Recent reviews by Lawlzer

I played this game in "beta", aka the Demo version

Cube Racer 2 is a mix of Ultimate Chicken Horse Fight, and SpeedRunners. The general goal is to "go fast", but after each round, you get to build "obstacles" that everybody must deal with in the future rounds. After a few rounds, it turns into a massive clusterbeep of chaotic obstacles.

The mechanics are extremely easily to learn and grasp for beginners, but there's also limitless amount of difficult tricks and tips that advanced players can learn.
This game is by far an amazing party game to play with your friends OOF, sorry, there's also a Discord for people like us[/i].
If you'd like to chat with the devs, or play with community members, please join the Cube Racer 2 Discord! https://discord.gg/b2hvVvDj9a

You can build obstacles to mess with everybody, or build "secret" paths (E.g cannons, portals) to help you go faster, if other people don't find them.

The devs are very active, chatty, listen to feedback, and play with the community!

This game is a clone of the first game, with some changes.
Sorry in advance, this is going to be a long post.

This game has a few additions; like evolving monsters (You can spend a resource to "evolve" a monster, to increase it's stats)
So far, I haven't played too much of it, but what I have seen, it's a direct clone with new graphics; All of the buttons, menus, mechanics, are the EXACT same. This is very very lazy of the dev, it's not even remotely hidden.

I'll be honest, I haven't played too much of the game yet, maybe things are better when you're super far into the game. But so far, the early game has been pitiful (there's a resource you can only get by BEATING stages, and there's hardly any benefit to going further, and tower EXP/GOLD is always the same, no matter what stage or enemy you're fighting, so unlike most games where you get more EXP and rewards for going further, in this game, your first 50 stages will give you HALF of your gold, and the last 50 will take MUCH longer, and give you 2x gold. Basically, you're just supposed to go near your max stage, prestige, repeat for a loong time)
The game is extremely tedious (After 1-2h into a prestige (keep in mind, this is still EARLY game, everything should be cheap, I can buy TWO upgrades with ALL of my prestige points. Really? When you start, the game should give you lots of points to explore things, have different options, make it interesting as you go on... This game has none of that)

Additionally, I recently decompiled the source code of the game --- and guess what? It's a 99% clone. All of the methods (IAPs, BanUser, detecting if a user is a cheat-engine user, etc... It's all an EXACT clone of the 1st game).

Oh, there are IAPs? Oh, let me look at those real quick... There's an IAP for $20 that you cannot remove from the side of your screen for (12h?)
Many more IAPs (2x some stats, 3x some stats, etc)... and guess what? The total cost for the basic IAPs is $95 (Cheapest was $5, most are $10 USD) (from what I could see, I'm assuming you unlock more as you go on)
What I found from decompiling the source code is that there are a total of... TWENTY in-app-purchases. TWENTY different things the dev allows you to buy to progress faster, or in his case, to make a crapton of money from a terrible clone of a game.

This is one of the worst "clone a game so people buy more IAPs" I've ever seen. It's truly incredible.

Edit: I've now played the game more to see if it changes, and I can conclusively say... Nope! It actually gets worse. There are some things that are not as bad as I originally thought (The IAP "2x game speed" is actually additive, so it's more like +10% in the lategame)...
But...
Lots of other things are bad. There are no in-game formulas shown (So everybody in the Discord asks the same questions. Is (this) multiplicative or additive?... For every feature.

The dev himself literally admitted this game is for casuals, not for experienced idle players looking for a good time. The only core mechanic in this game (as of release) is "energy", which you more/less get a fixed amount of. There is almost no way to increase your energy production, which means it's impossible to catch up to a player that has played/paid more than you.

The dev himself also said he doesn't even play his own game... He just listens to feedback. A developer that doesn't play his own game! That is insane; I've almost never heard of a developer that does this.

If you're a complete casual to idle games, and do not want to "think" much, sure, this game is for you. If you enjoy idle games that require thought, and decision making... Don't install this.

