Vostok Inc.

Don't let the trailer fool you - this is a cookie clicker game; not much in the way of good gameplay sadly. Not a terrible way to pass time but certainly not particularly engaging. Also, DO NOT buy this unless you have a controller to play it with, keyboard is a mess.

Vostok Inc. is the combination of a mediocre SHMUP and a mediocre idle/incremental game. Edit to add detail: A lot of my play time was spent idling to gain cash since you don't gain cash when the game is off and it would take a lot of grinding to advance. If the grind is fun, then I'm OK with grinding. It is not fun in this game. Travelling is tedious, and you have to do it constantly to upgrade buildings on different planets. I'd like for either a) travelling to be more fun or b) to be able to upgrade without travelling. The camera is awful. Most of the time my ship would be at the leading edge of the screen while travelling so I couldn't see what was coming. Often times I'd be surprised by colliding with an enemy and dying instantly. So many times my view would be obscured by text or a results window (after a challenge) while enemies are attacking. If you're going to force an unskipable results window in front of the view then at least make it so enemies don't spawn while it's being shown. The weapon variety was good, but I found most of them to be useless. If there's a variety of weapons to choose from then I'd prefer to be able to pick the weapon that fits any given situation rather than just select the most powerful (which is a gun that fires unicorns in this game). There are a lot of upgrades for buildings that are expensive yet completely useless because if you can afford them then you can afford better buildings/upgrades that produce way more. So I think that the idle portion of the game needs to be re-balanced.

Vostok above all is honest. It is exactly what it says it is and it does what it does very well. Satisfying shooting and combat, fun flight controls, and addictive progression make for a great shmup/clicker style game. Oh and the writing is pretty funny too! All of that as well as being very reasonably priced.

A surprising mix of an incremental game (clicker without the clicking) and twin-stick shooter. Enjoying my time so far and just hit the second zone. Plenty of upgrades to be had and the combat adds a welcome action component to the mix. Also includes some mini-games to keep your staff happy - think simple retro styles games from the C64 era. Game recommended with 2 Caveats: 1) Playing with a gamepad highly recommended. KB&M very clunky. 2) May be suitable for play with a headache, but the combat does get very frantic. Simply staying on a planet or in your base can be quite relaxing however. (Also reviewed by me via the [url=http://steamcommunity.com/groups/HeadachesandMigraines]Headache & Migraine Gaming Group[/url])

I found the game addictive and fun although there a few non-game breaking bugs: - Incorrect text used to achieve certain goalsd - Doesn't count your build numbers properly if using the Build Max option I also managed to break it after building up Earth's income beyond the game limit giving me infinite cash and taking my level over 9000. As a tip, just leave the game running whilst you're busy doing something else and let the money build up. For the number of hours I suink in the game it's good value too

[b]Edit Januar 27th 2018: [/b] The developer has asked me to update this review as they have fixed some of the issues I've listed. I am not going to alter what I originally wrote as that stands as a review of the product I played at the time. They seem to be continuing to work on the game so I recommend checking if the issues I have listed have already been fixed before making a desicion on buying the game. The dev said they have implemented key bindings which will go a long way to elliviate the biggest issue I had with the game. if any more updates are made you might find info from the comment section of this review where the developer has been posting a bit. I also ran into another issue with the game where if you full screen the game on a 16:10 resolution it breaks the UI, this has not yet been fixed as of this writing according to the devloper and it is not "top priority" to fix it. This was a game breaking bug for me as I was unable to revert the change after it was done. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This is a first impressions review after having played the game a few hours. My experience with the game is a bit mixed. Its a fun little incremental game about watching number grow as you explore the galaxy and build up production buildings on the planets you find. You fly around in a ship which you can upgrade as you fight a never ending onslaught of enemies. While the core game play loop is great this game has a SEVERE case of console port going on. * There are no graphics options. * You can't change resoltion (all you can do is ALT+Enter to enable windowed) * You can't use multiple saves * The menues are a mess * The controls are nonsenseical and can't be rebound. It's painfully obvious that the entire game has been made to be played with a controller and ZERO thought went into porting it over to keyboard. Playing dual joystick shooters on mouse/keyboard was never great, but it has never been this bad either. There is no mouse support, swapping weapons can only be done with IJKL, forcing you to move your hands to a random place on the keyboard, boost is set to RIGHT shift; a button I haven't clicked for a game ever before. Swapping between tabs in the menus uses Shift and Control, something I had to ask the forums to find out. The game also have some issues with turning on and off controllers while the game is on, so if you run into that I recommend restarting the game. All of these problems should be trivial to fix with a patch, but until that happens I recommend getting this game ONLY if you play with a controller and you don't mind the lack of a proper options menu. It's a real shame that developers treat the PC platform like this. If you really have no clue how a PC game should be designed, why not consult someone who does before you release the game?

