Energy Balance
Skip · Short indie · 2015
The verdict
SKIP IT.
The value isn't there at $2.99.
- Length
- 3.5h
- Value
- $0.85/hr
- Reviews
- 68% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 1 GB of memory, 512MB Dedicated Memory, 317 MB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux.
Energy Balance is a number puzzle. You have to swap power units in such a way that their sums form correct chains both vertically and horizontally. The game is easy to learn, but very hard to master. So, are you ready to peep under the hood of an alien spaceship?
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
December 2017 is where it bottomed out, at $0.49. It has been discounted 114 times in the 11 years tracked here, typically at 79 percent off, with about 5 weeks between sales. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 4 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 5 weeks.
It is less well reviewed than 81 percent of its genre. Among the games that feel like it, Fingered ($1.87, scores 36) beats it on value, while it beats Marble Mayhem: Fragile Ball ($1.99, scores 21).
The drop-off
7% start to 4% rarestNo achievement in this game marks the ending, so there is no finish rate. The curve runs from the most-unlocked achievement to the rarest, and its shape is where players stop. Steam global achievements
What players say
Thought it was about power. Turns out it's about surviving when coffee's gone and outlets throw tantrums. I now speak fluent outlet.
I am 32 years old. My ex-wife and I have a daughter together, and we adopted our son together. Both are now 4 years old. When we were going through our separation, I felt lost and unhappy. I was self-destructive. One day, I was so angry with everything spiraling out of control that I punched a concrete wall in a moment of overwhelming emotion. This resulted in breaking my fifth metacarpal in my right hand-the hand I...
My friend I play with said that if I post a review about the game and it gets 200 likes and 100 rewards, he'll buy me a bag of chips and a RTX 4090. So I'll leave this here.
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
No data upstream: critic score (Metacritic).
Cite this score
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Energy Balance scores 24/100 on the BANG Score (a skip). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/375010/energy-balanceThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 23, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.