Idling Gears

TLDR **This game has an excellent base concept for an idle game; however, the execution and balance is a little bit strange.

The weirdness stems from a couple of factors:
1) All power for your gears comes from one "Golden Gear"
2) The speed that all your gears move at is based on the speed of the Golden Gear
3) The speed that the Golden Gear moves at is based on the total torque load for your whole system
4) You make money by spinning gears as fast as possible

Each of these factors is totally reasonable on their own, however when combined they create some weird situations. Because you want your gears spinning as fast as possible, when trying to make money it is actually advisable to have low to no load on your gears and just spin large gears faster and faster by repeatedly chaining certain ratios. The result is that you end up feeling punished for attaching your machine to anything that requires a load unless you use a really large ratio to get enough mechanical advantage to not add too much to your total load. But by doing that you are also severely limiting how much value you are adding by attaching that new load.
Essentially, having speed and torque reliant on one another, while it does make sense, creates a weird, un-intuitive, and somewhat un-fun gameplay loop. I would absolutely love this game if torque was instead treated as a resource we are trying to use as efficiently as possible, and speed was just an upgrade-able component.

I was close to give up on this one. Even with an auto-clicker, it felt slow and boring.

But, after messing around a bit, I eventually understood a few principles. (those might be obvious to those used to mess around with gears IRL, which isn't my case at all)

First, there's *torque* and *speed*.

For the mechanisms already present on the map, only torque matters. You simply gotta connect small gears up to them and slap the biggest gear available between your small gear chain and the mechanism to achieve the biggest amount of torque. (keep left click pressed while hovering a gear to see it's torque)

For gears which depends on speed (amount of turns / minute) to make money, like the cash gear, things actually get interesting. You must compound a bigger gear on top of a smaller one to make turn faster. So, in practice, a cash gear will turn faster if you compound it on top of a smaller one instead of connecting it to a smaller one. Once you understood that, you can actually start to make decent money.

You can basically compound a BFG on top of a small gear, connect a small gear to that BFG (different layer), compound *another* BFG to that last small gear then connect a cash gear to it. Money goes *brrrrrr*. (I tried repeating the process to reach ludicrous speeds but there seems to be a cap ... not a bad thing, tbh)

I'm sitting at 116k bucks/s and have accumulated 222m while writing this review.


TLDR : The game is kinda slow before it starts getting interesting, but you gotta mess around a little bit to find out what makes good money and what doesn't.


Edit : I just understood that your load meter is the most important factor in that game.

Basically, you want the lowest load possible at all time to maximise your money/second. The game actually explains how to achieve this (by slower, big gears with a lot of torque through compounding) but not from the start, which is, IMO, the main problem of the game. The tutorials should be displayed sooner. From the get go, ideally.

It becomes 100% idle, yes, but you do need to be creative to get somewhere.

TLDR: Change some B.S. achievements, and actually tell the player what the complex systems do and how they interact with each other, and the game is an easy 10/10 for me

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To earn a good review, this dev needs to learn to explain things to their player base. I'm not only speaking for my own 450+ hour experience playing, but also the numerous mentions of this throughout the both positive and negative reviews. Yes, this is a frequent complaint, even in the positive reviews.

