Clickore Station

The game starts by letting you choose one of five rocks to mine. You can pick whichever one you want, but once you make your choice, the other rocks remain locked until you earn enough currency to unlock them. Each rock provides a different resource and introduces its own enemies, random events, and unique mechanics. The Crystal Rock, for example, has storms that interfere with your shields, while the Fire Rock brings meteor showers that break apart into smaller asteroids. Despite these differences, the basic gameplay remains the same across every rock. Most of your time is spent clicking around the screen while trying to keep your space station alive. The station sits in the middle of the screen, and your main job is to click to fire a laser at incoming enemies. It can take a few hits before its shield is destroyed, but once the shield is gone, a single additional hit will destroy the station and end your run. At the same time, you need to click on the nearby rock to mine resources. This creates a constant need to switch your attention between mining and defending the station. The interface itself is surprisingly clean, perhaps too clean in some ways. There is no visible counter showing how many resources you have mined during a run, so you only find out the final amount after your station is destroyed and you return to the main menu. That is also where the upgrade system comes into play. Your mined resources can be spent by clicking on the station positioned between the five rocks. The upgrade menu is divided into a station category and one category for each rock. Since only your currently selected rock is available at first, there is not much reason to worry about the other categories early on. Each category contains 12 upgrades, with every upgrade displaying its price and the number of times it can be purchased. The presentation is not particularly exciting, as the whole thing feels more like looking through a spreadsheet than a traditional upgrade menu. Still, having everything visible on one screen does make it easy to understand what you are buying and what you need to work toward. As you would expect from this type of progression system, every purchase increases the price of the next level. Some upgrades have a clear maximum purchase limit, while others are marked as unlimited. Naturally, unlimited upgrades also have unlimited costs, and the prices can eventually become extremely high for what amounts to a single additional improvement. Rock upgrades are split fairly evenly between different aspects of the gameplay. Some effect the enemies or mining, such as reducing enemy spawn rates or increasing the amount of resources earned per click. Others improve the station itself, including shield recharge speed, defense, laser strength, the ability for lasers to bounce between targets, explosive lasers, and a few other surprises. The mined resource is used for these rock specific upgrades, while the station has its own currency in the form of credits. These are earned by surviving for longer periods of time, meaning the longer you can keep your station alive, the more credits you will receive. The station upgrades offer a decent selection of useful improvements. You can increase laser damage, earn additional rewards from destroyed enemies, add turrets around the station for extra defense, and purchase mining drones that generate additional resources. On to focus on early is the upgrade that increases the number of credits earned per run. This can help reduce the amount of grinding required to reach more expensive upgrades. The same escalating costs apply here, though, so eventually you have to decide whether continuing to invest in a particular upgrade is actually worth the price. This gives the progression some much needed decision making, although the grind can still become quite noticeable. Credits are also used to unlock the next rock, which gives you another reason to keep playing after you have improved your