Obviously, there's a huge issue with the XP/grind system, but that's what everybody is talking about.
Nobody is talking about all of the other issues with this game.

Let's pretend you have every single tower in the game, and every single upgrade, because we're not going to talk about those issues.
- Eco: A huge thing BTDB1 players hated was "#epic lategame" - Because of how the meta progressed in BTDB1 (with farms every game), the important thing was to minimize your opponent's eco (farms), while having as much eco (farms) as possible. Not many players went eco in the pro scene, because farms were better in general. Well, farms in this game suck. Now, every player will want to go eco -- Alright, that's cool. I'd like it if farms were viable in some scenarios/some maps, but OK. Did you notice that all eco has different income:ratio? This is actually a really cool change! In BTD:B1 it was a ratio of 25:1 (25 money spent: 1 eco gained) for all "eco bloons", the only difference was send speed. In this game, it's massively different. Eco bloons are sent way faster, but give less income. This is truly an innovative idea and quite cool. I like it. So why do I dislike it? Well, in this game, the "non-eco" starting ratio is 15:1. It even goes up to 15:1.3 (11.5:1). This is insane! In BTDB:1 it took 5 minutes to double your money, in BTDB:2 it takes 2 minutes and 18 seconds to double your money. This means, at best, eco is TWICE as good in BTDB1. This is ABSURD, and massively encourages #epiclategame.
- RNG abilities: A thing that pretty much every competitive player hates is RNG, or luck. How is there luck in a competitive bloons game? Some hero abilities are unable to be controlled. I'm not saying "it's hard to use", no. Literally, Gwendolyn's first Fire ability is inconsistent. It's well known in the BTD:6 "challenge" community (I'm not sure if that's what they're called) that some abilities are pure luck, and you will just reset the wave constantly, hoping to get good ability RNG. There's an easy fix for this -- They can just change the ability, to make it always target the first bloon, or something similar. They can do this for each RNG ability, this isn't hard to do at all.
- First Blood: One thing that any remotely competitive BTD:B1 player will know, are that lives don't matter. If I have more eco than you, even if I only have 30 lives, it doesn't matter. You're never going to "leak 30 lives" in the lategame, eco is all that matters. NK decided, eh, let's add a bonus for not losing the first life. Let's give a bonus for something that does not matter. This makes absolutely 0 sense from a competitive sense, and it's blatantly encouraging bad habits (trying to keep all of your lives, even lowering your potential to win, just to get this small bonus).
- Why did BTD:B2 come out like this to begin with?: It's not possible for me to give an actual answer to this, I'm not NinjaKiwi. However, I can say that consistently, they put out bad games, and improve them as time goes on. What, that's not possible? Let's look at their most recent game, BTD6. I bought the game on day 1 of release on Mobile, and I'll be completely honest. That game was terrible on day 1. It was EXTREMELY laggy, there were constant crashes, numerous bugs (Infinite money from 1 crate? Regen farming?) I even used Nox to emulate the game on a gaming PC to help, and no, it was still insanely laggy. BTD:B2 is the same way. Lots of UI glitches, crashes, massive (BLATANTLY OBVIOUS) EXP/grind issues... They consistently put out products that are bad, and improve them until they're playable. I'm not asking for them to make a perfect game, but products like this are blatantly unplayable and terrible.

If you want to play this game to make choices... you only get two choices at the very end of the game, for a total of four endings. The entire rest of the game is literally just read-and-click-next.

Cute game. Play for maybe 20m max, but free and easy. Cool.

Not bad

I really like the idea of the game, except there are some problems (I'm not saying the game is bad, I'm saying that there are issues: It's a lot easier talking about problems than good things)
Crashing: After you "win" (aka, go infinite because the game is too easy) it's fairly easy to crash your game by just getting too much of everything. But, by that point you won a while ago, so..
Too easy: Even on hard difficulty, the game is extremely easy.

Edit: Also, I haven't seen the dev at all, so I doubt he actually helps or makes any changes to the game. Sadly :(
I'd still reccomend the game, though. It's really fun figuring out how to play and how everything works! :D