Idle Clicker Madness
It seems like every other game in the Google Play store these days is an idle clicker of some kind. These all have some kind of theme where you try to ramp up numbers exponentially, whether the numbers make any sense or not. And you can earn maybe 2 hours of progress while offline.
I tried a few and ended up quitting them after an hour or two.
Idle Apocalypse had a fun theme, breeding monsters to go beat on the adventurers outside the gates. The pixel art really didn't work for me, but there were plenty of funny comments from the NPCs along the way. I could not figure out what some of the little icons were supposed to mean, so an Ogre had 50 of whatever and maybe 200 health, and some other thing. The screens where you level them up were also not very clear. I guess you're just supposed to be happy whenever numbers go up. What burned me was after I built five floors of stuff and added a Landing Pad where a balloon comes every ten minutes or so ... only to find out that you have to watch an ad EVERY time, to get those rewards you built up to. Meh.
Idle Skilling had more pixel art that did not catch my imagination at all, though again it had some good humor. There were sooooo many screens of stuff to do, usually with no clue about what unlocks the next icon. You just click whatever skill or thing is next, so your guy with some unknown heap of numbers can go fight flowers with 6000 hp each, so you can click the next circle or next thing, and maybe pick up some cards along the way, assuming those cards do something later. Kudos for including funny skills like Sleeping and Waiting, and for the weirdness of measuring your overall level progress on an H20 bar, and the sheer scale of what the team put together. I could maybe stick with it a bit longer, but there isn't enough real time in the real world. It looks like you could never get bored with all those areas to figure out, unless you expect things to make sense. On to the next.
Crafting Idle Clicker then. It is very well put together graphically, but oh those numbers.
Barely an hour into testing it out, I needed quadrillions of coins to unlock a simple thing like iron bars? Not to mention it was probably millions of research points just to find out what the unlock cost was going to be. The Prestige (reset) option was a Rebuild Workshop page, where you get the usual meta currency and start over with all numbers growing even faster the next time around. I really liked the workflow layout of the main page, showing how the various crafting processes are connected, and showing products moving from one space to the next. But for me, having the leather armor valued at $400 would have been fine. It was $400,000. Like mere hundreds isn't enough of an ego stroking good time, I guess. No, everything has to be millions and billions.
I never thought I would get tired of seeing scientific notation. But what the heck is it doing in a game about making leather boots and swords? Uninstall.
Remember the good old days when Demogorgon had 200 HP and armor class -8? That was a top-tier challenge back then. You ramped up characters for months trying to even touch a creature like that. Now even the smallest monkey can take 1000 points of damage. The number creep is just crazy. I remember watching Legendary: Game of Heroes go from new heroes doing a few hundred HP damage to bosses in the millions, then 10x bounty hunter double boost special event heroes who needed bosses in the trillions. Sure, when these games were young, I don't think any developer could comprehend just how many times players are willing to click on things, how many $$ they are willing to spend on digital stuff and boosters and imaginary coins, how many levels a game is expected to have these days.
Sometimes a game has a balance that works for some spare time curiosity. Personally, I like to build spreadsheets of the elements in these games and stare at the grids of numbers to see where it is going. It has been a while since I have seen a remotely well balanced progression. Idle Planet Miner is one of those that works, and I will keep reporting on it. Others come and go. Calling them "idle time games" is the perfect phrase for them, for better or worse.
Jan 16 update: I put the first two games back on my tablet to get some screenshots. Yeah, clicking them again is a bit fun. I still don't get the attraction, though. I removed the third one. Billions of coins, nope.
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