Seems like a to try and cash in on the whole "twitch plays pokemon" thing but would you really buy a game after watching it get beaten on twitch?

I never heard of the game until these stories started popping up, and I'm kind of interested in it now, so the marketing works. I did have that thought earlier that some people may not buy it after watching the game on twitch. As competitive as the indie game market is, you need all the help you can get to be noticed.

Easy, just don't watch it then if you're interested, or just watch parts of it to get an idea if you'll like it

I have played this game for twelve hours on two separate save files.

The graphics and music are great, the progression as a boxer is awesome. This game covers all the good parts of the Rocky movies, along with some nice ideas of its own.

However this game is also an unbelievably painful grind and it's extremely unbalanced. Agility builds are far superior to any other build, to the point of being overpowered. Strength builds are almost impossible to finish this game with and stamina builds are only ok. However even with an agility focused build the grind is ridiculous, this game far outstays its welcome.

Everything in this game takes too long. For example you lose stats every day, so even if you train all day your net gain is only a small amount. If you don't train at all during a day, your loss is significant and it takes ages to get it back. The game is full of design choices to ensure you lose out on training, like needing to earn money which drains your overall "need" stats.

Even without mechanics like that the game would be a grindfest, but with that mechanic its just a tedious, soul crushing experience to try to finish this game.

I really loved the setting, the graphics and the story even if its mostly just a Rocky homage. However the grind in this game is just too much, I like games with grind, but this is ridiculous.

I love the game, especially after I used cheat engine to lock my need meters so they never drop and give myself infinite money and perk points.

That's a good point, that would fix all the problems with the game.

Anything that helps you stick out in today's world where even getting your game featured on Steam is no longer a reliable method to draw eyes to you is generally a good idea.

It's like with Let's Players or Youtubers who play a game for a week or two, do a couple of videos. Their fan base may never play the game they're watching the video of, but they look at it and think "hey that looks fun, they like it and I like them so I'll pick it up". Not everyone is going to do that but I think enough people do that it makes it worth while.

It's a unique and seemingly effective marketing campaign for what appears to be a pretty well produced game. If it looked like an extremely low effort game, I might be more inclined to agree with the "cash in" claim, but this just seems like good marketing.

I agree. The marketing is rather brilliant and can't blame someone for marketing a game any way they can.

I can't speak to balance (looks too grindy) but I also think there's something to this game and what it's doing that is more admirable then say Clicker games. Seems like there's good depth here.

@chessamv: Yeah, agreed with your points based on what I saw of the game. The stat loss comes too quick, and it makes the grind seem Sisyphean. As a basic design principle, it's probably less frustrating to players to just make the stat gains from training very low, instead of these systems where you gain stats but then lose stats every single day. I'm no expert, but I'm pretty sure boxers don't lose a bunch of muscle mass just because they take a day off from training to work a day job. If there's any stat loss at all, it should be like once every few days, and very very minor relative to stat gains from training.

Yeah, that seems like the way to play it. Though I wish that when this becomes necessary, there was a way you could directly send the devs a message saying "FYI, I'm using cheat engine so that your poorly balanced game is actually fun, so figure your shit out."

I used cheat engine. Still played for a good 10 hours.

The steam reviews said the same, which stopped me from buying it after Jason's playthrough on UPF piqued my interest.

i diddent know about the game until unprofessional friday, and even if i had seen in on twitch i would properly not have seen it from start to finnish or at least the ending. so i dont see the problem.
also if i had i would still buy it if i was interested in the game. so it would really have changed nothing for me

I saw all the people complaining about Strength builds, so naturally my response was to be stubborn and specifically try to beat it using a Strength build.

Started up a game with the intent of going Strength and Stamina, with minimal Agility. It went okay-ish at first, but I reached a mid-way point wherein even if I could beat fighters in 4-5 hits if I connect, and enemies are doing 1-5 damage per hit to me out of like 150 health, I just lose the fight in an excruciatingly slow manner. I've tried a few different skills in various attempts to debuff enemy Agility and increase my own accuracy as much as possible, but nothing really seemed to make a significant difference.

I could probably proceed if I spent long enough slowly gaining skill points by losing fights and training with Silver, and raising my attributes higher and higher to make up the difference, but when it comes down to it I don't really want to. I don't really regret buying it, necessarily, it was ten dollars and I got a good three or four hours to enjoyment out of it before I hit that brick wall, but I think I'm going to leave it alone and hope they tweak the balance some more in the near future.