Wish there was a way to set the default to all auto build or a similar option. Overall fun but repetitive.
Reviews for "Hydranought"
Pretty good. Text tutorials are kind of irritating though. I advise that the tutorial at least be given some images to accompany the text to better explain how to play. For the game's complexity, blocks of text aren't sufficient.
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.
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.
Here is a tip to anyone planning on getting the last medal.
Do not bother with it unless you have a massive load of time as it is a massive grind and even when you get as far as to the final battle you are not going to beat it in a short amount of time.
I was stuck there for about 30 minutes watching my ships and the other ships go back and fourth from my base to theirs over and over again. You also need to have just about every god dam races skills maxed out to do it.
So overall it took me well over 24 hours to even do it and I feel way too insane now.
Here are just 2 pictures of what you should end with.
http://postimg.org/image/6dzxwfmfp/ Amount of xp after level 10.
http://postimg.org/image/sr7oj8ndh/ Every level I did.