Simple Increment I mean
The Billion Clicker I mean
The Googol Clicker I mean One Life Clicker isn't really a proper game, it's just a lazy 2D browser/Flash-tier "number incrementer" game where the object of the game is to increase the in-game currency by clicking, and sometimes buying things that increase the rate at which your currency/score goes up. It's an incredibly shallow game loop, to the point you might as well just run a program that does "i=i+1; print i" and watch the numbers go up automatically, and just watch it. You'd get the exact same outcome. If this sounds completely mindless, you're not wrong.
And, in a massive failure to comprehend the basic truth about gaming, it's a pure text only interface, with just a lazy pixel blob to click on so you can pretend this is a real game or something. I guess they missed the memo, but gaming is primarily a visual medium. That means it has to look good if it's going to compete for gamers attention.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. It's from a known Russian asset flipper, which also should be enough to let us know this isn't really a sincerely made, professional game, it's just another cash grab. It's exactly the same game as the clicker games such as "Simple Incrementer" published by "Pelmeni Games" and "Paul Art", so "Pixel Fox" is just another shell account for this Russian asset flipper. Makes you wonder why he's trying to hard to hide his identity from gamers with these shell accounts. Legit developers don't do that.
There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision.
The game interface is just text boxes/dialogs and features no imagery at all, the kind of thing you expect to see in browser/HTML games from the 1990s. While that might be fine for the 1990s, gaming has evolved a lot since then, the ATI Rage became mainstream in 1996... it's 2024, and that kind of thing just won't fly anymore, it's just not visually up to scratch.
For gameplay purposes, because the user interface for this game is mostly just 2D static text... it might as well be a web page. It's functionally no different from a browser game. And we all know, Steam isn't here to compete with Chrome and Firefox. If the game can be done in a web browser, it's just not rich or compelling enough to appeal to serious gamers on PC.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 10 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 100,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?
One Life Clicker has the ridiculous price of around $5 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam.
For comparison, the $5 asking price for this game could get you games like "X-Com: Enemy Unknown", "Rainbow 6 Siege" or "Batman: Arkham City". No pixelcrap is worth $5. If developers want to get paid the same kind of money as real game developers who know how to do graphics properly, they need to learn how to do graphics properly.
Profile Features Limited!
Valve have marked this game as "Profile Features Limited" at the time of this review. This is usually caused by poor sales figures and low community acceptance for the game (to date). Until this status changes, this game will not give you +1 to your Game Collector badge count, appear in profile achievements or any other Steam meta-accomplishments, nor can it be displayed in some profile showcases. If these factors are important to you, it may be worth holding off before buying this game.
