The Big Suck makes every step from picking up grass to tearing apart the planet feel worth chasing
The first thing I sucked up in The Big Suck was a blade of grass. That's about all the little tornado you start with can handle, and there’s something funny about steering a natural disaster that can barely bother a lawn. By the end, I was swallowing whole continents. I’ve liked pretty much every incremental game I’ve reviewed, but this is the best one I’ve played so far. I loved the first few minutes as much as the point where the planet started coming apart.
Every run is about causing as much damage as you can. The dollar value of whatever you destroy becomes your upgrade budget. I got a similar kick out of smashing pots for gold in Greedy Greedy Gnomes, but there’s a particular pleasure in watching the ground get torn up as you pass over it. Coins fly toward the corner of the screen, the damage total ticks up, and I’m already thinking about what I can afford after this run. The destruction looks great, and I like how closely that dollar figure tracks the mess I’m making.
The skill tree is absolutely massive. You can buy a bigger tornado and pile on the multipliers, and I loved seeing what those purchases meant the next time I touched down. The camera keeps pulling back as your tornado grows. That little patch of ground you spent the opening run working over takes up less and less of the screen, and soon you’re crossing in seconds the sort of distance that used to feel like an outing. Getting big enough to tear apart the entire planet is a hell of a payoff for starting out as a glorified lawn mower.
Then you get lightning, fire, explosions, freezing effects, tidal waves, and gravity wells to play with. My favorite moments were when one bit of destruction set off another and the damage total started climbing faster than I could keep track of it. The ROG Xbox Ally X ran the game well for most of my playthrough. It did chug occasionally when there was a ridiculous amount happening at once. Fair enough. My brain was hitching a little by then, too.
The handheld controls were a bigger issue. There’s no native Xbox controller support, and while I could steer using the touchscreen, my finger kept covering the exact bit of the screen where the good stuff was happening. Half the fun is seeing what you’re about to rip out of the ground, so I switched to a wireless mouse and it worked wonderfully. That was how I wanted to play from then on.
I’d also love a UI scale option. On the Ally X, the upgrade descriptions take up enough room that I had to scroll through them, and there are a lot of menus and pop-ups to get around between runs. I eventually stopped reading every description and just bought whatever I could afford. Part of that was the interface, but mostly I was itching to get back out there and see what my tornado could eat now.
That urge stuck around the whole time I played. The Big Suck gets the pacing right, from the first few coins flicking across the screen to the point where you can barely take in what you’ve done. I’d finish a run, spend the money, and immediately want to take another pass. Turns out I could do that all the way from grass to the end of the world and still want another go. Thanks for reading!
