Idle Hero

At work there is a vending machine approximately 40 feet down the hall from my office. Within that vending machine there is a delicious 'Reese's Peanut Butter Cup' two pack for $2.50 - yes it may be overpriced then eaten in mere seconds, but it would offer more substance than what I found in Idle Hero. The clicker/idler game genre industry is in desperate need for more "non F2P" titles. Hence why this one attracted my attention. The first two minutes were really enjoyable: there was no long drawn out tutorial & the interface was easy to read by being uncluttered. It was a decent first impression. Although after a small amount of time I realized that everything presented in those first few minutes was everything the game had to offer. There is only one upgrade for your mouse clicks, ok fine the title is "Idler" not "Clicker" so I can respect that. So now its time to look into my idling options. Massive yikes! The only form of idle damage is through "pets" which hey that is not a bad idea right? Well the problem is that there are a bunch of different minion upgrades that only do one thing: increase damage. There is no special types of damage, or raising attack speed, or buffs, its just raw boring damage across all the other gold upgrades. All of your pets attack at the same time under a shared cooldown so even though you have an army of those things the enemy only takes one attack every five seconds. Wait "gold upgrades"? So there are other means of progression right? I'm glad that you asked because you can also acquire an upgrade currency to do various other things. Most of what you can buy with these are actually pretty decent: like upgrading pet attack frequency (which is desperately needed because the 5 second default is borderline criminal), or increasing drop rates, or crit rates. Now we are talking! This is the kind of stuff an idler needs... but wait... there is a catch because these materials drop very rarely & each upgrade costs an additional +1 from the previous upgrade. Ok that isn't bad all on its own, but what really destroys this game is that each individual upgrade is extremely minuscule until you get one to at least level 30-40. For example there is a "Increase pet attack frequency" upgrade. Each upgrade reduces the attack time by 0.05 seconds. So it takes 20 upgrades to reduce the 5 second attack delay to 4 second attack delay. To get these 20 upgrades you need around 210 of these materials which by default only have a 5% chance to drop with each kill. Sure after a long long time you eventually see the fruits of your labor, but by that time you already beat all the enemies the game has to offer so there is no point in powering up. Every upgrade has such a small return for its cost per level that it just robs the satisfaction other good idlers have because in those you feel like you are actually making progress after a handful of upgrades. In terms of content. There is very little. It takes about 10-20 minutes to beat a cycle of enemies then the endgame is just repeating the fight against those same enemies. Achievements are the only thing that would justify a longer play time (I currently have all except one), but these Achievements are also poorly thought out. 100 hours of playtime? Give me a break. 1000 total upgrades? A bit excessive. Beat 10 runs that never change from the last? Yikes. On top of that Steam is still "learning about the game" so even a 100% completion will not show up on your perfected games count so what is the point? Usually I'm much more forgiving towards games with a low price tag, but I just can't recommend this even to fans of idlers. Most of my hours are just AFK ones to get reach the 100 hours achievement so I can finally uninstall it. (EDIT: Two fantastic alternatives are "Melvor Idle" or "Lootun". Close to the same price range while being infinitely better)

"Idle Hero" a clicker game of the purest nature... Why can't I recommend it and this time I'll be really brief. Is it fun to play? - Yes, in the beginning. It's good to play in the background during home office. The used asset? - It's lower standard, not pretty to look at, but serves the purpose. What about achievements? - Yes, it also has them. But who would let a 1-dollar game run for over one hundred hours?! It offers too little for that. Especially this four achievements: Gold 5 = Earn 1B Gold Upgrades 4 = Buy 1000 Upgrades Time 3 = Play for 100 Hours Bosses 4 = Defeat 1000 bosses (830 / 1,000) ~~ (after 13 runs, stopped counting the Bosses, after the ninth run - LOL) Also, the approach that the "Endgame", words of the developer, should lead to battling your way into the leaderboards. Um, no thanks. For this I lack the desire to run the "Idle Game" equipped with assets. By the way, I don't have any power-generating hamsters connected. As i mentioned, it´s okay to pass a little time in the home office time. But some points, why with me, with the 10 hours Achievement comes to an end. - no offline progress - no great asset used - the white background hurts my eyes - no auto-buy function (which would be cool especially with the "Helpers", it's tedious to click 150 times/each to level them - here a buy 10/100 would be nice) Approach is quite okay, if you are masochistically inclined and as mentioned you own an electro-hamster, you can treat yourself to the 100 hours of PC sun.

Game is plain stupid not compareable even to other free idle games there is no real prestige system you just start over at the title screen and keep your upgrades. Spend your money somewhere else - not worth it