Smalles

Smalles is a fun free-to-play, idle game in which you idle while attacking enemies for gold and xp, or mining ores to smelt.

The game is quite fun and has a nice premise, although it is extremely unbalanced. The enemy to gold ratio is terrible, as you are able to one shot the first enemy at level 3 while the next enemy has a jump in health points and only provides you 1 extra gold for three times the trouble. The game does have achievements, 100% is very easily achievable if you focus your upgrade path on wisdom/gold and upgrade potion flash (which provides further xp boost).

The smelting related upgrades are futile as you are able to achieve the main achievements simply through grinding XP (around 30 minutes) and the game pretty much stops there. Of course it is endless, and you are able to Rebirth (prestiging) although there is no real objective.

The game also does not have any text boxes, nor tutorial so I have no idea what the key upgrade does (until I saw it on the Steam store page, scrolling through the description) and you are reliant on trial and error to work out what each of the item upgrades do. There is a DLC which provides even more content, although once again I do not see the point of purchasing if there are no real objectives to an endless grind (unless you want screenshot bragging rights).

Overall, the game is enjoyable and the idea behind it has promise but it is poorly executed with the lack of objectives. Developer is active which I respect, fixing numerous bugs (and there are quite a few). Will be looking in to playing some of their other games. At the end of the day, it is free, it has achievements (unfortunately does not count to global achievements) and was an enjoyable, small idler. If I could give a neutral review, I would!

I have absolutely no idea why the others are rating this game well.
Pros:
1) Graphics doesn't look bad
2) It's not hard

Cons:
1) There is no tutorial or tooltip for basically everything (I somehow got the gist of ~30% of the upgrades through looking at the game summary in steam. Is that supposed to be the tooltip?)
2) There is not much reason to play this game other than getting the achievements in perhaps 50mins or so
3) You gain exp, you up some stats, you gain more exp, you up more stats and *maybe* go mine and smith something (Maybe some people actually like this??)
4) Story doesn't exist. You see an npc at the start, and that's about it.
5) Perhaps the developer isn't a native english user so the language used hurts me more than it should (No hard feelings tho, it do be like dat sometimes)
6) Not entirely sure why would anyone purchase the DLC

Conclusion: Overall just feels really lacking in everything. Maybe that's why the name of the game is as such(?)

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