Would have been more enjoyable if the "Cookie Clicker" -aspect, as in the buildings and such, had stayed on one planet or even just in one system. Instead you have to fly around building and upgrading said buildings on 40 separate planets. In a sense, you're playing 40 games of Cookie Clicker, minus the clicking. And F*CK the minigames, half of them don't even work if your monitor run at more than 60Hz. PS: To whoever thought that Woodguy Jr, was okay, you should be f*cking ashamed of yourself. ---EDIT--- Did it all. Achievements are not happy to be triggered simultaneously. Luckily I found workarounds (basically triggering the achievement conditions again) to get everything. However, one thing you CAN'T work your way around is the end-game. More specifically, the way how the enemy stats scale with you. They don't care what your health is but how big your level is. If you make it past lvl. 500 like I did, the first enemies you come across in the first system that shoot in bursts of three shots can take you down with those three shots if they all hit. Oh and torpedoes are an instakill. Okay, fair enough, but even asteroids scale to your level. Remember that Super Mega Laser you enjoyed using to crack open some enemies and asteroids? Not happening if your level going too high. I'm sorry but I'm glad I'm done with this. I'll just play Cookie Clicker next time I wanna play something like this.

it reset my game data twice even after i saved though it hasn't happened for a few days

Good game. I recommend leaving it running overnight to get easy money, though.

[h1]A combination of ideas, none of which are executed very well[/h1] The core idea of this game is great - an idle clicker combined with a shmup to pass the time between clicks. Brilliant. But the details of just about everything turn out poorly. In practice, "shmup" is probably a misnomer in this case. There's relatively little actual shooting. And most of that shooting won't be at enemies, but at asteroids, because farming crates is the most money-efficient use of your time. But the spawn rate of crates is very low, so you'll want to destroy asteroids as quickly as you can, because the money you get from them is so tiny as to be meaningless. That also applies to races, enemies, even boss battles - absolutely everything that gives you money outside of your buildings, gives you so little as to be worthless. So it's primarily an asteroid-destroying, crate-farming game, with intermittent periods of purchasing buildings and thinking about which buildings deliver the best ROI. But there are more problems. Even if you purchase health, energy, and weapons upgrades very soon after they become affordable, you'll keep finding your ship to be oddly frail - several times, I was completely surprised when my ship blew up. And the loss from this is significant - when your ship blows up, you lose all of your middle managers (up to 36) which each give a flat 3% improvement to your rate of income. About midway through the game I lost 29, which essentially halved my rate of income, and I never managed to collect that many again. There's more to do, but none of it is very fun. There are quasi-pixellated minigames that seem ostensibly intended to reward crates, but they give so few rewards that you're much better off farming asteroids. Have I mentioned that this game heavily incentivizes you to farm asteroids? Farming asteroids isn't very fun. Not much about this game is very fun. They've decided on this 90's-esque theme which is great from a music standpoint, but doesn't jive with the graphics. Also, from a lore standpoint, you basically play as a selfish jerk who ruins planets and populations purely for your own benefit. So that's not ideal. Unfortunately, all in all, I just can't recommend this game. The core premise is good, but almost nothing else is. And that's a shame.

It's fun. The display resolution sucks ass for on the deck, and even manually configuring it to run in either forced 1200x800/1200x720, there's still a large part of the HUD you can't see. Other than that, it's one of those games you can have on the background if you're landed on one of your planets.

Decently fun, but very buggy. Neither a good idler, nor a great shoot-em-up. Both aspects are almost half fun, but you can't lean into either to progress. A good idea but the execution is, at best, quarter-arsed. It feels like no thought went into the gameplay by anyone who has ever played either and idler/clicker or a shoot-em-up. Fun concept: absolutely. Execution couldn't be worse. I would recommend this to anyone who both enjoys terrible shoot-em-ups and even worse idlers.

