Reviews for Hydranought

[Badlag]

Having played several of the trade card games, I was familiar with the races and ships here, and enjoyed a different take on using the races.

Unfortunately the graphics for each race seem to be mixed up a bit, making it difficult to know which race's ships are on auto, and which ones are not.

More experience is awarded for killing more enemy ships, but aside from the doubling for the win, there is no base destruction reward, making experience for leveling up skills 100% dependent on killing as many enemy ships as possible. This in turn means a "pull your punches" strategy to building up your abilities. The faster and more decisively you beat an enemy, the lower the reward.

The other major problem is the need to click all 8 races and adjust things for each "tab" with the default for each race being the energy level effect "button" that you never need to adjust. This means extra clicking every time you go through all 8 races to pick either the auto upgrade for energy, or to toggle auto-build on or off for the ships. Launching waves with all 8 races is pretty much impossible as a result, as is toggling skills of multiple races as a "set" also out of the question.

Minor bug is that once I had about 3 races' ships unlocked, I stopped seeing any fire from any ships, so that ships simply drift towards each other, then vanish. Bases also stopped firing, but kept killing ships.

Overall, a fun game for an hour or 2, but that's about it. Quickly gets to be too cumbersome and repetative to really be fun, and the controls prevent implementing complex strategies beyond "turn everything to auto and wait."

[xela0000]

Good idea, but you get more experience getting defeated. Mmmm.
For those who want a "fast start", get defeated twice from all the races, then use the experience to unlock at least a ship and the energy generation. After that in combat, auto create ships and upgrade the maximum of energy while you fight.

[jon-falan]

An alright game. It kind of gets too easy though. Upgrade everything even and kick all abilities into auto and you'll win almost every time. You still have to do a little farming to make it work properly though.

[FiesesAlien]

The Idea behind this Game is good. But the Gameplaz itself... is extremely repeating. Gets extremely boring after 10 Minutes. But again: The idea is superb. Stay crunchy.

[sqykly]

I see potential here. The idea of having many parallel economies and tech trees invites me to customize each race's upgrades to maximize some aspect of their capabilities to form an intergalactic fleet whose power is far greater than the sum of its parts. And that is pretty cool. In theory.

But it's just too fast and easy to implement spam tactics that can carry you throughout the game, ending matches before the depth of strategy I wanted to see could manifest. Here's how I ruined the game for myself: I played each race's campaign only up to the point where I could afford their passive energy generation and economy ship - 3 or 4 battles. Then, I did that again for another race. And so on and so forth. In battles, I put each of my race's economy ships and max energy upgrades on auto. I waited for the maximum energy to get to 70, then turned off the max energy upgrade and set the ability to auto. I did this for each race - or I would have, but the battle was over before I could ever get all 8 abilities going.

Something needs to be rebalanced. You can't really nerf the economy ships, because that would make early battles really difficult. I would introduce some limitation that would affect all of your races, but choose carefully - the parallel economies and upgrade paths are what could someday make this a really deep strategy game, and you don't want to break that.

Everything else about the game is pretty good, but you might want to look into rotating the ship sprites as they move laterally, and adding some more varied effects instead of having every ship fling the same multicolored X's at each other all the time. Since most of the ships have special abilities, maybe add some flashy glitter there, too. Just something to indicate that the ability is being used is fine with me. Give the option to turn all that off in case it affects performance, but I have to say, I am impressed with how many ships I could crank out without any perceptible lag. Remember, I was sending nothing but economy ships downfield and winning, so there were a LOT of them. You have earned your graphics star on that alone.

Only one other thing. I don't even know if I should write this. Ah, what the hell. When an ad is about to interrupt the game, there's about a second before the modal overlay takes over where you can still click the exit button, thus skipping the ad. And the exit button is in the same place as it was on the previous screen, meaning your mouse is right over it, so it's pretty easy to pull off skipping every ad. If you fix that before you fix the balance issues, you have no soul.

Summary:
+1 good enough graphics
-0.5 invisible ship abilities
+0.5 great performance as ship count scales up
+2 lots of detail and customization
+1 no bugs that adversely affected gameplay
-1 severe balance issues prevent it from reaching its potential.

That is all.