Recente recensies door alveolate

like every other bloons td, the interface is ♥♥♥♥ and a whole lot of annoying - but for this incarnation of the game, they crank it up to "hey fk you for playing this". so many years into the franchise... and they still refuse to put the basic stats of every tower clearly into the game. you have to check a wikia to know how many bloons each tower can really pop. so you really can't figure out most of the game properly without asking others who had to check the wikia and ask other people... and that's what counts as "community" to ninja kiwi.

game is basically a rehash of the old BTD; but with a city map where you clear maps to unlock tiles, so you can build buildings that give you more towers to place and upgrade them. it's a nifty concept, but it gets pretty darn repetitive VERY quickly. there's a few daily/weekly events to make things less boring, but those events too eventually get repetitive. the only long-term aim is just trying to unlock every tile in the map, which is challenging; but also super repetitive. it may have been bearable... if the game doesn't have crap UI, random crashes, freezes from bad optimisation left in the game since like BTD3 or 4... and about 2,000 other lazy dev things.

but hey, it's free to play, and if you don't mind waiting days for those upgrades to complete, there's "no pay wall". just a ton of waiting.

game was pretty decent, but randomly failed to save and lost all progress. there's no export, so when the manual save button dies, you're done.

play at your own risk.

SEA player here.
got a turkish (???) client from pressing install.
checked discussion, says there's some "fix".
jumped through hoops (i.e. redownloaded 33gb 3x).
♥♥♥♥ still failed.

don't give a game away for free if you don't intend for players to play it.

extremely slow and boring start for a clan wars type game. the UI forces you to click into each resource building and click 8 more times to retrieve resources... for an already boring and slow game, that collection inconvenience just makes you hate the game further. hard pass.

like other reviewers already noted:

1. game says 200mb on steam but that's just the client, which then forces you to download a further 18gb.

2. the tutorial is incomprehensible and clunky. clicked a mission complete button and the entire thing just froze. restarted and it turns out nothing was completed, had to do the entire thing over and still didn't understand what was going on.

3. uninstalling the game via steam does not remove the bulk of the game files, which actually bloats up into 25gb on disk. have to manually navigate to \SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Starfall Online to delete it. very egregious.

while i can't say whether the game itself is actually good or bad, i'm just so turned off by these 3 points that i'd sooner save 25gb on my hdd for other things.

game has a decent premise; but the execution is god awful.

1. a lot of info is not shown. after an entire week, i still have no idea what "faction skills" are or how to activate them. i can't tell how much account xp i need to hit next level, nor what do i unlock next. there are no summaries of battle for you to know which units did the most work either. so good luck using instinct to improve your deck.

2. where info is shown, it is often ambiguous or poorly displayed. why should the units' skills be shown on separate page from the stats? why not make the stats fit into one page? how long does headless' fear last? how much hp regen is that undead faction skill, if it ever procs?

3. the worst part is multiplayer matchmaking. you only get one choice per 40s (it's a waste of gold to skip those 40s) and it is often a player who is twice your level and +1000 ranks on you. it is also possible to get someone -1 of your current arena and worth only +1 rank point for a victory (but probably worth the quick win to get the arena chest). it's just egregious that you're forced to face mismatched players because of bad matchmaking. in fact, it could be argued that this is a minor pay wall since you can't make much progress without opening arena chests by "stealing" those chests (actually just killing their dragon i.e. 3 trophies).

4. the nail in the coffin is the poor balance. some cards are absolutely non-factors, but cards like freeze have no counters and huge synergies (with michael j wolf). you can tell the game has mechanics that could be balanced just by tweaking some of the values; but freeze duration remains wayyyy too long with a huge aoe that even disables all counters (since hero can't move/summon if frozen). meanwhile the swarm units are so weak that just one meteor usually wipes them all out.

conclusion: game has good bones but really bad flesh. if the devs would look into it, most of the issues can be fixed in one patch. just offer two players per MP select, decrease freeze duration (or keep hero unfrozen) and buff some of the weaker cards.

fun to play but not fun enough to keep playing.

edit: after 2 weeks, i finally get some human player attacking me. watched the replay and... the guy summons 50 units instantly and mobs my base. so the game allows hackers. uninstalled.

if you're expecting a remake of the classic Drug Lord abandonware, you'll be as disappointed as me. no fun lists of international market prices to compare, no weapons to buy, and DEFINITELY no lucky quick billionaire games.

this is more like Adventure Capitalist but with drugs and no instructions. i hovered over almost every icon possible, and half of the popups don't even tell you anything useful at all. (btw, you HAVE to buy a trailer to get meth production started, because you can ONLY click-to-produce weed, even tho the meth button looks clickable.)

after fumbling through half the game blind, you will discover that the game is horrifically slow, with completely tiny ass numbers, while the main upgrades are insanely high. there is just not enough early content to justify actively playing it without using a clicker. sure, you can set up a $10/s minor weed dealership and come back in 10h... but in those 10h i could easily advance 200x further in most other clickers.

and as if the agonisingly slow start isn't punishment enough, every event you hit (yes, there are random events) is a penalty. you lose your dealers or worse, you could lose your production houses. in a worst case scenario, you could be taking a hit bad enough to lose half your progress. what kind of incremental would do that?? additionally, if you're rich enough irl to buy cash, you would effectively be losing REAL money when some cops take your meth trailer.

so, caveat emptor.

first playthrough and autosave fails. very bad look.

gameplay is meh and quite stupidly grindy even at the start, which really sucks the air out. nothing really special to hook you either.

i mean, getting to pretend you're Henry Cavill is pretty nice.

the key concept and gameplay is decent and fun; but the execution leaves a lot to be desired.

1. a ton of waiting time for game lobbies (and you still end up fighting AI)
2. you can get one-shot multiple times in a row if you're unlucky
3. getting killed shouldn't be that bad... except in this game, you are stuck staring at a boring screen for 10s every respawn, which quickly gets old in a fast-paced game.

until the game fixes/rebalances these glaring issues, i cannot recommend it.