I've played up until part of the third level, and there's some very interesting ideas here, like the different upgrade paths units of the same type can take, or the fact that currency gain is tied to DPS. But honestly, I found they were overshadowed by a lot of issues I had with the game.
- The first two levels feel kind of tedious overall. They are very long, both due to the sheer amount of waves and due to the amount of slow but tanky enemies, and if you die in one of them, which isn't particularly hard even on Easy difficulty, you have to redo it all the way from the start.
- The third level, on the other hand, is way too fast-paced. Is it even a strategy game anymore if the game doesn't give you the time to make a plan more complex than "spam scouts and hope for the best" before bombarding you with enemies old and new?
- Some of the difficulty can feel like pure trial and error, like in the first level which is very easy until 20 ninjas show up at once and instantly kill you at full health for not giving all of your units the "hidden detection" skill, which had no apparent use until that very moment.
- Are the solar panels supposed to be so underwhelming? They’re pretty expensive to place, they keep consuming the rest of your money while they’re active (which the game never even tells you directly unless you check the Almanac) and they don’t seem to produce money until the very end of a wave. Maybe I’m just using them wrong, but they feel more like a liability than anything else, especially when combined with the trial-and-error difficulty since they make it even harder to react to new threats.
- The pause/settings menu is a mess. The sheer amount of options is quite overwhelming, and the fact that the Game options are among them instead of having their own menu is both easy to miss and quite confusing. It's also weird how pressing Exit from the main menu version of the settings menu will just return to the main menu, but pressing that same button during gameplay will quit the game entirely.
- Some of the text is quite hard to read, especially in the Almanac. The text size is inconsistent, there’s no margins, the orthography is very poor, and for some reason switching between entries keeps the scrolling bar at the same position, so you have to manually scroll up every time you finish reading one.
- Lastly, even trying to set aside my general distaste for modern warfare settings, I’m not entirely sure of what to make of the fact that a lot of the “enemies” are clearly just civilians and children. The Commander does call out the General for killing children in the second cutscene, but it’s not clear if it also applies to the shooting range or the battlefield (partially because of the poor writing mentioned above), and the rest of the game I’ve played so far, including the Almanac, doesn’t seem to take the situation very seriously. I genuinely don’t know if you’re trying to show how evil the enemy kingdom is for sending unarmed civilians to war, how evil the General is for making you kill them without remorse, or if you’re just trying to downplay or even justify the situation in general; but I sure hope it’s not the latter, and I don’t like how ambiguous it is in the first place.
Overall, this game has potential, but it could use a lot of polish, and whatever its themes are meant to be they can be interpreted in very questionable ways. I hope this feedback helps.