This is such an amazing opportunity to TEACH some useful, real life mechanical engineering, in a fun, interactive way. However, we get a blank slate with few explanations of what's going on, where my focus should be, what the numbers mean, how they interact, and wastes much of the player's time expecting the player to FAFO. This was obnoxious back when it was common place on Atari, NES, SNES, Sega Genesis, where hardware limitations were a well known factor to consider. It has little excuse in modern gaming, and frankly, comes across as lazy. Seek the middle ground between explaining vital systems that will be interacted with for hours, vs holding the players hand too much. Essentially, tell them in great detail what the pieces of the puzzle are capable of, without directly telling us how to solve a puzzle or obstacle. It's not enjoyable for one to find out they just wasted 50 hours doing something that could have taken 5, simply because a core mechanic wasn't explained well enough.
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Since 6/10 is my overall rating based on the current state of the game, and my 450 hours wasted gathering unbalanced achievements, I was willing to part with a thumbs up, until I reached Ricky? That is such a cheap, convoluted, obscure way of handling achievements. In no way would I logically reach that conclusion simply by playing the game, plus it is hidden with no valid explanation. If it was not hidden, and there was a punny hint, such as "This achievement is of great CREDIT to the game!" that would at least give the player something to work with. But no, he not only hid the achievement, he gave it a convoluted description, plus they troll distressed people asking how to get the achievement in the Steam Discussions.
Considering the game is in a complete, non-early access state, I have to unfortunately leave a thumbs down, until the dev can learn to communicate with their demographic better, and use "achievements" for actual accomplishments in game, not random inside jokes that leave the masses randomly clicking literally everything, wasting their time further.
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Some things I wasted time on, due to lack of proper explanation:

• Not understanding why so many gears tell me in their description "makes x money on each turn" yet when I add simple gears to the gold gear at the very beginning of the game, the only income is coming from active clicks on the golden gear despite the golden gear physically turning the simple gears in a 1:1, so the subsequent turns of the attached gears show they are producing $0 income until attached to a machine, or later game when your torque is significantly higher.
• Wasting 10 million MGE on a PVP scoreboard with no indications that it is a wasted unlockable.
• Not understanding what the game expected the player to do for gathering keys.
• The free leadership board in the pause menu is false. I would prestige with 50+ billion AP, yet the leadership board updates, showing I have just under 2 billion total.
• As a frequent idle game player, I use auto clickers to preserve my mouse lifespan, my wrist lifespan, and my all around sanity, so it's unfortunate that the last achievements I need get, are time wasters:

1. Ascend 50 times - Great, I finished all the game has to offer in around 250-300 hours and < 5 ascension. Time to waste time ascending dozens of unnecessary times
2. Ascend 100 times - Remember how I completed all the game has to offer in under 5 asc. stated up here ^...Guess I better double that time wasted!
3. Upload a gear skin to the workshop. This is not an achievement, rather forced behavior for players that do not find value in 3rd party out-of-game features. If you really must have this as an achievement, create an in game feature to allow it. Forcing the player to use 3rd party tools to gain achievements is in poor taste, and simply lazy.
4. And the worst offender, Finger Flex. After 450 hours of casual play, occasionally using my auto clicker at 10 click/ms to speed things up after ascension, I barely reached 100k clicks. Now you want me to do 10x that, when there is literally nothing left in the game? If I set my auto-clicker higher, the in-game limitations prevent it from working, even with varying random offset ranges, so I would legit need a secondary computer just to have an auto clicker running at all hours, simply to get 100% of achievements in this game...No.

As a side note, it seems poor taste to separate tiny, yet vital, portions of the game behind forced loading screens, as separate scenes. Everything that requires loading to a new area within this game, is easily addable to UI elements, simply deactivating non desired UI, avoiding the need for loading a new scene just to see the gear tree is still maxed out with the 15 total upgrades on that 1 screen alone, which takes 5-10 sec to load...You could even create state machines for different UI + Controls combinations, as an alternative. Rather, we are stuck with 4 separate scenes, which take roughly 10 sec each to load in/out of, and in order of access, only contain:
15 purchasable upgrades
5 purchasable upgrades
1x automated progress bar, requiring roughly 1.5 billion AP if I recall (I unlocked it, so I no longer see the former cost)
PVP leadership board

And you're telling me I have to waste multiple minutes of my time to simply navigate to and fro such basic systems? Why are these not in a simple tab like "Gears" and "Upgrades? There are too few features to suggest that it might be for performance reasons.

I understand that my review may seem harsh for a $5 game, but the potential real life value of learning useful information in fun, engaging ways, like mechanical engineering, creates high possibility for profound impacts to society. Even now, that potential still exists within "Idling Gears". I've now brought attention to some of the hurdles holding back such potential.