miniBONG

A brilliant idea ruined by bad execution.

miniBONG could have been something special. A dress up inspired idle game with a little gacha mechanic (the random equipment store), stat progression and visual customization? That’s basically a first and exciting concept. And yet it fails in almost every meaningful aspect. Yes, you can customize characters. Eventually. But early to mid game, you’re constantly swapping out gear, making fashion choices irrelevant. The real customization kicks in far too late, and even then, the lack of basic QoL features kills the fun.

-No auto-equip. You’re forced to manually compare and equip gear in a clunky interface.

-No inventory search or sorting. With dozens of items, this becomes a nightmare fast. At least you can auto destroy stuff. Right, no sorting there either.,

-No detailed stat breakdown. You're given the bare minimum.

-No clear skill/ability info. Many passives and effects are literally undocumented.

-This is unacceptable in any game but for an idle game, where efficiency and clarity are core to the experience, it’s a disaster.

-No team formation system. All characters fight solo, making progression feel shallow and wasting the potential for synergies or strategy.

Speaking of progression; it's extremely slow, interaction becomes more of a chore than a reward. The art style is charming, that’s the one thing that holds it together. If you buy it, you're basically paying for the aesthetic. And at 90 cents, , it’s not the worst purchase you’ll ever make. Still, this is a missed opportunity. With competent developers, miniBONG could’ve carved out a niche of its own in the idle genre. Right now, it’s little more than a proof of concept hidden behind cute visuals. And sadly, it will probably stay that way.

Actually quite fun! I typically play these type of "Idle" games on my phone, but the artwork for this one caught my attention. Unlike mobile games however, it's nice to just pay for the game and not deal with any cash-shop or anything like that.

The core 'gameplay loop' is running your team of chibi warriors through levels of auto-combat. As you move up the levels, your warriors will level up through experience points while collecting equipment and outfits. You can dismantle your unwanted equipment to purchase new equipment in the shop, RNG style - or you can spend currency to enhance your warriors with unwanted equipment. When the difficulty of the auto-combat levels gets too much - you can restart your run from Lvl 1 to gain more experience and equipment. Rinse and repeat!!!

Aside from the main line of auto-combat levels, every hour a special area will open. Combat in this special area gives different currencies that can let you change the appearance and color of your equipment.

The grind is slow, but comfortable. There are LOTS of different designs for the equipment and costumes, and the system of appearance/color swap makes character customization really fun.

I hope the developers continue to work on this game. I would REALLY like to see a few more gameplay loops to make things more engaging when you're not playing full idle. Something like a tower defense mode would be a fun way to mix things up. As long as they don't add PVP - one of the best things about this game is there is NO PVP, echoing the lack of cash-shop - as someone who has played a ton of these games on mobile, they are always shoving PVP in as a way to encourage players to spend money for fast upgrades in the cash shop. Kudos to the dev's for not including any of that nonsense.

Very decent especially if you pick it up on sale for 99 cents.
Decent soundtrack, a nostalgic artstyle, freedom of customization for your character looks, and big dopamine hits when you drop a destruction rarity that fits in perfectly with what you needed for your next upgrade.

Few things to note:
1. Getting to floor 1k+ and unlocking destruction rarity will take a LONG time. Even then, you will need to manually hold and prevent 10 star enemies from attacking at first until you're stacked enough to let your roster autokill them. This is going to be the part that feels kinda suck. This game WILL require a lot of user input, more so than you think. You will not be unlocking the highest rarity gears and do it all on auto idle, it's just impossible objectively.
2. After you progress to post game and start farming destruction rarity on auto without any player input you will start to lag and slowdown on occasion (I noticed this when saving or when the game auto-saves) due to how many things are being processed at once on screen from the unique skills.
3. While the character appearance customization is great, it only really makes sense to do when you've unlocked all of the codex, and having a destruction rarity being the target of appearance modification because it feels like you're wasting style resources otherwise.
4. getting the last achievement for 10bil power level on a character is going to take more than 120 hours, maybe more if you are doing it legitimately while min-maxing stats. On level 34k+ character with all destruction rarity gears equipped, having around 20k in energy and dumping like 14k into agi WHILE having a ton of agi % affixed gear will for some reason push you to 10bil+ because of how the game weighs agi as a stat even though the atkspd caps out at 10k%. Probably can get away with less stats to cheese this one out real quick and you can just reset stats on the character right after.
5. Regarding the gear affix stats, flat will be most useful early game but percentages will be way more useful mid to lategame. For damage potency and overall power level, raw energy/power percentages seemed to be the greatest value, followed by crit damage, while energy damage and physical damage affix stats did not seem to help as much. Stacking agi% can help you hit the atkspd cap of 10k and you can phase them out and add agi to your character stats later for more damage rolls. Also while agi is weighed super heavily for overall power level, attack speed affix rolls on gear seemed to be way worse than agi% as it looked like it provides less attack speed overall than agi% rolls. Natural agi to hit atkspd cap without any gear/affix effects= 9901 agi but before anything prioritize getting crit rate to 100% hope this helps have fun gamer