Immunica

nice game

This game has an interesting concept, but the execution leaves a lot to be desired due to frustrating mechanics and poor design choices. For starters, there is no way to end a run immediately. You either have to play through the entire thing or quit out to the main menu. On top of that, once you actually beat the game, it just kicks you straight back to the main menu instead of letting you continue playing. It feels like a huge letdown when you are invested and just want to keep your run going.

Managing the lab is a headache. Once you place stations and shelves, the game does not let you move them. Your only option is to sell lab/prestige to clear everything out. To make matters worse, the placement rules are inconsistent. Somehow, you can place a station next to a shelf, but you cannot place a shelf next to a station. Also, when you buy more than ten researchers, their characters just overlap each other. There is no dedicated counter to tell you how many researchers you own or how many of each type you have, which makes managing them a mess.

The pacing and menus also have some glaring issues. Whenever a research task is completed, a popup stays stuck on your screen for ten seconds, and you just have to sit there and stare at it because it locks you out of clicking anywhere else. The menu navigation is equally frustrating. If you are on the skill tree screen and go to the lab to collect points, clicking the "back" button takes you to the battle screen instead of back to the skill tree. You go to the lab specifically to get points to spend on upgrades, but the game basically forces you into a battle instead.

The game also does a terrible job of explaining its deeper mechanics. While it teaches you about the battle screen and the lab, it never explains the skill tree or the evolutions. It uses official scientific names like plasmodium, ecoli, and viroid without giving any context. I had to look them up just to figure out what they were. I also have no idea what mutant pathogens are or what actually triggers them. There is an achievement for getting 50 mutant pathogens in a single run, but after beating the game multiple times, I only ever saw about 6 out of 50.

The Insight HQ mechanic makes zero sense as well. After selling the lab/prestige, the game gave me insight points, but I could never figure out how to use them. Even though I had more than enough to afford an upgrade, there was no clear way to actually spend them.

Finally, the settings menu feels unfinished. If you go to the language options, there are three blank choices in the dropdown. When you click on them, they are just blank, which sums up how unpolished the rest of the experience is.

Bugs
Super grindy
Unsatisfactory scaling
Annoying prestige mechanics
Useless short range weapons
Nothing's thought out

Should have played < 2 hrs and get a refund

Game starts to stutter after a few runs. Gets annoying having to restart every 10 mins to play without stutters. Progression also feels slow even with the update, making it feel like I have zero progress. Also whose idea it is to put REVERSE controls into this?

Great game. Respect to the dev for the polished price. 🇵🇱