Fascinating game, think I spent a solid half an hour saying 'just one more go'. Absolutely love the pixel art and how each cow has a different look for max upgrades. It's very very cute and I very much enjoyed upgrading a full squad until they were bulging out of the barn.
I do really wish it were possible to understand more of what's going on from the game itself. I was completely baffled just trying to play it and had to refer back to this page repeatedly to tell what the different abilities did. Even then, lots of things remained unclear to me. What do the stats do? It felt like leveling up wasn't that useful beyond the obvious visual incentive. I think it somehow gated the mid-contest upgrades, but I never needed more than a few levels to get all the upgrades I wanted. Tier 2 upgrades always seemed to be so expensive that you could only get them quite late.
Things I'd love to see
- an indicator of the actual number of charm points you gain in a round
- ditto for the enemy team
- some way to see the effect of cheer/distract more clearly (per-round scores would help a lot here)
- a "you win" / "you lose" screen after a contest rather than a hard cut back to the menu (and an indicator for how many stars you won!)
- some indicator of how many rounds there are, total?
I assume it's intentional that when you lose you just go back to the first round with all your upgrades and unlocked cows? But it shows the other party slots as locked, even if they're filled, it's quite odd. If you're supposed to have a hard reset after losing I don't know how you'd ever get enough star points to fill a squad. On the other hand, the way it is now, after a while I started just spamming 'roll' for the first few rounds, spending all the winnings and then losing to repeat.
I gave up on the round versus Lum, or maybe the round after that. The enemy team had upgraded dice out of the gate that made it very hard to compete and it felt like for all the strategising I could do it would just come down to luck as to whether or not they'd roll their big charm dice or not. I felt pretty strongly by the end that I would prefer having a full team of Claires and Slicks as just rolling a ton of charm and the occasional upgrade seemed the best way to win.
Anyway, compulsive game, I do look forward to updates for it very much.