To be fair, I didn't think this game was for me - even at $3. It was part of some bundle with a game I did want. I thought I'd try it just to clear up my cache of untried games. I went into it - knowing it's a shooter and pokes fun at capitalistic greed. However, as another review mentioned the tutorial was quite obnoxious and while I didn't expect voice actors the sound chosen for that narrator - bathing naked in cash in the title - is undeniably irritating. I didn't make it 10 minutes into the game.

Originally played this game on the switch and really enjoyed. Bought this hoping to have fun on PC as well. The mouse and keyboard controls are awful, you might as well be playing with a controller. If I wanted to play this game on a controller I would play it on my switch. Also the yamming noise the NPC makes is so annoying and there's no way to skip any tutorials other than mashing the space bar.

My laptop keyboard keeps stopping to respond at random times when playing this game. It has not done this for a single other program I've ever used in my time using this laptop, and this issue is the cause of literally every single one of my deaths. I am forced to restart my laptop every time it happens, which is more than enough time for enemies to spawn and kill me, throwing out all my middle managers. It's endlessly frustrating, the game is genuinely unplayable until this issue is fixed. Computer Information: Manufacturer: Dell Inc. Model: Inspiron 7577 Form Factor: Laptop No Touch Input Detected Processor Information: CPU Vendor: GenuineIntel CPU Brand: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-7300HQ CPU @ 2.50GHz CPU Family: 0x6 CPU Model: 0x9e CPU Stepping: 0x9 CPU Type: 0x0 Speed: 2496 Mhz 4 logical processors 4 physical processors HyperThreading: Unsupported FCMOV: Supported SSE2: Supported SSE3: Supported SSSE3: Supported SSE4a: Unsupported SSE41: Supported SSE42: Supported AES: Supported AVX: Supported AVX2: Supported AVX512F: Unsupported AVX512PF: Unsupported AVX512ER: Unsupported AVX512CD: Unsupported AVX512VNNI: Unsupported SHA: Unsupported CMPXCHG16B: Supported LAHF/SAHF: Supported PrefetchW: Unsupported Operating System Version: Windows 10 (64 bit) NTFS: Supported Crypto Provider Codes: Supported 311 0x0 0x0 0x0 Video Card: Driver: Intel(R) HD Graphics 630 DirectX Driver Name: nvldumd.dll Driver Version: 27.20.100.8854 DirectX Driver Version: 27.21.14.6231 Driver Date: 10 14 2020 OpenGL Version: 4.6 Desktop Color Depth: 32 bits per pixel Monitor Refresh Rate: 60 Hz DirectX Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 with Max-Q Design VendorID: 0x10de DeviceID: 0x1c20 Revision: 0xa1 Number of Monitors: 1 Number of Logical Video Cards: 1 No SLI or Crossfire Detected Primary Display Resolution: 1920 x 1080 Desktop Resolution: 1920 x 1080 Primary Display Size: 13.54" x 7.64" (15.51" diag) 34.4cm x 19.4cm (39.4cm diag) Primary Bus: PCI Express 16x Primary VRAM: 1024 MB Supported MSAA Modes: 2x 4x 8x Sound card: Audio device: Speakers / Headphones (Realtek Memory: RAM: 8057 Mb VR Hardware: VR Headset: None detected Miscellaneous: UI Language: English Media Type: Undetermined Total Hard Disk Space Available: 229152 Mb Largest Free Hard Disk Block: 37308 Mb OS Install Date: Dec 31 1969 Game Controller: None detected MAC Address hash: e20de0cc73b408226534f79d8997e9ac5dd7fc8d Storage: Disk serial number hash: c15e5930 Number of SSDs: 1 SSD sizes: 256G Number of HDDs: 0 HDD sizes: %s1

I love this game. I platinum'd it on PS4, and I got again on Steam cause the Vita version never goes on sale and I figured I'd get it for the Steam Deck. It's just as addictive now as it was 2 years ago. This has to be the best shooter I've ever played, as all the building and levelling up really adds longevity. You can really stretch it out if you like the combat by levelling up your buildings in one system far longer than you should.

