A few keys to mastering this game: 1 Mana is life. Embrace the mana. Seek only the mana. Seriously. 2 Never use teleports. Those early easy fights are essential to charge your mana. 3 All equipment has two stats. The top number is meaningless. The bottom number shows how much mana you get per tile, in a % modifier to base mana. 4: Best cards: Magic Channel, Second wind, Divine protection, Healing herbs, and Fist of Fury. 5. Don't use bard. Use paladin or Monk on yellow. Wihtout these things, later levels become unbeatable to lack of mana.
The key to the survival badge is to know that any and all NON-upgraded modules at full health can be sold for a full refund. This includes the repair stations, so you can put one out to repair somethings you want to sell and then sell it back, too. This lets you move much of your base around to best exploit asteroids and so your defenses face the current wave.
I was really disappointed with this one. I loved one and two, and the introduction to this one is great, the gameplay itself loses almost everything I found enjoyable about the first two installments, leaving a long, slow, and dull grindfest.
Thrice damned son of a goat! Move the firckin' mute option so it shows up before you've completed the tutorial AND LET US FRICKIN' USE IT!!!!! After the settings option finally showed up, I still couldn't mute the *bleep*ing game because the game insisted I had to do more quests. I would have stopped playing the game entirely at this point if not for the badges.
I have a Kongregate level of 65. This is the max rank. It is also a higher rank than Greg, the guy who makes the badges. I bring this up not to brag but to say this: I have played every last game with badges, gotten the badges for most of them, completed almost every daily badge since the dailies were implemented, and I still couldn't make it past rank 3 before I was so bored and annoyed that I decided to skip today's daily.
Spent a few hours trying to get the second badge, as I had the other two already, only to have the achievements panel finally acknowledge that I had already completed the legendary driver one as well. This is not to say I count that time wasted--if I hadn't liked the game I would have submitted a missing badge report once completing a race didn't award it--merely to muse on the amusing coinkydinks of life.
... Just finished the game, looked for the badges(as this was listed as recently badged), only to find there are no badges.
On the game itself, though, the concept is good. There's just too little of it for me to give it a rating over 3/5
Has potential, but falls far short of the standard games made to this style. A modular ship is a great way to balance upgrades, but making that equate directly to the size of the ship--a highly regulated size--leads to all the maneuverability of a pregnant elephant with three broken legs. Laying out the ship is the sum total of all game difficulty, as ship acceleration is so insanely slow that it becomes more a matter of a pausable auto scrolling game. Again, the approach of the game has potential, but it is barely playable now and not at all enjoyable.
Where's the *bleep*ing mute button? Or the 'skip all dialogue' button? Getting the second badge didn't happen the first time, and I find myself suspecting the reason why =/
I despise this style of game. It's beautiful, no denying that, but that is the only positive for the entire game. No matter how beautiful the box, a box of *bleep* is still just *bleep*. The obnoxious and incredibly incessant attempts to get me to spend money on a game with less function than final fantasy I, combined with monotonous combat that it dares to claim is strategy and a game that essentially plays itself while you watch, bring this to 1/5, and only because a lower rating isn't possible.
I've bought the premium version of some of the prior editions in the series, but I find the shadow cores aspect of this version to be too intrusive. Balancing that out is the marvel of a x9 button, and graphics that really help to bring the critters to life, regardless of others saying they are minimal. They are just right.
The trick for defeating the infection stages is to use shields(which prevent infection), barriers(which are immune to infection), and a variety of guns such as the autocannons which can shoot missiles and bullets, keeping the infection from getting to you. Then, you'll want to use weak ships so they will die almost as fast as they can get infected, while also soaking up the infested projectiles, with some long range ships to carry the fight to the enemy. If you have them available, ships with beam weaponry are best because the beams can't transmit the infection, unlike missiles and bullets. Thus, whenever your ships get taken over they don't spread they don't infect more.
This is one of the few games I wholeheartedly give a 5/5 to. The game is fast paced, but with the option to construct while paused so you don't feel too rushed. The various levels require a wide array of strategies, including equipping different sets of units to tackle different obstacles. This is one of the very, very few where I played the game all the way through and reset it so I could play it through again.
If you don't understand the admittedly bizarre loot system, this game is a joyless grind to advance at all with an exponential increase in grind as you go on. If you DO understand the system, the game becomes stupid easy, to the point that I've put more effort into playing idle games than I put into getting to and defeating the final boss, which died so fast I never even got to see it, making the game every bit as joyless for those who understand how the game works. I originally gave this game a 3/5, but feel I need to downgrade that to 1/5. The flaws in this game are so large that it is nearly unplayable.
I'm glad for the walkthrough, because otherwise I wouldn't have been able to see the end. The final step for the machine, turning it on, is broken and stays broken even through reloading the game. I checked the walkthrough to find what I was missing, only to find I wasn't missing anything. The game itself had a nicely surreal atmosphere, and was generally a pleasing game, though.
"Autopause can be disabled in the menu". I think that is my favorite feature of any tower/defense game I've played on Kong. Being able to click on something else while waiting for time to pass in game is very useful.
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