Ballionaire Review (Ti Kastor)
The game is good, but there are some design issues.
The good:
The introduction to the game is perfect. You have some premade boards that introduce the player to the different strategies possible in this game. Difficulty is really easy. Then you slowly get better, unlock some bonkers, try harder difficulties, and learn how to use your new toys. You even get a god run where everything is working together, and you have a huge dopamine rush when you have infinite balls spawning and making points on your board. I've made a nuclear reactor in this game once, and I've been chasing that high ever since, hahaha.
The neutral:
Then you try the other boards. They are creative but very gimmicky and hard to play around. Don't get me started on the pinball one lol. It's fine. I'm sure some players like changing things up, but personally I would only play the other boards on easy once in a while.
The bad:
Then you spend more time trying to find everything this game has to offer. You end up unlocking too many bonkers after playing for a while. It's great to have this big variance in gameplay, but with this increasing pool of bonkers, you end up not being able to build anything synergistic at all. You actually had an easier time building a money machine early on with simpler tools. Even your most basic bumpers, which are core to the game and very much needed at higher levels, end up buried in all the junk bonkers that you unlocked with your sweat and tears.
This is also true for the passives you get every 3 rounds of your run. Some are incredibly broken; others are near unusable or super niche. You can't reroll these, so you have to do with that randomness. 3 bad passives when you needed something more powerful? Too bad; guess you'll take the passive that gives you 5 rerolls rather than have a passive that goes AGAINST your current build. You'll need these rerolls anyway. You have to find a single bonker that remotely fits with anything on your board.
Ironically, unlocking all the stuff in this game is shooting yourself in the foot. It's a shame, really. There are so many great ideas in this game. You want to discover all the crazy stuff you can do, but it's too late. You diluted your pool, and now it's hard to have a board at all. It could be easily solved by introducing bans per run to this game. It's not present in the game at all right now and is very much needed. The rerolls are most of the time not enough.
The game would also benefit from having less randomness from the pool of bonkers and bumpers. Let's say you're building food synergy. The game should recognize you're trying to build that and give you increased odds to find food-related bonkers. Doesn't have to be crazy, just a little grease in the gear. I mean, if there was a system similar to this, it would probably fix my main issue with this game.
Let's hope the devs change their mind. This glaring issue with meta progression in the game is undermining how deep and fun this game is. They have been adding more content and seem to be listening to their players. So at the very least I can still recommend this game because it's still very playable and fun as it is. I'm sure it will be fixed eventually.