This might be a style issue.
The goal is to climb to the highest point you can and the rocketeers get you there.
Hmm.
OK, but I'm not climbing to the highest point I can - I'm climbing to the highest point
the game will let me climb to before it stops giving me any method of getting higher. I'm not failing because of any lack of skill on my part, I'm failing because the game randomly decided it was time for me to fail.
What this does to me, as a player, is tells me that it's completely random whether or not I beat my last high score, because it's down to whether or not the game's random number generator allows me to. It's like a ladder game where the objective is to get as high as you can without falling off the ladder, and after a while the game stops giving you any more ladder to climb, it's arbitrarily decided that this is the end of your game.
If you could promise me that the sum total of ascending potential before they run out completely is the same in every game, then it would be slightly better - I would at least know that any improvements on my previous high score were down to my skill rather than the RNG - but this patently isn't the case in your current build, and it still means that there's an absolute upper limit to scores, which means I'm far
far less motivated to try again in hopes of getting a different one, 'cause I'd suspect I'm already so close to the limit from my last couple of games that any improvement would be so minor as to not be worth it.
In short:
Sometimes you get lucky and I think that's important in this type of game.
I don't mind the kind of game where sometimes you get lucky and get an unexpected boost to your score, or an unexpected easy patch... but I loathe the kind of game where sometimes you get unlucky and there's absolutely no way to continue playing no matter how perfectly you play - I would consider the situation I describe above as a bug, either in the implementation or the design. IMO, if I can play a perfect game, a good game game shouldn't punish me totally randomly.
It's a really fun game in the middle part, where it's still playable, but it stops being fun as soon as the game randomly ends my play, and that makes subsequent plays less fun because I know it could happen again at any time. I have much less motivation to keep playing, because improving my skill at the game doesn't help me much at all. (Case in point: I didn't read the instructions and only learned about the boost after ten or so games; it didn't improve my score at all, I couldn't beat my previous score because I just kept running out of guys to climb on.) I might as well spend my time on the slots, if I'm going to play something that depends mostly on luck with only a small element of player skill.
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