picked up the non-f2p version of this game on apple arcade. galaga wars+. its hard to pin a score on this one because the base game is actually pretty fun. its got a good challenge, it feels like as good a conversion of galaga to modern sensibilities on a touchscreen as i can imagine with a few caveats. when you get two ships, one of the ships just disappears after a while, and if your main ship gets hit but not the partner ship, you still just die and get a game over right then and there instead of the partner ship taking your place like in real galaga. but even though this "+" version of game doesn't suck money out of you, the scaffolding of the f2p mentality is still fully there.

there are a ton of ships with different powerups to unlock, and all of 'em are cool little namco tributes. you can unlock the galaxip, the solvalou, the blast fighter, even pac man and the katamari damacy prince. these also get you extra lives. anyhow the big problem is that say you want to play as the prince of the galaxy. you need like 120 credits to unlock that (it might be 300? i forget). well how do you get credits? you unlock one credit per stage per day. there are ten stages so if you play perfectly, you can get up to ten credits per day. but its a hard game and you don't get that many lives, so you're probably gonna get closer to 5 credits a day, at least with just a few ships. and it takes time to play all these stages!! and there are so many ships to buy and honestly they are all expensive. you get the galaxip for 5 credits and the solvalou for like ten but after that, the next one is 30 credits, then 40 ,then 50, it's nuts. so if you've got gamer brain like me and you have the improper urge to get all the ships you'd have to play the game every day for like twenty to thirty minutes for a sustained period of six months to unlock all the ships. this is obviously where the f2p nonsense comes in because come on. that's an absurd proposition.

so really what it appears the difference between galaga wars and galaga wars+ is, is that you just can't buy the currency. like there are all kinds of other mini currencies i dont even want to get into, they exist, you need them to like skip levels or buy access for the opportunity to skip levels, or upgrade your ship powers, its just stupid. your options as a gamer, if you want to check some sort of box that you've finished this game:

1. walk the path of the master and 1cc it and stop playing without unlocking all the ships. this is probably the worst option because the controls are kind of finicky and your finger is always by necessity blocking part of the screen and honestly the game is good but it's not that good. and the game is so disrespectful of your time that trying to 1cc it just feels like being disrespectful of your own time as both a gamer and a human being.

2. walk the path of the maniac and play this game for 30 minutes a day for at the very least six+ months to unlock all the doodads and baubles. this is probably the worst option because that's like 90+ hours of your life on this dumb piece of crap phone game which is honestly very funny in a way but also come on dude. doing this will incur some sort of psychic trauma.

3. walk the path of the blighted and download the f2p version of galaga wars and shell out big bucks to play as pac man in this crappy game. this is probably the worst option but obviously this is what the suits at bandai namco who are trying to give you a gambling addiction designed the f2p original to do. i imagine your progress in the apple arcade version would not carry over if you did this which is somehow even sadder.

all three of these roads lead to the same end goal: rotting your soul from the inside out and leaving you hollowed out like a dead tree. you will enjoy games less, you will spend less time with friends, loved ones, hobbies, education, and you will weaken your armor against becoming addicted to gambling. you may still walk this earth but you will not bear fruit.

i would recommend not playing galaga wars, neither in its original state nor the plus version. in a way it helps to open my eyes to the framework of many other games and many other things in life. i don't know that i'll make my life appreciably any better since my run-in with galaga wars+ but upon doing the calculations of how much time i would have to spend on this game, i deleted the app and all of my progress in it and i can only hope that i will be more able to recognize and avoid falling into the arms of many of the other myriad traps that await us in this life.