It's a good "EXPERIENCE." I... mostly enjoyed myself? If you can call it that. It's like spending a couple hours in a casino; there's pretty lights and nice sounds, and it gave me the dopamine.

But at the same time, I think it's a really bad "GAME."

Outside of the core upgrades, absolutely nothing is balanced at all. Quality of gameplay mechanics range from being mediocre (artifacts) to useless (mine) to worse than useless (a surprising majority of the cards). It's really hard to actually "feel" any impact from the lightning/dynamite/plasma abilities. And as you continue to play you'll likely start to notice even the core upgrade balancing falters, and the game becomes a grind.

There's so little care and thought here to these aspects that I can't really recommend this or give it a good rating.

Some problems:

• The mine feature is a completely useless joke, for how short the game is. It's the "idle progress" feature, but the active progress is better at all stages by severals orders of magnitude.

• There is a very obvious lull in being able to afford any upgrades as you get closer to the end of the game, and it becomes a grind. A very short grind, but a grind nonetheless.

• The end is extremely anticlimactic, but I guess that's par for the course for these mini "node" idlers.

• The artifact feature is pretty boring/low impact, and there's no real way of interacting with it; there are I think 3 upgrade cards that can boost them and that's it? One card increases their effects slightly, but the other TWO of them(!) upgrade their drop rates... but there's a FIXED NUMBER of artifacts, and you're almost guaranteed to get them WITHOUT those upgrades! And not only that, taking those cards is actually worse than useless, because...

The major problem, in my mind:

• Your rate of progress is going to be pretty RNG-dependent due to the cards, due to a combination of factors:

• Firstly, the simple reason that some cards are completely useless (a hilariously bad upgrade that boosts the useless Mine feature; another thing giving faster artifact drops), some give boosts that are negligible to income at certain stages of the game, and some are super valuable (potions).

• Secondly: The act of choosing these often-useless upgrade cards actually hinders your ability to progress further, once you take them!

• It warns you at the start of the game; for every card you take, the rocks gain HP and become harder to destroy. Some of the upgrades (and the fact that "pickaxe hits" has its own upgrades/scaling that doesn't require completely breaking rocks) increase your stats enough to outpace the HP gain, but some of them don't, or don't do anything.

You can actually play through the entire game without taking a single upgrade card, and the middle+late part of it will go much faster due to you breaking rocks in 2 and then just 1 hit, focusing on income and ignoring all XP/levelling upgrades and features.

I did that after feeling like a moron for taking the two artifact cards and then instantly getting all the artifacts, and some other bad rolls that made my progress noticeably slow to a crawl.

tl;dr please, devs, for the love of god, balance your games. consider if your features are actually contributing to a player's progress. playtest them a few times. do some math. please. thank you.

Or, better yet this dev needs to pair with someone else to do the back end math and feature balancing, so they can focus on what they excel at (shiny things).