Alchemist of War

alchemist of war kinda reminded me of puzzle forge on mobile, but with cards instead of match-3 elements. it's closer to the first game with not much meat on it though, only even more basic and doesn't come close to puzzle forge 2 in any way.
the best thing one can do in case a war breaks out is make a killing not by actual killing, but by not taking sides and providing both parties with means of taking lives. that is what this random/endless score attack card game is about, no campaign or anything.
each run gives you a random and most likely infinite deck and a 2x2 crafting area. place cards in the slots to create any weapon (no demands like in puzzle forge), sell it, done. you can have up to 8 cards in your hand and no need to fill all 4 crafting slots. they're essentially crafting materials but customers don't care what you create from them.
cards can be regular, silver or gold, and background color and arrows pointing in various directions are also important. if a card has a blue arrow pointing to the right, placing the card on the left and putting a blue card next to it means more cash, as is filling the multiplier on top (the game, well, the achievements, refer to it as your level). keep doing this until one of the factions wins, then check the online scoreboard if you want to compete against random strangers on the internet.
early on it might seem like a good idea to conserve cards since new ones cost money, and also to keep higher values for later, but the higher the multiplier, the harder it is to keep the game going, and while it might be possible to run out of money and so new cards, it's highly unlikely.
balancing the two factions in tug-of-war fashion is the key to a higher score, as you're essentially prolonging the war by not providing enough weapons to either party to kill the other one. you can skip customers for 10 gold and the purple star with the number represents weapon power, tells you how much the bar will go in the direction indicated by the arrow. if one turn the weapon for a blue guy has 12, it'll favor the blue team by that much. then next turn crafting a weapon with a value of 13 will favor the reds by 1 because it has to counter the 12 first, but if the value is only 10, it'll be another 2 for the blues because it wasn't enough to negate the 12.
the problem was, I had no idea how weapon power is calculated, but refer to the comments below for some insight from an actual smart person. the devs said they didn't want to simplify the game by explaining how it works, not that simplifying it any more would be possible, and that's what the help screen is for anyway.
holding left and right click do the same, they pick a card up to drag around. that is all the controls. graphics are cartoony, there are a bunch of different customers and weapons to make. audio is fine, the usual unmemorable but unintrusive variety. some flavor text would've been nice though, tooltips or right click close-ups for amusing card descriptions and a few lines for each customer. no mid-run saving, going back to the menu or quitting forfeits the current progress.
settings only consist of separate volume sliders and theoretically language options, but only english is available. not that there's much to translate. the screen is accessible while playing as well. no windowed mode, alt+enter only produces a non-resizable window, have to edit the registry to change resolutions, and the developer said they 'can't do anything' about it. getting sick of this now. unity used to have a config screen on startup if devs bothered to enable it, but unity decided it was too useful and removed it from newer versions, yet developers still don't bother to add resolutions and windowed mode to their games. it's ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ lazy, or in this case might be down to incompetence, same result either way. windowed mode is a must for a game like this, as it doesn't require your full attention.
it's a simple game, made even simpler by customers accepting any old crap you give them, but some might find longevity in its randomness even if I never do, a couple hours tops is how long something like this can entertain me. excluding a working windowed mode, it's done mostly well for a mobile port and the price is about the same as the mobile version, but as is, it's only worth checking out on sale, don't pay full price for something that doesn't fully work.

Update 8/30/2024: It breaks my heart that in 2024 I can look at the steam store and see Overwatch 2 that has almost 300k reviews in which barely 20% of them are positive. Yet 38,500 people are playing it on steam right now. We as a community have very obviously gotten our symbolic gestures down. I just don't understand why we've chosen to only express it in a negative way. While you're doom scrolling steam to find your next bundle of sale items to never play don't just pass over this one. It's a $.99 game done by just one person or maybe a couple who are clearly passionate about games from Istanbul. The art is really unique and cute, appears almost hand drawn and they very clearly wrote their own music. From now on I'm no longer going to scream at billion dollar corporations who don't even view me as a human but as a mechanism to make themselves richer. I'm instead going to give money to developers like this so that they don't give up on their dreams. This developer created socials for this game, for their company and a website but just as fast we never heard from them again. It's because we're so busy lamenting the death of gaming as an art form as we queue for another apex match. From now on I'm going to seek out developers like this who are trying to preserve that legacy and support them. If we don't do that in 20 years we're going to be talking about the next big WoW expansion, Diablo 6.5 that needs loot 2.0, Call of Duty Black Ops Infinity and how your favorite movie was made by Marvel. You're not buying a small cheeky game you'll never play for $.99 you're sending a message to the developer to never stop dreaming big. For the love of god if you don't buy this game right now I will come to your house and delete your Fortnite skins. If you want to stand for something, stop only thinking of yourself and start standing for the little guy. If you want games to get better you need to support the people who are trying to do so.
Update 12/27/2022: The price was reduced to $0.99. I honestly don't see any reason why if you have even an inkling of interest in the game you shouldn't get it.
Original Review: This is a charming little game. The instructions leave a lot to be desired but with some trial and error you can pretty much figure the game out. It’s not too complicated but has enough complexity to keep it interesting if you like beating your own high score. The art is actually very well done and, for a while, is interesting to look at. The music is a bit repetitive but it’s not bad background noise. Overall I think the game has a lot to offer even if only for a couple of hours. I think $3.99 is completely reasonable.

