Birdfull

As someone who is both a bird and idle/cozy game enjoyer this game was perfect for me. The gameplay loop is simple, the art is cute and the atmosphere of the game is soothing :) I am still pretty early in the game but I look forward to encountering all the birds! [u]Minor con(?)/something to be aware of:[/u] The gameplay is slightly different from most other idle games as the birds you get aren't permanent and will fly away after a set amount of time if not fed (AKA when you are offline), so each time you open the game there will likely be little to no birds in your garden. [i]So don't grow too attached to the critters you get :')[/i] (There is a way to keep [b]one[/b] bird permanently through a somewhat expensive lategame item)

So I'm marking this game as recommend, but that is strictly because if you like birds it is worth getting and that's where I am at with it. I love birds and there are VERY few video games out there centered around birds. Off of that alone, for $5, if your a bird person it's a good buy. Especially once you get to the point that you can keep birds because then the game becomes fantastic background noise while you do other things. For a run down of the game you can attract birds to your yard using one of 3 feeds (which you unlock as you go) and birds stay for a certain amount of time based on how rare they are. Your birds give you eggs (which I'll just call currency) as long as they are in your yard. Once the timer is running out on a bird you can feed them again to keep them around longer. Don't feed them before the timer runs out and they fly away unless you have certain items to keep them around. Earn eggs to unlock things and to buy more and more feed to unlock more and more birds. With that out of the way... let's talk pros and cons. Pros 1) Sound design is fantastic. Absolutely wonderful. Again it's fantastic to run in the background for the beautiful sounds of birds. 2) I adore the artwork. The artwork is beautiful and I never get tired of looking at the birds. All of them are a bit stylized but look very much like there real life counter parts. You can tell between the visuals and the sounds that the dev loves birds. 3) I love the achievements. None of them are insane to get (though I'm stuck on my last one at the moment) but the great thing is that they show up in game. You unlock a green house where all of your achievements are represented by more exotic birds than you get in your yard. Which I adore. 4) This one is a pro but also leads into a con. I like that the birds don't stay until you give incentives to stay. Birds don't stick around forever, they fly away. I like that aspect of the game. 5) Pigeons make sure that you always have a source of income. If you run out of birds you can just click on them (ones with floating eggs around them are worth more) and you can get money decently fast to get the cheaper birds attracted to your yard. 6) Bird facts <3 Now for the cons... and why I WOULD be putting not recommend if it weren't for the fact that I love birds. 1) Let's get my single SUPER arbitrary con out of the way. I assume this games setting is the US (due to some species of birds that appear in the yard... if it's not US and is instead Europe ignore this entirely). Because of this I do have issue with a *single* bird in the game and that's the European Starling. In the US this bird is an invasive species and is detrimental to your local birds and other wild life. They are also considered a pest to farmers. If at all possible you should NOT be trying to feed these birds. Now a lot of people do, because a lot of people don't know how bad they are. I'm one of those people though who has my feeders set up in the best possible way that I could find that deters them from wanting to eat at my house. This game is not educational (even though it does give bird facts) and I get it... European Starlings are beautiful birds. But I'm not particularly fond of the game encouraging feeding of these animals. Again, probably just a me thing, totally arbitrary and won't matter to the majority of people. I do feel like I should include it though. On to the ACTUAL cons. 2) This is not an idle game... at first. It's just not for the first few hours you play. The game has to be VERY actively played. As said before the birds fly away, which I love. However no birds stay for longer than an hour and those birds give you VERY little currency. If you want to get anywhere in ANY amount of time you need the rarer birds... and none of those stay longer than 10-15 minutes. Some leave in 5. Like all the birds that give you more than 10 currency an hour are rare, most birds you start with give you less than 5 currency an hour. This means that you can't leave your computer for more than 5 minutes without losing the birds that actually help you progress. You also have to check the game EVERY hour because by the end of an hour every bird you have will be gone, whether the game is open or closed and you don't make any money idley without birds. There IS a way to keep birds, but both unlocks are VERY expensive. That's the Birdfeeder (which keeps birds for a certain amount of time based on what level of it you have unlocked) and the Birdhouse which lets you keep a certain number of birds indefinitely, however it is the most expensive thing in the game and any additional slots to hold more birds get increasingly expensive. So the game doesn't even play it's self when it's off till you've played A LOT of it. What you end up with is the first several hours having to actively play. You can't even get up to make yourself something to eat or pee without risking losing that really rare bird that gives you more than anything else because it only sticks around for 5 minutes. I think I played for.... 5 or 6 hours before I was able to get the bird feeder so that I could stop actively playing. I don't mind having to actively play an idle game for a bit. I don't. Having to actively play in early game is fine. The problem is that the game does not have.... 3) A pause. There's no pause. So you're playing early game. You've managed to shoo and attract enough birds that you've got like 5 or so birds that all need to be fed again to keep them there after 5-10 minutes. If you need to pee or make lunch you risk losing them. Yeah you can feed them and reset the timer before running to do what you gotta do. But that timer length doesn't change. You come back... and your rare birds are gone... you are now once again stuck with your seed birds that give you less than 10 currency.... PER HOUR. You know what fixes this? A pause button. So that you can pause the game, make yourself a bite, come back and keep playing. I think most idle games I've played that have the ability for you to lose something (like Virtual Villagers where your villagers can die) have a pause button. So that if you are going to be away for days at a time or even for an hour or so. You can pause and keep yourself from being reset back to square one. Prior to getting the bird feeder I can not stress enough that this is NOT an idle game because unless you are checking the game every 5-10 minutes you will barely be making any currency and even excluding that the longest a bird sticks around is an hour. So even the tiny amount you get from birds that stay for an hour is also only temporary. Once you get the bird feeder... it becomes an actual idle game because you can actually leave the game alone for an extended period of time. Check it, do some stuff for about 10 minutes to half an hour. Then stop and let it run on it's own again for a while. Though till you get the bird house you still have to check daily at the most. The game NEEDS a pause. Just for the early game. So that you aren't constantly having to start over every 5 minutes to 1 hour that you aren't at your pc or doing something else End of the day this is a $5 game and it's well worth the money. It just has some parts of it that are frustrating. Because *to me* an idle game is a game that I can sit down and play for 10-30 minutes every couple of hours as a break in between doing something else. Bonus if I can actively play it if I WANT to. You HAVE to play this game actively to progress for the first several hours though. It takes forever for the game to ACTUALLY be idle where you can stop paying attention to the game for a few hours and do other things and then check back now and again. To me an idle game is a game you can leave... to idle... for an extended period of time. [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/43095726-Just-A-Chick-Reviews/] Check out my Curator Page[/url]

