Nubby is a fun game, but it's in dire need of some work. Thankfully the dev has already announced a lot of changes, so here's hoping these fix my gripes with the game. I would still recommend it if only just because it's cheap and fun for a good while, but I also want to stress that, at the time of writing this review, this is a pretty deeply flawed game.

In terms of positive, Nubby is fun looking, fun sounding and very unique feeling. It's got a vibe for sure and it feels like it's got a much better grasp on that kind of late 90s, early 00s crusty edutainment game look than a lot of other titles that attempt to emulate the style. The base premise is a lot of fun and items make for fun synergies. The music is also a banger.

Now for the bad. Nubby is actually just pure gambling. Your effects on the board are highly limited and, for all intents and purposes, it is a plinko simulator with some visual flair. Player expression and skill are already fairly reduced in the game, as randomness is excessively common and genuinely impossible to manage (even the way the ball bounces is random, fundamentally), but what kills it for good is the rubberbanding.

Nubby strictly denies players with the ability to get ahead of the curve. You can't outpace the scaling, you can't snowball and you can't really do very well in the game, you can only do okay. If the player has a good round, hitting high multipliers and stacking points, the game will instantly correct the score requirements, and this correction hits like a brick. As such, every run essentially ends up feeling the same, and rather than challenging, the game just becomes luck based. The builds that can reliably beat the score even as it course corrects are very rare.

Challenges are also terrible, in that they're both badly designed and most of the progression is locked behind them. This is going to be addressed soon according to the developer, but the rubberbanding system seems to be here to stay, and that's my main gripe with the game. It just feels so deeply unsatisfying to hit these massive restock chains only for Nubby to give you an impossibly high score to beat next round. I'm willing to recommend this game so long as this gets tuned up and reworked. It's in dire need of some balance touch-ups.

Nubby is a fun game, but it's in dire need of some work. Thankfully the dev has already announced a lot of changes, so here's hoping these fix my gripes with the game. I would still recommend it if only just because it's cheap and fun for a good while, but I also want to stress that, at the time of writing this review, this is a pretty deeply flawed game. In terms of positive, Nubby is fun looking, fun sounding and very unique feeling. It's got a vibe for sure and it feels like it's got a much better grasp on that kind of late 90s, early 00s crusty edutainment game look than a lot of other titles that attempt to emulate the style. The base premise is a lot of fun and items make for fun synergies. The music is also a banger. Now for the bad. Nubby is actually just pure gambling. Your effects on the board are highly limited and, for all intents and purposes, it is a plinko simulator with some visual flair. Player expression and skill are already fairly reduced in the game, as randomness is excessively common and genuinely impossible to manage (even the way the ball bounces is random, fundamentally), but what kills it for good is the rubberbanding. Nubby strictly denies players with the ability to get ahead of the curve. You can't outpace the scaling, you can't snowball and you can't really do very well in the game, you can only do okay. If the player has a good round, hitting high multipliers and stacking points, the game will instantly correct the score requirements, and this correction hits like a brick. As such, every run essentially ends up feeling the same, and rather than challenging, the game just becomes luck based. The builds that can reliably beat the score even as it course corrects are very rare. Challenges are also terrible, in that they're both badly designed and most of the progression is locked behind them. This is going to be addressed soon according to the developer, but the rubberbanding system seems to be here to stay, and that's my main gripe with the game. It just feels so deeply unsatisfying to hit these massive restock chains only for Nubby to give you an impossibly high score to beat next round. I'm willing to recommend this game so long as this gets tuned up and reworked. It's in dire need of some balance touch-ups.