Energy Cycle
Skip · Short indie · 2016
The verdict
SKIP IT.
The value isn't there at $2.99.
- Length
- 0.6h
- Value
- $4.98/hr
- Reviews
- 69% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 1 GB of memory, 512MB Dedicated Memory, 297 MB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux.
'Energy Cycle' – new puzzle game from the developers of ‘Energy Balance’. When you click each cell on the game field - it changes color, and the colors of adjacent cells horizontally and vertically. Your task to bring all the cells to the same color. Sounds pretty easy, but try to do it!
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
November 2016 is where it bottomed out, at $0.49. It has been discounted 112 times in the 11 years tracked here, typically at 80 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 77 percent of its genre. Among the games that feel like it, Fingered ($1.87, scores 36) beats it on value, while it beats Crystals of Time ($6.99, scores 15).
The drop-off
5% start to 3% 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
Players
1 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
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A pretty interesting color matching puzzle game. Would've been cuter if they replace the energy balls with actual cats...
Pros: + The only graphic/animation in the game are the energy orbs, which I'll give some credit for Cons: - music is very unsettling. It's like the developers just threw various sound effects into a blender and tried to see what would stick. - The puzzle mechanics are functional, but it's very bare bones. - The backgrounds don't really add in or tie to the puzzle element of the game.
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 Cycle scores 21/100 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/415960/energy-cycleThe 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.