I really enjoy idle games, but this one is interesting. I saw that one of my favorite streamers was doing a sponsored stream for the game, and I thought it looked terrific at the end of the two hour time slot. He did get codes so I tried getting one of those, but in the end I had to buy it, but that's perfectly fine by me. The idle gameplay mixed with the twin stick shooter grabbed me instantly. Only issue I have with the twin stick portion of the game is that keyboard controls suck, but that can easily be fixed with a controller and a USB cable. The idle portion is relatively traditional: buy things, wait, collect money or just have all of it transfered to you instantly. Only issue I have with the buying is that buying in bulk is pretty risky that you can spend every cent in a misclick. Overall, though, I love the game. Definately worth the $15

What a neat little concept. While Vostoc Inc. could be described as a hybrid between an idle game and a twin-stick shooter, it comes together as something more. As far as idling goes: there is none. The game always gives you something to do, from mini-games to just roving through the galaxy picking fights, blowing up meteors, rescueing cast-aways or participating in races. The different star systems you can reach all have their own unique atmosphere and the writing (as charmingly aweful as the puns can be) is usually quite interesting. It's always fun to see how the diverse cast of natives react to your attempts to turn their homeworlds into a capatalist paradise. It's not invasion when you're an entrepeneur! This causes the game to have a real sense of progression. While the buildings you place slowly rake in the cash, there's always the feeling there's something tangible you can do to help speed things along, rather than go through a mind-numing numbers grind. The weapons and items you can buy in return, have a really nice feel to them too, with enough customization to keep things interesting. Several types can be combined to have different effects and with 19 sorts, there's genuine thought and strategy involved. As someone relatively new to twin-stick shooters, the game was worth it to me for the combat alone. I can recommend it to anyone looking to waste away some time on a nice, casual arcade game.

Vostok Inc. is a pretty fun time-killer "clicker-esque" game, I got a lot more out of it than I expected, although based on some of the achievements I doubt I'll ever get 100% of the content finished, and was surprised at how some of the animations are weirdly visually pleasing, looking at you wormhole jump. My only main complaint with the game is how long some of the jumps between "techs" are, and by that I mean getting enough money via your outdated extractors to be able to buy those shiny new extractors, as the game doesn't seem to keep counting money when no longer running, like a lot of other clicker games do, however the enemies, races and other various things to earn money (not just via extractors) help make that gap a little shorter. Overall a fun game, but be prepared to leave it running in the background while you do other stuff, as far as I'm aware the game won't get you that sweet moolah unless its running.

Decent game, but controls on PC are a mess. It's odd that I, J, K, and L are used for weapon management instead of the number keys, but the real problem is the mouse. Please note, you CAN remap the keys, so I highly recommend remapping your weapons to 1,2,3, and 4 like a normal shooter. The game engine is awful at managing its own borders; part of the menus at the top, the radar on the lower left, and part of the annoying assistant's talk bubble get cut off at times. Whatever cocaine the game engine is taking, it does not know how to manage mouse movement. I have lost my ship 4 times, but only one of them was my own doing; the rest of them were caused by the game suddenly losing focus. Why? Because if you happen to have the mouse over something else on *any* monitor (as in, if you weren't in the game, that's where your mouse would theoretically appear), the game may fail to intercept the click and instead minimize. This game does not pause when minimized. Get it on sale, but don't pay 15 bucks for it. This is a 7 dollar game at most in this state. I'll keep playing it some, but I can't recommend it in this buggy state at its current price.

Fun little combination of space-shooter and idle "bank builder" style play. Space races, rescue stranded corporate managers to unlock minigames, spaceship combat against weird aliens, and build a financial empire across several galaxies to fund upgrades to your spaceship. Tons of achievements, sixteen permanently unlockable managers to rescue who each have a different replayable minigame and provide bonuses to your cash gains, capacity to rescue and house dozens of additional corporate staff who don't have minigames but give extra cash bonuses, several types of weapons for your ship to buy and upgrade, half a dozen galaxies to visit, about twenty different types of businesses to build on each planet. And if you like to just fly around blasting asteroids for cash you can do that, too.

Decent game, definitely worth a play. The enemies scale nicely so there's always a little bit of challenge. Kills a few hours and you can leave it on when to help build up a bit of cash. Slight issue though, I broke the game when prices for buildings exceeded Duodecillion. Then everything essentially became free. My player level exceeded 9,000,000 because I wanted to see how far the game could go before my computer started to tank. Unfortunately, the enemies scaled with this and instantly decimated me because their health was in the millions. So yeah, that was fun to do :)

Wound up getting sucked into this for four hours straight, it is definitely addictive. Control issues (and a few bugs) aside, this is a great game. With a little extra polish it could be even better, but it's certainly worth the money as is. Gamepad recommended, at least until they improve their keyboard and mouse controls.

controls kinda suck and the tutorial is obnoxious af, turned me off immediately :/

Right out of the gate, I'm baffled by the configuration of this game, and I've been playing PC games for 30 years. I can't get my generic PS3 gamepad to work. I can't figure out how to play with just keyboard. I wish I hadn't flushed $15 down the toilet.

