Holoidle

I don't like giving negative reviews, especially for a project made by fans, but as a paid product, this shouldn't be sold. It is empty, shallow, and as dry as a bone. This game should be called "Hollow Live." The main gameplay consists of waiting for gacha cards to drop and assembling them in certain orders to create combos. That's pretty much it. The rest of the game is just waiting and clicking on upgrades 99% of the time once you find something that works. The only goal is to prestige and reach a higher level each time, without any real variation. The visuals are cute, and it's fun at first to see what references and jokes they turned into cards, but it's so monotonous that it quickly stops mattering. The "Tamagotchi" part is unrelated and serves no real purpose. You unlock some furnitures and occasionally play the equivalent of a flash minigame, but that's it. It feels like two separate projects that were vaguely tied together. The idol doesn't do anything, they don't live there, they don't talk, they don't interact with anything. If this is your first experience with idle games and you’re trying this one because you like Hololive, know that this is nowhere near how complex or "fun" idle games can be. Try Trimps. Try Cookie Clicker. Try IdleOn. Try Antimatter Dimensions, my all-time favorite. Try ANYTHING else to get an idea of what a good idle game can be.

An idle where you can't sit AFK, you can only take it for the emoticons and backgrounds.

If possible I'd give this a "Meh" rather than Negative Note I'm playing on launch day. Let's start with the positives - it's Hololive branded and they have a 2 by 3 grid to put Free Gacha obtained upgrades in. The quality of these upgrades differs dramatically, and some of the upgrades buff others depending on where they are on the grid. The upgrades themselves will be buffed if you get multiple copies in the Gacha. I like the Art - obviously, everyone who chooses to try this will like the references. Thus ends the positives. This is an idle game seemingly without any sort of Prestige mode. There's no hidden systems like Cookie Clicker, or complicated strats like the Runescape idle game. There are a very tiny amount of upgrades to automatically deal with the extra friction systems the game has - Troll turns up, click Troll to remove, now automated. Everything else is just the basic "Plus Income per Sec" at the core of every idle game. So, the exciting (and only) system is going to be using the Gacha upgrades - but you are going to get a random roll on getting one every 40 minutes (slightly faster if you maintain Idol happiness by tapping litter etc) - and early on many can be useless until you reach certain thresholds. So almost within an hour, you have effectively experienced everything this game currently has to offer, with the one interesting system having no way of shortening it's cooldown. So it feels like an idle game that's not really checked on this genre in 10+ years. Perhaps I've been spoilt by the incredible Holocure, but I was expecting this to at least match others in the genre (especially paid as it is compared to Holocure) and not really just be a shell apart from the Hololive branding. I'll keep an eye on it, and hope they add additional systems post-launch.