Illuminaria

SUMMARY: Cute but unfinished - trailer looks great but actually playing feels like a bad port of a mobile game. Worth it as a $5 solo passion project, but not as a $15 game expecting actual profits. The Good: * core gameplay loop of the resource management half is fun * lights & noises are satisfying * Story is adequate and doled out in short chunks to keep things moving * Music is adequate bordering on catchy The bad: * Actual bugs are relatively minor but glaringly obvious, things like plus-minus selectors with missing plus signs, or a level-select display that I'm pretty sure is supposed to show whether you've beaten it and/or achieved each of the three story beats - but doesn't change or show any checkmarks at all, so it's just a mysterious icon followed by three mysterious "landscape picture" icons that serve no purpose at all. * There's an overall lack of tooltips, encyclopedia/database/codex, or other info that would allow you to make decisions based on e.g. enemy attack values, even if you *could* make combat decisions (see below). * Most of the turrets you'll use can't be upgraded by technology, only by random drops from the "tactical adventure" half of the…

Very basic and simple introduction to a factory type games with tower defence mechanics. None the less it was quite alright.

A very nice game to chill. The workers do all the work, you just give them orders. Even without orders, they are smart.

Cute little managment/basebuilder. it took about 6 hours for a single play through on normal. The gameplay loop and progression hit the spot i played the whole thing in one sitting. The story is cute. I like the poety story book feel.

This game manages to be both boring and tedious. Mostly because it is so very, very easy. The graphics are cute though. It is a base building game with a few mini games thrown in. You will battle through five maps. On each, you build a big base distributed across several smaller maps. You can see just a small portion of one of those smaller maps at any given time. So expect to always see only a tiny portion of your big base. The first three maps are mind-numbingly easy on the highest difficulty setting. The fourth is maybe not completely boring. On the fifth I rearranged some of my special machines twice. Those two decisions were the breadth and depth of strategic decision making in the entire game. Yes, there is some entertainment involved in getting to know the different systems and in optimizing your economy. But that part of the game is stretched painfully thin across too much play time in the first three worlds. In the last two worlds you just repeat what you learned before. And spend a lot of time waiting for your economy to grind out the things you need next.

Quite repetitive and lots of just waiting + good art + for the most part, worker AI is pretty good about efficient trips - after the 2nd region, nothing actually novel is introduced - no way to have workers prioritize fire-fighting; if it didn't burn out more than it spreads, this would be a serious problem - the ending [spoiler] does not address the fact that you've been doing the same things - using dangerous power sources, including dark magic - as caused the catastrophe in the first place [/spoiler] - you can't see all resource counts at the same time, making it unnecessarily painful to figure out where the bottlenecks are -- there are several other games within the game that are incredibly shallow: - tower defense - reverse tower defense - autobattler - roguelite node-picking adventure -- most of the resource management is linear - you need 75% of the tree regardless of your "strategy" - for the one thing that theoretically allows free choice (weapon ammo), the very end of the game arbitrarily (literally) gates advancement behind producing objectively inferior choices