▼ Not recommended
89 hrs
I like idle games . . . a lot. Not sure why, but I play them almost exclusively. This is the 4th title I've played from this dev. This is his 6th game in about 11 months that he's published on Steam, plus a few paid DLCs. Don't know how many other games he's published on other platforms.
From his other games, he seems to copy most of the core mechanics from one game to the next, along with some style aspects of the UI. This game has more refined graphics than the previous 8 bit graphics. I don't mind 8 bit games at all and I'm not sure whether he made these assets himself or got them from an asset pack. Likely a mix of both. It's a simple, grindy idle game with a built in auto-idle feature (buggy) that auto fights for you over night, if the game runs over night, so you don't need to set up an auto clicker or anything. There's no prestige/reset mechanic, but you increase the difficulty and rewards by fighting through all the mobs in each area at level 1, then when you beat the boss at the end, you can increase the mob difficulty and keep doing loops, increasing the difficulty as you go.
So back to the copying core mechanics from one game to the other, which is a smart move and great time saver, if your core mechanics are stable, which they aren't. This is the 3rd game of his that crashes the entire Steam stack. I ran the game on 3 different machines with 3 different o/s and hardware setups, not to mention all the people online that report the same issue. He uses Construct 3 to make the games, and people started reporting the Steam crashes almost a year ago. He seems to have little interest in addressing that issue, which is a major problem, especially since your save games can often get deleted when his game crashes. I had to restart twice due to his game crashing Steam, plus, there's the fear that when Steam crashes and other Steam games get hard killed, their games are corrupted too. He could export the save games to a JSON so player effort isn't wasted, but he doesn't do that either.
In his games, he likes colour, lots of different colours, which is fine, but his UI looks chaotic and the important features are rarely in the same place twice from one screen to the next. It makes it difficult and frustrating to try to figure out what some of the screens do or how they work or where your resources are, and whether or not you have enough of them to do what you want to do. He doesn't believe in mouse-over tooltips and the "hints" that he provides don't explain much more than you can figure out on your own. He needs to cut down all the colours and make important features, like buttons, easy to spot so you don't have to scan the mouse all over the place looking for a button to light up onMouseOver(). There's a craft all/make all button in some of the buildings and while individual crafting has a progress bar, the craft all action has no progress on the bar at all, and seems to be instant. In the smithing shop for armour, the progress bar is black - so you can't see what is going on and sometimes the crafting works and your gear levels up, and sometimes it doesn't, so you have to try it multiple times.
As I mentioned, he added an auto-idle feature so you can auto fight the mobs. When auto-fighting, it fights in a different mode, style and screen layout, and you don't get as much loot per hour as when actively fighting, which is fine and a good balancing mechanic I think. Once you get to the boss though, the auto-idle feature fights in the same screen and while it kills the mob, it doesn't open the loot chest or pick up the loot, so you get nothing except XP (maybe). The code to turn the auto fight on and off is buggy too because it fights so fast you have to try multiple times to shut it off before the button disappears before you can click it. Even if you do manage to click it, you'll have to do it multiple times before it actually shuts off.
The way he displays numbers is also an issue. He just rounds them up or down. It'll say "2K" but you don't know if that's 1600 or 2400. There's also a problem with big numbers, which is pretty much the bread and butter of idle games. In the bank, it won't display numbers if they are too big when you deposit your cash. It just shows "0". If you go too high, and I don't know what that number is because it doesn't actually accurately show you what you've got, it just resets your money, you lose everything and start from 0 again. Major issue when everything takes cash to upgrade.
The progression mechanic isn't explained at all. You have to go to sources on the web to figure out what should be explained, even simply by in-game dialogue/lore if he wants, in the game. There's nothing that tells you how to progress to the next level of difficulty for each of the areas. The lack of information and tooltips, I think, is just because too many games are being rushed out, too fast, and maybe he thinks that sloppy/lazy game development is the same as making his games more challenging, or like a puzzle. It isn't.
The reason I stopped playing the game was because it crashed the Steam stack again. I went from level 3 mobs to level 43, and my bank balance went from something like 350 quintillion cash, to 16,000. The boss mode auto-idle/auto-fight was permanently stuck on in all the fights and was glitching through the screens so fast, it was impossible to turn it off. So, out of all the save games I've lost, this last glitch at least beat the game for me, so yeah, I'm done. I have 10k+ hours in Clicker Heroes, 5K+ in Mr Mine, etc etc etc. I have no problem putting time in to idles, but this game, not so much.
Players know it when they play a good idle game, even an idle game with bug issues. There are lots of simple idle games with thousands of long term players. His games drop to less than a handful of players in a few months, and then he walks away from them, for seemingly all the same reasons. Minimal content, the same bugs and chaotic UIs. He needs to slow down, a lot. Good coders couldn't pump out functioning durable games at the pace this guy pumps his out. If you report his game's bugs in his discord channel, he takes it as a personal attack and bans you, so that's "professional". There are SOO many idle games out there, supported and organized idle games, I would give this one a pass in hindsight. Not a game I would recommend, and certainly not anything I would ever spend money on.
