Life On Earth (app)

Here is an idle-time game that I forgot I had, but looking at it again, dang ... it is gorgeous.  Wow, for a futuristic or high-tech science-like app, the design is top notch.  Every little bit of it cycles through colors, or swirls, or bounces or pops, or is filled with status bars and doo-dads and things that go bump in the night.  And I don't know what some of the pages even do.

Okay, so it's called Life on the Earth or just LOE, by doMobile Games.  The splash page has a lovely full-screen video of evolution up to the age of dinosaurs.  Nicely done.  And every page after that, as you will see, is meant to catch your eye.

I'm not sure these idle time apps really qualify as games.  They are pastimes or amusements, sure.  But there are no real decisions or goals.  You just get numbers, and tap to put the numbers in various bins, and the numbers get bigger over time, unlocking more places to put the bigger numbers.

The main screen goes through the epochs of evolution, starting at the simplest single-celled organisms.  Each epoch has five representative creatures which are all beautifully rendered and respond a bit if you tap them.  Each species generates a certain about of stuff per second, and can be bred using catalyst and leveled up to produce more.  Various things roll across the screen to be tapped for extras.  The counting system is interesting, starting with an endless range of units from "A" to "Z" and beyond.  You start with regular numbers, then 1,000,000 becomes "1.0 A", then 1000 A becomes 1 B, 1000 B = 1 C, and so on.  Looks like I have about 88 G right now.  Looks like the formula is 10^(3+3*letter), so G (the 7th letter in the alphabet) is a 10^24 already?    And there does not appear to be a limit to how many powers of 10 it wraps up into those little letter codes.

OMG, the top-ranked player is at 135.48 Af units.  So that has gone past Z six more tiers which would make 1 Af = 10^99 points???  I am ranked 3540th right now, which is not nearly as bad as in Empires & Puzzles where whatever activity I participate in, there are always a half million people who beat me at it.

There are two things which keep this trippy, frantic cycling of numbers interesting to me: the pages and pages of information about the real-world organisms and the fact that you almost always have the option to skip the ads by answering a multiple-choice question about all these little buggers.  Back when I first got into it, I could answer where the Isothelae lived or how big there got or which epoch they were from.  After not looking at it for 2-1/2 years, nope, I have no memory of the trivia.

The epoch activity page and epoch description page. 

 

The creature detail page and creature breeding page.

 

There are even more screens full of things to "invest" your tokens in. One has a well-researched map of evolutionary traits and leaps, and you do need to develop true eyes (for example) to make the leap to certain organisms, so those are connected together.  The next involves building a robot for some reason, I assume it's to make numbers spin faster.

I don't even know what this last page does. It does have sparkly bits.

There are other pages, then loads and loads of bonus items, 7 or 8 pages of rewards (time spent, days logged in, reaching new levels, and so on), bonus chests and spinners and glowy things.

So, while I find the interface amazing, and it is fun to get immersed in, it is also way too flashy and nothing stays still for any fraction of a second.  When I see the ranking of some other players and calculate the trillions of points they spent, I think I would have preferred all the animal lore in book form instead.  But answering deep geeky science trivia to avoid ads about other idle-time games is rather satisfying.  Way better than the old days of just popping balloons.