This is one of the best idle games I've played. It combines an idle game with a legitimately good arcade space shooter. Highly recommended.

神ゲーです！！！！！！！！ このゲームで得た経験で今FXトレーダーとして儲けています！！！

Yea even for $2 this is bad. The controls are just insanely useless, I honestly haven't encountered a game that plays this poorly in a VERY long time

Fantastically addicting. Best game to have minimized at work and reopen and play again once no one else is looking. Work Productivity: 0/10 Work Satisfaction: 10/10

Really, thoroughly excellent incremental/idle play. I look forward to seeing how weapon complexity and rebirth options evolve.

I've personaly never played a twinstick shooter before, so I had no idea what this would be like. However thanks to Nerd³ who made a video recommending it I gave it a look, bought it for half the price thanks to the sale at the time and can happely report that I would have been A okay with the pricing as is and that this game is absolutely AWESOME! I love the simplicity and dificulty of it, and its an interresting combo, clicker + twinstick shooter! So yeah defenetly recommend it to any one who like twinstick shooters or people who are up for something special!

Need a Controller to play M+K controls suck but if like twinstick shooters well its fun.

ok, so i bought and refunded this game once, it is UNPLAYABLE without a controller. it is a cool mix of twinstick shooting and an idle game. i realy wanted to like this game, i like all the elements in it, but it has massive control problems. is is not playable, at least with keyboard and keyboard + mouse is worse. it is a bad port. i am getting a refund.

★★★★☆ ____________________ Pros - - A clicker game that has gameplay and is actually fun to play - Different weapons to your weapons and ships that allow you to play differently - High quality music that becomes more or less intense depending on what you are doing (for example, you'll hear ambient noises when sitting still, start flying and a melody will start, start boosting or shooting, and drums will kick in) - I feel like I'm playing a game in a Kurzgesagt video - Casin is a cute star system, which is the first time I've ever called a star system cute _____________________ Cons - - The game rarely, but occasionally softlocks my keyboard, forcing me to restart the computer or sit there, dying repeatedly - Executives are annoying to manage, mainly because I rarely see supplies for them - Jimmy is bloody annoying in the tutorials (but you can mute the tutorials so it's fine)

It's basically digital crack. Use a controller and run it in a window; any time you're not actively playing just leave it running in the background.

Combining a SHMUP with idle game it' s not a bad idea, unfortunately, this games implements it badly, especially for those using mouse and keybord. The shooting part seems like something that was tacked in at the last minute, with awfull controls, no option for customizing graphics, no option to lock the mouse to the window, wich causes problems for anyone with dual monitors, a complete disaster. If they fix some of those issues, I might rewrite this and change my recomendation. But for now, I uninstalled it and recomend that you don' t waste your time. There are better SHMUPs for chean and idlers for free out there.

it feels to me like this game is not finished, it need a overhoul of the steering of the ship, its just a pure pain of flying and shooting. as it is now it more or less unplayable. have tryed with handcontroller and keyboard, while it was slightly better with mouse+keyboard it was still terrible feel. navigating the menues is allso terrible, pressing allkind of buttons just to find how to switch in between the menus, same goes to try to get to the settings menu, took some time to figure out how to get there, an easy way would to implement by pressing esc would make the experience better. over all this game is not worth its money, your more or less paying for a Beta. in conclution fun idea, but terrible stearing and menu handling it killed the game for me. cant recomend the game as it is now.

First off this game is massivly exspensive for what it is. When it comes down to it. It is a clicker. However the gameplay in this game keeps it moving foward for me. You play as a spaceship blasting astroids and alian spaceships. Meanwhile you are also building buisnesses on planets to make money while you fight. The story is absolutly garbage same as the over excessive tutorial for such a simple game. In other words get this cheap and maybe you might like it. Slightly recommend this.

