Q-Up is a delightful incremental game about a fake eSport of the same name which basically consists of flipping a coin, with one team winning and the other team losing. While the core part of the gameplay is about the coin flips, everything you build around that - customizing your character’s skills, gear and upgrades - is the meat and potatoes of this fun title. I had a blast with it even if it got frustrating at times, and I went through most of the characters you could unlock while really looking forward to see what the next one did. If you enjoy cheeky incremental games I wholeheartedly recommend this one!
While the core mechanic of flipping a coin might seem silly, the idea behind the game is that in eSports, you normally should win and lose 50% of the time based on your ranking (i.e., if you fight someone too strong, you’ll go down in ranking, if you fight someone too weak, you’ll go up, and if you fight someone of equal skill, you’ll win half the time), so it’s pretty much a coin flip anyways. The real character building and upgrades loop isn’t really around the coin flip anyways (you cannot influence the coin flip to win more often) but rather what happens if you win or lose. You’ll try to maximize your points via a base bonus and a multiplier (among other mechanics that unlock progressively) in order to go up in rank as much as possible. Wins give some points while losses take away a whole more. This is the main balancing act of the game, losing a coin flip is much, much more punishing than what you get from winning one.
All heroes have different mechanics, and I was always happy to see what they are. Each of them has a base passive thing - a meter that goes up and down based on your wins, a meter that increments every time you lose, free item tickets, etc. - and then you have a big skill grid that you progressively fill as you level up, adding passive abilities and “active” ones that you can then upgrade up to six time with additional effects. The whole idea is to build chain reactions (you will have skills that trigger ON FLIP, ON WIN, ON LOSE) and then they impact other skills around them (either by triggering all adjacent nodes, one or more in a direction, etc.) so that when you flip, you get as much points as possible when it benefits you. For instance, the Medic character is great at minimizing losses, turning them into big score gains instead; the Whale uses items, the Pro has a lot of skills that mimic chess pieces, etc. My frustration here is that it’s almost impossible to figure out what will happen on a flip, things can get a bit complicated and I always had the feeling at the back of my mind that this was a “solved” system, there is a “best” skill build in any situation and if you’re not using it, you’re just handicapping yourself.
You progressively unlock game features like items you can equip, stack and recycle, challenges, a PVP system, corrupted shards and really powerful glitched items… There are a lot of ways to customize your character. It can feel kinda grindy at time (you won’t always get the items you want in the store for example) and some builds are more difficult to pull than others (because of the item rarity), but Q-Up does a great job at giving you more things to look forward to. The leveling down you’ll get if you lose too many flips in a row can also get frustrating after a while, but at least there are some ranks you won’t lose even if you’re incredibly unlucky.
Overall, there’s a lot of heart in Q-Up, I haven’t even talked about how the game mimics a “real” eSport game, with 5 on 5 matches (with real players or bots), ads, fake emails (and a neat storyline to give even more flavor to everything) and poking fun at how everything tech can kinda become terrible. I enjoyed my time with some characters more than others, I had to look up build guides at some points because I just couldn’t progress, but ultimately I had a really good time. If you enjoy flipping coins, buying upgrades and watching the numbers go “brrrrrrr”, Q-Up is the eSport of the future for you!
