Just utilizing the basics of the review questions to kick off my review of this game, I have to say... the game starts out looking a little less impressive than you might think. It'd be cool if there were even some standalone visuals to serve as the background of the game as you play in this flash-game universe to build one of the most ultimate swarms of bugs in the universe. I could imagine a graphic or illustration of an army of nasty drone bugs marching up a hill, getting meat from goodness-knows what creatures. Perhaps it's up to the imagination in this respect, not a nice background. We start off with an aesthetically-unpleasing looking, overly-luminescent white background that you may change if you can find the More tab, open up options, and change to one of many other display styles such as a notebook; it felt akin to a bunch of guys drawing out a fantasy football team, nothing was authentically going on but numbers, calculations--which isn't bad if that is the type of thing to stimulate you. No audio was incorporated to accompany that which was, at its' earliest origins and roots, supposed to be a game about alien-esque bugs-- it would have thrilled me to hear something akin to the X-files themesong play in the background as the tutorial introduced me to some wild story about this undertaking.

Without this element, we move onto gameplay. Controls are pretty straightforward, as you can either be idle and observe the growth of your swarm or cause exponential growth through interaction-- late into the game, it's best not to be deceived by the text on the screen telling you it will only be a few more years (in real-time, I might add!) 'til your next upgrade-- simply engage in manipulation of production to increase the rate, and in about five to ten minutes of clicking you will find yourself pushing into "one month until next upgrade" down from a year. Simply balance resource consumption with how much you produce over 'x' amount of time, and you may very well be on your way to mechanics-mastery. The story, or rather, the bits and pieces of flavorful text added to the game, can be found by directly looking at description of units listed in the game, or by mousing over those brief descriptions and finding funny or cute developer additions, such as the initial description of energy. It goes along the lines of this "Energy is consumed to fuel abilities"; upon further inspection by way of mousing over this text, a new box will appear reading "Coffee is consumed to refuel Energy". Cute, huh!  I decided that due to those basic elements, it was probably worth a 10/10 in the category of gameplay. Just peek into entering a value, or a number such as "100" and off you go, making 100 more drones--subsequently, enough to make that very first queen you'll need to get through the tutorial! Watch the numbers exponentially grow with upgrades that quicken production, double it, and double the amount you're capable of creating without being affected by the cost of your primary resource, larva. (Developer: "Why not Larvae, English language?")  

Mind you, your first attempted gameplay may be a dry-run, or something to those effects, seeing as you're still going to be somewhat disoriented, and there aren't many how-to's and walkthrough videos, so much as subreddits on the internet, and even then there are few. You may make some investments that may be later discovered to have been a hindrance to your overall progress. This brings me to replayability; personally, I would play it again (you can run different save-file versions on different browsers and hosted websites, combined, to my knowledge-- this allows you to enforce a variety of strategies at a time and discover which gives you the best head-start, once progress starts to slow down late into the game).

If you utilize the hacks and cheats on Konghack, though, especially the ones that advance you a bit into the game, you might overwhelm yourself with too much information to understand what happened, and not know where to go from there, you might become bored (as with many hacks)-- there are, however, various features in the game that you may have missed out on hacking, and you might still find yourself enjoying those features along the way. On my first runthrough, I didn't know exactly what to focus on or how to improve in the first-- while being mostly simplistic, coming back to it... the game is quite addictive, as each time you come back, being that the game advances in real-time whether open on your browser or not, there come new changes and developments. It's truly a game where you must strive to do better each time, until you build up to the point where you've unlocked nearly everything possible and no longer feel the urge to reset (with benefits) to build up a little bit more quickly.

The current hacks are extremely efficient at bringing out the best of the game and delivering you a strong experience no matter what you implement; this is enforced by the developer providing the option to 'ascend', whereby players can eliminate all current resources built-up with the exception of end-game resources, which are utilized to increase production and accelerate your playthrough. This, being all at the expense of a reset. If you over-stocked on all of the resources that the hacks can provide, you can remedy that by starting over, and begin playing again at a steady pace, after familiarizing yourself with the game's functions and mechanics, all while using those end-game bonuses to improve progress enough to perhaps motivate you not to need to use the hacks, the second playthrough around.

I'd have to say, I want to give this game a rating of 9/10. With absolutely genuine feelings, I'd say the developer has put in a lot of time into the production of this game, and it shows, seeing as it was put through heavy amounts of development and testing prior to full release; the rigorous modifications and advancements, all of the key-concepts within the game that really make replayability shine, you can tell that it's all there and comes together quite well when you get a taste of this game. It's stimulating, addictive, and it puts your mind to work in an enjoyable way as you engage yourself in strategizing how to get phases ahead on a grand plan that, when executed on Kongregate, may land you high on the scoreboards (though not as high as those who have enforced legitimate hacks that didn't disable the leaderboards. Hehe). It truly has emphasis on resource utilization and balancing, being smart about investment. It sure does a great job of helping you to kill time on a long or slow, boring day at the office too, when you're waiting on a download and running a flashgame on a browser won't obliterate the download speed, when you're waiting on something to que up in a lobby, load, and et cetera.