Recent reviews by Pandorian

EDIT: The game was patched pretty quickly after the original review which seemed to address a lot of the issues I mentioned. Here's the new review as of October 6, 2021.

I wish I could give a neutral response but I guess this will draw more attention. I got my money's worth in time investment. Still some execution issues but the dev patched it soon after the first review so there's hope for it getting better.

100% completion within 2.5 hours. It was actually quicker since the recipes which you can unlock are super easy to get but I was able to see the whole game after this amount of time. This was my first playthrough on Easy. After the patch I was able to do a run through on Easy and then Hard with a combined time of 1.9 hours for both of those.

If you want easy achievements play on Easy, you'll accumulate rank and money quicker that way. The game feels a little too Easy to me but maybe that's because Hard mode felt more like a natural progression.

Noticeable differences between difficulties(might be more but I didn't notice it):
Hard Mode: Villages have more power, Items sell for Less, Less mastery is rewarded per item, More mastery is needed for blueprint unlocks, Army element unlocks cost more, harder to progress through mastery ranks(might be tied to total mastery points)

Core Gameplay loop: Buy raw resource, turn into craft component, craft item, sell item, repeat.

7 Tiers of Raw Resources and Armor/Weapons with 4 Tiers of Tools. There are 5 different armors, 5 different weapons and 3 different tools. Crafting a weapon/armor 5,000 times will level it up to a max of level 3. Each level gets you an additional item per craft so a level 3 item is 3x more profitable than a level 1 item. The tools feel a little lackluster because they only go to Tier 4 and they don't level up.

As of the update each Tier item has a better profit margin than the tier below it so if you're after cash you'll want to push tiers and there is no difference between selling prices in the same tier. You'll probably be looking for that item that only uses wood/cloth/ore because it's easier to mass produce. Still no incentive to craft multi resource items but maybe that'll change in the future. It's very easy to snowball your cash. Even on hard I was able to get all the starting capital by making Tier 2 Spears after spamming Tier 1 swords for mastery. It's so easy it makes the other mechanics in the game sort of moot.

Other mechanics:
Army: Make an army of T1-T7 units with 4 different unit types of the items you made. Use that army to conquer Tiered villages which will give you items every 5 minutes of that tier. You can level up the villages by spending gold and mastery points. After conquering the T1-T7 villages you can fight "Powerful Area" villages that just give gold. The major downside to all of this is every village shares the same timer. So even though there are multiple villages in the "Powerful Area", there's no point in capturing more than one. Just capture the one and upgrade it.

Related to the Army mechanic: Elemental upgrades in Blacksmith. So what I noticed is they boost the damage your army does to villages by a flat amount. At minimum it appears that value is 400, at max 4,500 with a crit doing double damage. This feels really underwhelming still. On Easy/Hard the max army is 1.12 Million strong(999 of each unit) but the hardest village you'll face is 120k, almost a tenth your strength.

To the dev: Instead of a fixed amount of damage, perhaps the damage your armies do could be a % of your total strength with the upgrades increasing that %?

Trading: You can trade with up to 7 towns. Each town is blocked until you reach a certain mastery level. Each has a limit of items they buy/sell. The limit is 1000 and is refreshed in real time. The items you can buy will be cheaper than your regular town, with the cheapest I saw was multiples of 4 while your normal prices are multiples of 10. They will also buy your crafted items. The best I saw was a T7 item for 1k vs the 320 regular sell price on Hard. The only issue is that 1,000 limit. At the end of hard just to get to the final town I crafted 250,000 T7 helms and 250,000 T7 swords. That's 2 million ore.

Note to dev: Please increase the buy cap more. I was frequently spam clicking even with the Shift key held down. It would also be super awesome to have a "Craft Max" on items like you have on the sell item/process resource.

The screenshots show some kind of quest mechanic. I didn't run into it so maybe it's a planned feature?

So yeah, it's a lot better than when I originally reviewed it but the Trade/Conquer mechanics still feel out of place/useless. For a natural feeling progression just play on Hard. I don't know about normal but easy is just... easy.