Idle Evolution

This is a good example why there should be a difference between idle (incremental) and clicker games on Steam. Those are the complete polar opposites of gameplay. A clicker is a game where you are supposed to furiously click the same button thousands of times to progress or earn points. In Idle Evolution clicking doesn't earn you anything. There is a hover mechanic, but you can alt-tab while hovering and it'll still count. This is a game designed to be put away for some time (in fact, some missions straight up require you to do that), so you can go do something productive knowing that there will be something interesting waiting for you when you get tired. The game sure has its flaws (grindy minigames, missions that lie to you, weird design for higher difficulty, appendix upgrade that does nothing AFAIK), but it's good enough as a productivity tool. It's also useful to learn some real scientific numbers along the way. At least definitely more useful than learning numbers like "blue laser damage", "green dragon hp" and "bear butt drop rate".

This is a niche game that will appeal to certain types of people, but you do not have to be a chemist to understand and (potentially) enjoy it. For reference, I don't have any chemistry training outside of what was required for a basic college education, but I am comfortable reading STEM topics just enough to get the gist of things. So STEM hobbyists who enjoy learning new things would likely get the most out of this game. Idle Evolution is an incremental grinder to be played casually while you work, study or do other stuff. It follows the path from abiogenesis to the modern day, and you're accruing atoms as your currency to purchase elements for upgrades and unlocks. Progression is by unlocking the full periodic table of elements for use and making your way through all the geologic eras of Earth. As the name implies, it offers idle progression both online and offline, and at points even requires you to be offline. It has an auto-save feature that saves your progress at 1 minute intervals and uses Steam Cloud. There are lots of ‘quests’ to complete for each level, along with minigames, knowledge quizzes, collections, and achievement goalposts. The game will frequently provide you with direct links to Wikipedia pages of relevant information so that you can research what’s needed for the task at hand, so if a bit of light research doesn’t juice you then this is not a game for you. I ran the game in a small window on my laptop and had no performance issues on an average Win10/i7/Nvidia system. I do wish it had the option to mute the game while in the background, but you can just shut the sound off if you don’t want notification beeps. It’s not the prettiest game to look at, but that’s not what we’re expecting on a nerdy science game right? The UI is serviceable and suits the theme. There’s enough depth here to keep you playing for a little while if you want to go for 100% achievement completion. It felt like the pacing was good and none of the game’s systems came across as arbitrary bloat. There’s always something to tinker with when playing actively. No it’s not free to play like many idlers, but there’s no microtransactions here and it’s cheap. For the summer sale price I paid for this, I feel I more than got my money’s worth of play. P.S. that level 17 tho P.P.S. Considering how science-based the main game is, the end cinematic gets a bit weird [spoiler] and seems to address post-biological evolution in an oddly cartoonish way.[/spoiler]

Before I start, I want to say that I do not believe this is a bad game. This game is fine and im sure there is a niche market for fans of this, however I do not fall into this group. Scroll to the bottom for a pros/cons list. For a long time I have enjoyed playing Idle and Clicker games, and have put likely thousands of hours of my life in them overall. I saw this game, thought it looked interesting and did some research. I found out there was an older version that was completely free to play online and I tried that out. After only a few minutes (I wasn't expecting too much to change throughout and the general concept of the game seemed clear enough) I decided I would purchase this game and see how it would work out. It starts out simply enough, and the tutorials are clear enough to get you where you need to be. It starts slow, like every one of these games, but I feel like the pace never picked up much since the beginning. The concept seems great, the gameplay was fine, but overall this game left me feeling like I wasn't doing much. You can argue that I only have 5+ hours played, which is true, but you also need to consider that time "idling" (not having the game launched) isn't counted for. Pros: -Great Idea, basing an idle game off the perodic table -Not a mouse clicking spam fest -Some education/testing of what you remember from school Cons: -Extremely slow progression, with way more content unlocking than I can manage -This game is not free, if you are looking for a classic idle/clicker game there are many out there for free -Some of the hints get annoying quickly if you're watching the screen waiting for something (such as some quest requirements) Overall, I do not recommend this game because I do not think this is the type of game for everybody. As I said I consider myself a huge fan of this genre and this game just did not cut it for me. To anybody out there who loves this game, I hope you continue to enjoy it. For anybody looking for a new idle game, please take your time to try out other games first (including the free to play version of this online).