Spiral Knights = ehhh

Welp, I think I'm done over there.
The gameplay was fun and easy, the design and graphics were awesome, and the leveling was gear-based, which was an interesting way to do it.

Unfortunately, the 800lb gorilla in the room is the amount of money that has to be spent to play the game at any length during the day. it's $10 for 3500 energy, and the form of energy this is doesn't regenerate.

energy is what allows you to access dungeon levels and make new gear. There's 100 energy given every day, and it replenishes at the rate of 1 every 15min. It costs 10 energy to access each dungeon. It costs 2 energy to revive yourself in this game with little HP regeneration options, and the price per rev increases exponentially every time you do it.

You earn crowns (gold) in-game, and can use the crowns to buy the pay-energy, called CE, at the rate of 4000-5000 per 100CE.

So, there's 2 ways to get CE. Grind on a limited amount of "free" energy to get enough to purchase 100CE at a time, or pay $10 for 3500 CE.

Building higher level armors cost more energy. The amount of energy I need for each piece of equipment at this point is 200. That means I need to grind for 2 days to get enough for 100CE, then wait another complete day to build a piece of armor, which will drain me of ALL energy, so that I have to wait for another day to play after that.

Oh yea, you have to have recipes for this gear. If you can find the recipes, they cost 10K crowns. So, grind 10K up, then grind 100CE up and wait 3 days. Also, the recipes spawn randomly on a vendor that you have to go through a few levels to get to. So, you have to pack 10K or more, in case the vendor has more than one recipe you need, cuz you may not see them again.

Oh yea, you have to level up your new equipment to make it worth anything. I guess you can level it up during the grinds.

SO...You've now spent a month and a half doing the grinds and energy drains to build a full set of 3 star armor and gear.

OOPS you need 4 star gear to get into the deeper dungeons.
Multiply all the above costs by two.

Or, you could speed everything up by spending $20/month on CE. Well, not speed up as much as use the CE in gray market gear building and buying.

Stupid. There's no ad-click, tapjoy, adsense, or any other revenue other than credit card payments. They just patched recently and drove the CE prices on everything up A LOT too.

All this economic finagling is not what I call fun; playing a game and killing monsters for hours is what I call fun. That's the one thing you can't do in this game, however.