Decent Idle with Caveats
Context: I play a lot of idle games at work, i have experienced and enjoyed a great number of them. TLDR; an idle game that does not reward idle gameplay, has predatory progression methods, is balanced poorly. visually unoriginal and unpleasant. This is an okay idle game in concept that has many issues in practice. imagine taking a normal idle game and stretching it as thin as possible to make sure you view as many ads as possible. entire portions of this games progression are locked behind weeks of grinding. I don’t mind the grinding itself. however, it feels that the grinding exists for the purpose of ad watch time. there are far too many methods of progression tied to watching ads. Another issue is that the progression can be extremely random. you hit points of complete stagnation where you could be grinding for weeks. Unless you get the right combination of random box, chest game, or bonus zones at the same time and suddenly your progression could advance an entire month forward. this leaves the gameplay feeling extremely unrewarding even when you do make a large advancement. my last issue: the visuals. i enjoy the idea behind the style of the game, but it is incredibly clear that these are simple app store reused assets. this game looks exactly like flappy bird or jet pack joyride. i don’t want the game to look “fancy” but it could at least be slightly original. i lied - my actual last issue: the bow. the bow feels absolutely terrible to use. the lack of controls is abysmal. it completely changes the platformer style collection gameplay into some strange tap tap meta. the bow is meant to be a big milestone in progression and from my perspective, essentially ruins the “core gameplay loop” if you can even call it that because this game is so barebones. TLDR; an idle game that does not reward idle gameplay, has predatory progression methods, is balanced poorly. visually unoriginal and unpleasant.