Disappeared into the gacha game rabbit hole over the past few months and one of my first efforts to come back and play a "real game" led me, of it often does, to a city builder... which is also a Survivors clone, which is also a roguelike auto-battler dungeon crawler, which also has elements of plenty of other games glued to it in ways that are very rarely complementary.

It's extremely bizarre to me that it exists in this state as of its 1.0 release, because it's hard to shake the feeling that this game is horribly unfinished no matter how you choose to engage with it. The genres this game tries to pull from are very much dependent on robust systems or large pools of items/effects/abilities that would cost a tremendous amount of development time on their own, but because the developers have stapled three or four of these together it's pretty obvious that they didn't have the time to spend on making sure each of them was individually compelling.

The core of the game is the city-builder, which is actually more of a colony sim thanks to the fact that this is a cultivation game - you won't be placing that many buildings because your workforce is going to be pretty small, requiring a constant stream of resources to achieve these spiritual breakthroughs - allowing them to commute to their shift at the spirit stone mines by flying on their swords. Facilitating this requires a lot of work, most of which is micromanagement: you send people out into the world to scout out possible missions, then you do a mission (more on these in a bit), then you get a mobile game-ass loot chest that you have to manually open, then you can individually equip items or forcefeed elixirs to your various disciples using the "gift" system. It's... not great. The result of all of these games being attached to each other is a page for each disciple that is a huge mess of stats - most of which are irrelevant at any given time - being thrown into your face any time you need to interact with them.

Mostly, you'll need to interact with them for spiritual breakthroughs (which are just feeding them the necessary items and sending them to the Level Up Workbench) or for missions, which are locations that appear and disappear on the world map that allow you to dispatch disciples for a short bullet heaven or autobattler session. Neither of these have the variety of effects or loot to make them interesting beyond two runs, and if there's any meaningful metaprogression tied to the game's other modes then it's so drawn out that you could rightfully call it sadistic. I am not the foremost bullet heaven hater on this site - I've played my fair share of them and even think a few are quite good - but this game falls into the same traps that so many of these games do: it's often hard to tell when an enemy is doing an attack, your own attacks can be so visually busy that you walk into enemies, the upgrades you get aren't very interesting... All of the game modes present here indicate an understanding of the core elements of each genre but a lack of passion, funding, time, or analysis that would allow them to really shine. Does the autobattler really need so many pieces of gear that never meaningfully change the gameplay? Do either of these game modes justify each colonist displaying 13+ combat stats on their profile at all times? When you were testing this, was anyone excited to get a piece of gear with an 8% bonus to "critical resistance rate"?

The whole experience is disappointing because it's pretty easy to see what they were going for, but they really needed a project director who was willing to tell them "no" more often, or at least to help guide their efforts. I genuinely think cutting the bullet heaven components of this game and replacing them with the other combat minigames would've given them a substantial amount of time and effort back that they could've used on punching up the gameplay of the other game modes, of refining the menus for the rest of the game, of making sure the translations correctly explain the interactions between systems. Making these fixes now is a losing proposition - people will freak out if you try to do something like remove a game mode, but future projects from this team would benefit greatly from taking some time to really examine what you're putting into the game and asking how the player benefits from tying research progress to real-life timers.