This looks like a nice game/program/thingy where you can run it in the background while you work/surf/study to enjoy the white-noise and music and occasionally check in, hit some buttons, get a little hit of false dopamine from the birdies to keep you going, sort of like looking out of your real window but you get achievements for it. Actually, this is Get Those Kids/Birds Off My Lawn Simulator 2025. You know how in like, Cookie Clicker, there's the golden cookies that pop up on screen occasionally and you can hit them for bonuses? This game is that, constantly, forever. Pigeons show up constantly and can be clicked on for a little income boost, which is fine, but they make a loud popping noise every time they show up and it is incredibly annoying. You can turn the sound down or off, but the visual noise of pigeon .jpegs constantly popping in and out among your other nice still birds destroys the whole calming atmosphere. You can't just leave them there either because they leave very quickly after showing up (also with a noise.) On top of this the gimmick is that birds leave after a while unless they are fed, which is cute and thematically appropriate but the timers are so, so short. The longest is an hour; rare birds stick around for just 5 minutes and presumably rarer/epic birds stick around for even less. Oh and of course they also make a noise when the timer runs out. There are lategame upgrades you can buy that will keep birds around for longer, but in the early/mid game you are just going to have to deal with 5 minute timers going off constantly and/or clicking on the game obsessively every few minutes to make sure your high earners stick around. Now that I write this out I feel like it'd be a great system for a late-season Sopranos/mob-boss game where you have to make sure all your capos are still working for you and check that they aren't running off to the FBI or making deals behind your back or getting themselves killed while you work, and as the game goes on it gets harder and harder and you get more and more paranoid--but for a relaxing birdwatching game... not really the effect you want. TL;DR Less of an idle game and more of an active game that still has idle game presentation and gameplay complexity (or lack thereof). If you try to treat it as an idle game and run it in the background, it is equivalent to running a 5-minute egg timer that also makes bubble-wrap noises every 5 seconds just because. But at least you get to listen to generic looping birdsong (no music), I guess.