Vostok Inc. Reviews

[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.

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

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

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.

[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?

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

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])

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.

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.

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.