Widget Inc.

I hate to be the first (I think) to write a negative review for a game, but I just don't see why people are talking about complexity and difficulty or having to think and optimize things. The game gets off to an interesting start, with a lot of cool details like the interesting ways all the different machines work and such, and that's where it shines the most.

When you first start off the game it takes you a while to get automation going, involving some level of manual work to produce widgets and buy researches and improve your factory. You build out machines and it's all good.

My problem is that when you unlock Tier 2 you do the exact same thing again. And then again at Tier 3. And then at Tier 4. Unless you're so patient that you made one of each machine and then waited until you had 900 out of the output you will wind up producing 3-5 of every machine at each tier, and then afterwards you will never have to think about each tier again for more than a few seconds.

After I finished Tier 1, I didn't touch a single one of my Tier 1 machines again until I got some research which offered adjacency bonuses to them which required me to spend all of five seconds reorganizing my widget machines, and then later moving my mines on to the nearby rocks. The output of my half dozen of each Tier 1 building was so much that I never seriously considered them again at Tier 2, 3, 4, etc. You would think eventually I would outpace the production of the earlier components but that's not the case at all because every tier I would be unlocking 40% production bonuses and similar for the earlier stuff without having to do anything but push a button.

And each Tier after the first reveals that the game plays the same at every single level. You get one machine that mines resources, then one machine that processes them in a midway product, then a third machine that processes that midway product plus one of the results of the earlier Tiers, and then a final machine which produces the final product. Researches all cost the output of the third and fourth machine. Each tier has these same four machines with very slight cosmetic differences, to the extent that in Tier 4 you will get a "Copper Mine" and "Copper Smelter" which are identical in almost every respect down to the specific upgrades as the Tier 1 "Iron Mine" and "Iron Smelter."

I think the most annoying to me is that doing well in one tier has no bearing on the next except that you don't need to think about the last tier again. When I finished Tier 2 while producing 10/s of the output resources, I moved on to Tier 3 and... the first instance of each machine and the first of six automated workers in each one uses products from the previous tier. Every other upgrade, automation, and additional copy of that machine will require the outputs of its own tier. This means that after you hit the end of one Tier and you're speeding along you don't carry any of that momentum with you, you just drop it and start the game over again with a slightly different skin twenty feet to one side.

I thought that Warehouses, or the Construction Queue, might liven things up a little bit, but they at most alleviate minor little pain points or make it slightly easier to manage things. The game gives the illusion of building on itself, but it's only an illusion. Progressing through one Tier every thirty minutes, the fourth felt exactly the same as the first in a really unsatisfying way.

Don't take my word for it though, the game costs like five bucks and maybe it's your cup of tea where it wasn't mine. Cheers.

This is a neutral-leaning-negative review.

I got to tier 3 in just under an hour, and started to realize that I was going to be doing the same thing for 3 more hours and then be done with it. With other automation / incremental games, normally the next tier or step comes with some new complication. In Factorio, oil processing adds new fluid handling, cracking, and fluid recipes to think about. In Cookie Clicker, you ascend and find new upgrades that change the way you play. This one is the same every tier: 2-3 new intermediary steps that each require some manual clicks to set up, and then you come back through them once you're done with all of them to queue the next upgrades. There's no critical thinking or decisions to be made. This is the primary reason I quit the game.

Also, it's clear that the art is AI generated, with little to no effort put into making it look better. Parts of the game use a bunch of different perspective types layered on top of each other. A lot of things just look scaled down without any thought at all. Take a look at some of the screenshots. I think this could be really charming art-wise, seeing upgrades change the way things work and workers slot into larger machines that previously had been manual. Instead, a faded slice of an image gets un-faded. Riveting (pun intended).

Though the game is generally finishable, and I'd say fun to play (though that's subjective), it has a major issue that still hasn't been addressed. It has an achievement that basically requires you to leave your pc on, idling (yeah, no offline progression), for 2 weeks (as someone told me who got the achievement).

Basically, to get prestige points, you have to launch rockets, but those get exponentially more expensive. But once you prestige, you spend your meta points, like in other idles, and become faster right?

But the achievement in question requires you to build 60 rockets in a row without prestiging. I left my pc on for 2 nights in a row, and only managed to get to 17 rockets. Imagine how difficult it will be to reach 60, with exponentially growing costs.

Anyway, this to me seems like a bug (maybe it's meant to mean "in total") but since it hasn't been addressed yet and I'm a completionist, it's a thumbs down for me. Too huge of an oversight. I also posted on discussions and talked with someone there, but the dev was nowhere.

EDIT: First of all, it isn't about the achievement, it's about the fact it hasn't been addressed, although so many people have talked about it.

Secondly, no it's in one sitting, unless the dev changed it since. I tested it, and launched 7 -> prestige -> 17, and I didn't get 24 in the counter, but 17. So it's in one sitting.

Thirdly there are many other reasons why I got this frustrated, I honestly gave it an honest go. Since this is the second comment suggesting I gave it a negative review *just because of an achievement*, let me say:

- In the prestige tree, most parts don't change anything.
- Every run is the exact same. Same configuration of buildings required, etc. In fact you get so good at this you're doing it blindly. But there's no automation to skip this part (for example, blueprints).
- You might think the upgrades are many, but most of them do more production or more speed for each separate building, so they appear many. However, there's no automation to purchase them either, so you have to do this every run too.

Basically after you prestige once, you've seen what the entire game has to offer. And the gameplay is simply to put down the widget you want, then spam lower widgets so that you don't have a deficit, then repeat. That's all. You just get bored of doing that after a while.

I dunno what else to say, I think these reasons are enough to dislike a game. But I wouldn't mind them if the dev addressed some of these points, I'd say it's a fun little game and move on. What frustrated me was that there was an arbitrary achievement to make you play forever without looking into it properly.

Anyway it's just my thoughts, you can have different ones, it's fine.