EDITED AS OF NEWEST RELEASE, THIS IS THE ORIGINAL REVIEW FOR THE EARLY ACCESS. NEW REVIEW IN THE EDIT ADDENDUM. I am very sad that I don't like this game, because it could be so good. But for starters; The prestige. All upgrades are expensive as hell and you don't know what's behind them, which is very important knowledge. You need to unlock automation through it. The way you get more prestige currency is by number of Goods pilfered, Leading me to The Clicking. Oh my god, the clicking. I started using an autoclicker halfway through my first run, because sending each individual mouse to a house is a click. If you have 20 mice, and want to send them all to a house, click 20 times. Does every mouse take 2 seconds per trip? that's 10 clicks a second, to keep up. But oh no, they don't take 2 seconds. By the end of my second run, my 100cps autoclicker could not keep up with demand. The only true input I had was sending a skunk to the location every 10-13 seconds to keep up the smokescreen (which would be good active gameplay by itself). Even with that, I still felt prestige currency was slow, very slow to get. Reminder that it's directly tied to the amount of clicks. But thankfuly, there's automation, right? Oh, yeah. Technically automation exists. I found an upgrade that sends One (1) mouse on a task every time intel is gathered. What is intel? A currency squirrels get. Once every like, two seconds. So each squirrel is equivalent to 0.5cps, which would be fine, if they weren't stupid expensive. They could not afford 10% of my required cps to keep up with task demands.

Please, for the love of all that is holy, allow players to assign mice to houses. Or allow us to shiftclick to send them all to a single place. Or literally anything except this.

EDIT: Good news, the game doesn't require an insane autoclicker now! It is very active gameplay, but it requires some timing and a click every 10~ seconds now, with the new Tailwind effect auto-assigning all available mice into the house for its duration. The prestige still feels very, very stingy. The rest of the automation also feels kinda pointless in relation to the active gameplay, and the game becomes kind of repetitive after a bit. I am giving it the benefit of the doubt seeing how much it has improved from its original 2 star review, and how it's only a demo right now. Definitely the correct way forward. Can't wait to see how this develops!