Koltera 2

I feel bad about writing a negative review on a free game, but the positive reviews are so disgustingly misleading I felt obligated.

This is no Melvor Idle or Palworld. It's free, and the art is cute, but that's really about it. Maybe I'm missing some massively important detail that makes the gameplay come alive, but if I am then that means the tutorial needs updating.

The gameplay is pick 1 of 6 gathering skills to gather 1 resource from every 10 seconds or so. Eventually you will get 1% chance gathers of containers that give you charms on opening. Those charms are used with one of the aforementioned resources to summon a new pet. That pet then does what you do automatically, but roughly 20 times slower. The kicker is you can only assign 1 pet per skill, so you will never expand your ability to gather resources in an exponential manner, which is a key part of idlers and clicker style games.

There also appears to be some kind of dungeon system you can assign more than 1 pet to, but each dungeon appears to only reward you with a single resource of their unique type, and they take well over 10 hours to complete (excluding the tutorial dungeon).

There's also a set of 3 different types of crafting which refine gathered resources and crafted resources into a new crafted resource at ratios of roughly 10:1.

The various skills level up to unlock new resources and crafting recipes, but to what end? As far as I can tell the pets don't actually change in any meaningful way. They level up as they work, which I assume makes them complete gathering and dungeons faster (I've had this running for over 24 hours and the starting pets are only level 3, so hard to see if there's meaningful change).

There's just nothing here that makes me want to continue playing it outside of popping it open for literally 60 seconds every few hours to change whatever I'm gathering to focus on whatever the next pet summoning requirements are. Again, it's nice that it's free and the art is very cute, but I just don't see a game under it. There are so many free idlers with actual addictive gameplay in them: NGU Idle, BitBurner, Idle Skilling, Leaf Blower Revolution, hell even Idling to Rule the Gods has a better loop, and that one is infamous for taking literal years to escape the "early" game.

I hope the dev researches some more engaging gameplay loop design, because I'd really like to see their art used meaningfully.

Progression ir painfully slow, it is an idler where you play for like 3 minutes to set up few things and forget for hours, and repeat its cycle with little progress. The game lacks meaningful and engaging upgrades to speed things up or scale productions. Sadly i find this style of idler boring, but you should try it out. Props up to the devs standing about a true f2p game, ando also the art is great.


Edit, taken from my comment section:

I do enjoy lots of idlers, and i also suggested ppl to try this one out.
The problem is that i gave 2 days to this game, checking it for about 3 to 3 hours to realise that the game loop does not change or get even a little excitier (with produce multipliers, for e.g.).
You unlock a new creature after about 30 minutes, to then unlock the next one a tier higher for like 3 hours, while your other creatures "work" for like 1/10 of your single focus. The time demand for a new unlock piles up but the production speed does not keep up. Next tier creature is even harder to get and so on, whitch is expected, but also is expected to ramp up the production of resources, and that is the problem.

I left an negative review because i saw potential. Most games that i try and don't like, i don't even bother to leave a review. Feedback is important to the dev to know what ppl think about his games. You cant improve if you just ignore criticism, and mine is a constructive and respectful one.
Also, it is my opinion , the game does not click for me . There are other players that may enjoy it like the way it is, like you both. Just be a little more open minded to others that think different than you... or don't, keep in your bubble that always reinforce what you want to hear and think, you do you.

Its honestly just really dull, you aren't building up to anything its just a super dull version of the numbers go up slowly. Skilling stuff doesnt make you better at skilling stuff in anyway, awakening creatures doesnt speed up their next awaken progress so everything just stays slow until yo slowly grind out the awaken tree, all of which to do nothing with it anyway.
There are much better idle games out there like unnamed space idle.