good game, really like it, 1 more
Be a magician, make weapons, get rich, buy lots of cards, beat the opponent, we can! I think this is a suitable advertising word for this game

Honestly for $1, you get a very difficult game.
It's not crazy deep, and yet some mechanics aren't even explained. But I've had a decently fun time trying to figure out how far I can take the game, trying very carefully to balance the war gauge.

Play with beating level 10:
I was gonna 100% this game, but it's a shame that the dragon achievements don't pop I sold a 250-500 gold item multiple times, but they don't work. The game though is still a ton of fun though and the working achievements make you change your playstyle drastically which is neat and adds a ton of replay getting to level 10 you have to slow roll actually get a feel of how the cards will swing with the huge multiplier etc. The money achievements you have to basically base race and use the arrows to maximize profits before the swings become too large and the dragon achievements you would just need MASSIVE rng with the eyeballs. Overall though for the price this is a really dope strategy management game in my opinion. There is a glitch though where if you put the items in and give someone the boot it will give them whatever the score was from the made item even if you didn't give it to them and sometimes even though there's a score to move the bar it won't register on the first turn which can really smack you if you're trying to speed roll through.

Singleplayer card game where you craft and sell weapons to two war factions. There is no defeat in this game, but if you want to make a high score, you need to balance the power of two factions. If one side gets too powerful, which you can see on the bar at the top right, the game ends.
If you match the crafting ingredients colors with the arrows, you'll get a bonus in profits and power of that weapon. You can kick a customer to postpone the game-over, but it costs 10 golds, so try to craft a useless weapon if you can, instead of kicking them.
The more you prolong the game, stronger the weapons become, so it gets harder as you play.

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Alchemist of War is an intriguing game that I want to like. It's got a distinctive art style and an interesting premise. I feel like there's the bones of an interesting game here, but it definitely falls short of feeling completely fleshed out, however. It definitely seems like a game that could become something more with just a couple extra updates, or a little more polish. So while I'm recommending it tentatively, I definitely feel that anyone should wait until it's at a price point they feel comfortable with or until the game's gotten some more content.
The general premise is that you're an arms merchant, selling weaponry (that you create) to both sides in a conflict. Your overall goal is to keep this conflict going as long as possible, to increase the gold in your coffers. It's a premise that I can't recall having seen explored before, and I really wish they'd given us more here – either in terms of weapon/conflict variety, or maybe some sort of flavor text describing the origins of the conflict, or what's happening during the war.
While your customers are all done in a very stylized and unique artistic style, there's only eleven of them, so you're going to quickly see everything that the game has to offer. The same thing applies to the weapon creation system – there's only fifteen, and so you're going to see them all very quickly. The music is a single 30 second loop that oozes a dark and whimsical Danny Elfman-esque style, but unfortunately, it's so repetitive that eventually you'll probably want to mute the music, or your brain will tune it out completely. In the end, you're just left chasing a high score and more than likely only paying attention to your customer to see which side they're on, and only paying attention to the weapon to see the effect it has on your score and the tide of war.
In addition, the “scoreboard” feature only has two slots (and wasn't functional in my build). In a score-chaser game, this is something that's frankly essential, because nobody's going to keep notes on their best scores. The mechanics themselves (including the ability to kick out a customer) weren't explained well at all. Both of these things are presumably easily fixed, and neither was a deal-breaker for me, but it's not entirely encouraging. It's such a shame, because this game has such promise and personality. It absolutely oozes charm. I just wish there was more content, because this really feels like the developer was on the cusp of creating something very special.