Vostok Inc. is an attempt to make an idle game that replaces tried and tired clicker gameplay with a twin-stick shooter. So does it succeed? Mostly. The first issue I would mention is that it, despite being a twin stick shooter, does not support twin-stick shooting. What I mean by that is you can not bind the left control stick to ANYTHING if you're using a controller. In addition, there didn't appear to be any buttons for firing up or down when I tried (for added laughs, firing left and right used the left and right bumpers by default). Seeing as they've been getting heat over this for years to no effect, they must be either uncaring or uncapable in regards to fixing this. And I do mean "fixing." The second they said they had controller support, it went from being a nice-to-have to being a key component. If you use a keyboard the game is fine, although enemy variety is still severely lacking. I guess what I'm getting at is this game was a good idea, but you should wait for a sale if you're planning on picking this up.

I'm a sucker for twin-stick shooters and I'm a sucker for incremental/idle games. This game's first 12 hours was great! But the end boss is fucking awful--too powerful by several orders of magnitude--and I'll never finish it. The last building unlock was also a gigantic letdown. And that's a huge shame. I can't recommend it even to weirdos like me who love the building blocks this thing is made with.

Weird game... fun dialogues but has crappy keyboard controls and hollow clicker mechanics. Not recommended ^^

Deeper gameplay mechanics than Elden Ring

got it for $2.50 and it is certainly worth that, but $15 might be a stretch. However I am still on my first playthrough and there is a new game plus option, maybe it will turn out to be worth the original price. Love it, fun to play casually or aggressively. The shooter aspect and clicker aspect is balanced so that it doesn't make sense to ignore either. If you only like one of those aspects, probably skip this one. Everything requires money. Developing some planetside technologies eventually requires you to fly around and engage the universe. You COULD just play one aspect or the other, it's not a hard lock, but it's not so particularly soft that it makes sense either. There are even bonuses to your business found in space. It's a dual stick shooter I think originally on the PSVita, so the UI is not perfectly PC optimized (not bad at all though). You may also want to use a controller as WASD and arrow keys for dual stick is not what I think younger will prefer, but I find it adequate.

This is the most fun entrepreneurial shoot'em up I've enjoyed. It's difficult to understand what you can press on what screens at times, as there's no menu options that says what the button to press is (although I change most of my keyboard layouts). It's definitely interesting after playing Arcade Paradise so much.

Sure, it's not the most challenging. Sure, it's kinda shallow. But honestly, I bloody love it.

Brilliant game, so addictive. I’m hooked already! Got it in a steam sale and i couldn’t be happier! It gives you such a power fantasy, whilst at the same time being very challenging and fun to play! 12/10 recommendation

This game is not very good. Its not a fun idle game, its not a fun challenge game. There is a random difficutly spike at one point that is pretty annoying. Also the exec arcade games generally aren't fun and the achievements tied to them are even less fun to actually get. Just play really any other game than this one. It tries to do a few different things and just none of it is good.

This is an amazing game that has and will take up way to much time in my life. Love it.

An experiment in changing the idle game formula that didn't work.

It's an idle game that doesn't count up when you're not running it, and the interaction of the idle game and the shooter means the scaling feels way off. Once I had the Unicorn rocket thing (one of each weapon), all the bosses became trivial, and I didn't care enough to fill out the achievements or even bother unlocking the last few buildings. All combat was trivial very quickly, except that most times I came into contact with another object, I would very quickly (like in a second) have counted sufficient collisions to remove my shields and destroy my health. At least the enemies that are *supposed* to ram you die on collision, other things can take only one or two bullets, but eat *all* you health without noticing when rammed, scraped, or even touched at speed. Particularly annoying when this happened with spawns that you cannot *shoot*, but can collide with. Probably due to the weird momentum physics, which also show up when you have the booster. You can *brake* harder than you can boost, which makes it faster to turn by releasing the booster than boosting *against your current velocity*. There was never really anything between of "just spam bullets, the enemy shots are nearly impotent" and "you touched something solid, you're instantly dead". I honestly never really wanted to fight anything, there just wasn't any reward to it (due to idle-game money scaling), nor even a feeling of accomplishment. Most of my deaths happened while boosting between planets upgrading buildings, and bouncing off an asteroid due to limited up/down vision range, or having something spawn directly in my path. In the end, I stopped playing because I didn't really want to play a 2D space version of Desert Bus. Picked it up with a massive discount, probably got my money's worth out of it by leaving it running continuously while I played other games, went to work, slept, etc. So probably six hours of play and 70 hours of background idling. There's a New Game+ option, but since it says it resets all your stats, it's not clear how it's different from 'Delete my data'. And frankly, one round of this game was more than enough.