FragMiner

Pretty enjoyable! Short, not too much grind (though there are a few places where you'll be better off just rushing through runs as quickly as you can rather than placing bombs carefully, if you want to progress more quickly and get to new unlocks. Not sure how I feel about this as it feels like "anti-gameplay", when placing the bombs carefully in order to make the best use of them is somewhat satisfying. That said, the gameplay loop is tight, albeit simple. It's a small incremental game, so that's expected. If your clicker finger isn't well exercised, it might get sore, though holding the throw key works as well if you're okay with progressing more slowly.

This game falls flat very quickly after 1-2 hour of gameplay for a few reasons: - Poor balance. Some upgrades give no benefits, some are overpowered, and some are outright harmful, such as the +100% value +1 HP special ore upgrades (they're harmful because they contribute pretty much nothing to the final profit while making chain reactions harder to initiate). It's also very unclear what each upgrade do since the displayed values doesn't factor in prestige multipliers, and the ore/bomb list display in the home screen is too rudimentary to make anything useful (for example, I don't think it shows multi-bomb damage multiplier). - Too much grinding FWIW. There are a total of 5 prestiges in the game which resets your skill trees every prestige (this part is fine), but prestige 4 and 5 have very absurd requirements. You're required to clear ~30 mines to pay for prestige 5. Lots of upgrades are very expensive for some reasons so most of what you do in the game is just grinding (~100+ to rebuild the whole skill tree in later prestiges, though full skill tree is not required for prestige). There are little to few progression to be made. - No skill ceiling whatsoever, and endgame gameplay is so unengaging it completely falls flat. You just clear the entire grid with a few bombs clicked on 4 corners of the grid every time. The endless mode (Core Rift) is a fxcking joke: the final achievement (2M score) is free by literally just mindlessly clicking on yellow tiles for 20 minutes until you reach wave 40, with a full upgraded skill tree and no modifiers. (Also, why does adding modifiers in endless mode require spending a copies amount of currency seemingly for each run? Why does unlocking it requires over half the required resources of prestige 5? Does this game even warrant this amount of grinding?) Honestly the game would be passable if it doesn't require so much grinding, it's just a Nodelike, the expectation for this genre is very low. The "too much grinding" part really breaks the deal.

This game was cute! I blasted through most of the content pretty quickly. I prefer the creator's newer game "Goblins Can Conquer" but this one was quite satisfying. Definitely worth the experience if you like incremental games.