Re: my dream, your nightmare
I feel obligated to start out by saying that I've never played your game extensively. I gave it a shot once on a day when I was really bored a couple months ago, but only stuck through the first 50-100 ish levels.
I do know people who do, though, and from asking around I'm reasonably confident that the issues I had with it don't go away at higher levels.
I'd also like to apologize in advance if I come off as overly harsh, I'm just trying to provide honest feedback here.
1. Spelling, grammar and syntax.
Pretty important for a text game, and yet very obviously not given enough attention in yours. Never have I read a line of text from your game and gone oh [[wow]], that's well written. from help files to starship messages and room descriptions, I've never gotten the impression that writing quality matters. If I'm playing a text game, I expect to get quality text- not something slapped together on the back of a napkin. It's not just the presence of mistakes, it's the lack of depth, about the lack of consistency. I got the impression of trying to read a project done in google docs where 13 different people are trying to add things in without going back and making sure the top half of the document matches in style to the bottom half. I expect some variety in messages, too. having only played the game briefly, the one thing that comes to mind at this second is weapons firing, which from what I remember relied on a single message with a single adjective and the name of the weapon changing for variety, but other than that was almost exactly the same for 80 percent of the weapons I saw- again, I admit that I only played the game briefly.
I can live with typos- they happen to all of us- but I expect at least some modicum of effort put into presentation of text when the entire game is about text. [[wow]] me with your writing skills. I don't expect PHD thesis level writing, but I'd hope it's not unreasonable to get something that doesn't read like an eighth grade project that isn't even being marked on grammar.
2. me and a five-year-old would be equally good at playing Cosmic Rage.
As mentioned above, very many of your activities are rote tasks- type this, then wait, then type that, then wait, rinse and repeat, or buy an upgrade that makes it so you only have to type one command. More than that, though, it feels like many activities are carbon copies of each other- drawing from my experience, I didn't feel a difference between trash collecting and volcano harvesting, for example, or several other activities who's names I've forgotten. yes, the commands and some of the text changed, but I was literally doing the same thing, and from asking around this appears to be a recurring theme even at high levels. The buttons change, the messages change a bit, but you, in essence, are doing the same exact thing in almost all the multitude of activities cosmic rage has to offer. I get the impression that there are four or five activity templates reused ten or twenty times each, and from what I experienced and what others tell me, once you've done one activity from the template you can pick up any of the others in seconds.
I've also been lead to believe that at no point is there an activity requiring true strategic thinking, planning, timing yourself, or anything similar- that as I said earlier, a child capable of typing would not be disadvantaged at all if they and I started playing at the same time. Nowhere is there a cutoff related to skills, save combat which I will address in a minute. If you can use a keyboard, you can play cosmic rage- which, don't get me wrong, trying to appeal to gamers of any skill level is great and all- it just provides nothing in the challenge department. from everything I've been told, no matter what if you sink enough time into it you'll end up at the top even if you barely understand what you're doing. For a game to truly be enjoyable to me, I have to be challenged. There needs to be some amount of effort involved, if I can get to the top by keyboard mashing at 3 AM then it's not particularly fun. Make people have to use their brains sometimes.
3. The issue of combat.
This is definitely not unique to your game, but the way space combat works has got to change. I'm not even going to go int much detail here, I think @Dark addressed it pretty well above for your particular case. What I will say, though, is if a game relies heavily on luck and better upgrades to do well at an activity touted as the one requiring the most player skill, something isn't ideal.
Again, I'm sorry if any of this came off as me trying to insult you- I'm honestly just trying to provide my personal, and hopefully constructive! reasoning for not liking your game.
Thanks and I hope you have a wonderful day.
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