter (the game's premium currency) drops from the following sources:
* Achievements (not renewable)
* Reaching a new planet (not renewable)
* Special asteroids (rare, requires you to manually click on them, only drops a single dark matter each)
* Daily login bonus.
So, once you've used up the readily available dark matter sources, you're stuck with the daily login bonus. This drops 20-25 dark matter each day.
Aside from some noob traps, you spend dark matter on aliens. The useful aliens cost 500 dark matter, so you can get one about every 3 real-time weeks once you get past the early game. (I suggest the ones that make all parts either cheaper or faster.) However, even that doesn't help as much as you might think, as costs/distances appear to increase exponentially. Halving costs won't help when the next milestone is 300 times as expensive as the previous one.
That leaves you with the basic gameplay. You can click on your ship, but the effect becomes negligible rapidly. You can click on asteroids, but they stop giving useful amounts of gold after a while. You can watch for black holes, but they're only really useful if you can then fire off all your skills, so you can only do this once every 10-30 minutes. Even then it's not great. You can watch for special asteroids, but they don't give a useful amount of dark matter.
So, somewhere between planet 40 and 50, this turns into a game where you log in once a day, collect your bonus, then leave. It feels possible to bypass this grind with money, but I think reaching planet 60 within a year would require spending around $100. (Bit of a wild guess, but I'm not about to spend money on this.)
(There are also some minor issues with the game. For example, they left achievements in place for watching ads and connecting to social media, neither of which appears to actually be possible in the Steam version.)
