Farmer Against Potatoes Idle is my kind of incremental game; on the slower side, with new mechanics being doled out over a long period of time, with things to do when the game is active but also with a good reason to let the game do it’s thing while you’re doing something else. I’m always drawn in by games where you can see that in a few weeks there’ll be another gameplay system to discover, that you’re slowly building up a resource that you’ll be able to spend on some upgrade and that the things you’re doing right now will be easier in the future. Farmer Against Potatoes Idle was that for quite a while! It’s neat.
Much like the previous game from that specific creator (Wizard And Minions Idle), and many others (NGU idle comes to mind too), the main core loop is defeating enemies (in this case, potatoes). Doing so gives you equipment that you can put in six different slots, and also skulls and potatoes that you can spend to upgrade your stats. You gain experience by defeating enemies, which you can use to level up your class on a passive tree (which is a bit too complicated for no reason). Ultimately, all of this feeds into making your character stronger, so you can get to higher tiers of maps and defeat stronger enemies to get better gear (that you also can upgrade by spending materials you get from destroying unwanted equipment.)
Everything else, no matter the kind of sub-system, feeds into your stats. There is a silly “whack a mole” mini-game that you can play every ten minutes that gives you tokens you can spend to improve your stats (I’m glad you can automate playing this game later on because it’s a bit too active for me, although the game smartly gives you a reason to keep playing it from time to time). There is a fairly deep gardening sub-system where you plant various type of potato-producing vegetation and get resources that ultimately feed into your main power.
There is a “worm breeding” sub-system where you allocate resources to get experience in various stats progressively, and so forth. There is a “milk” sub-system where you get cows that produce milk you can allocate to (you guessed it) improve various stats. Everything does more or less the same thing, but it all feeds into making you stronger. You get pets, you get cards, it takes a long time to unlock all of that but it all improves your main stats and gives you some other neat bonuses here and there. There’s also a mining and town building sub-system that also have their progression tracks and bonuses to other game systems. It’s fun!
The game has multiple layers of progression reset; You can ‘reincarnate’ when you have enough experience and time progression; doing so improves your stats, gives you more bonuses when your reincarnation level gets high enough and does not take away too much of your progress. By getting a high enough reincarnation level and fighting to a certain map tier of potatoes, you can ascend, this resets pretty much all your other numerical values (but not most minigames you’ve unlocked) and you get points to get very powerful upgrades that change the game more in meaningful ways.
For all the good I’ve said about the minigames and sub-systems, they require quite a bit of player interaction, and this becomes bothersome after a while. It’s okay to allocate worms to get experience for a bit, or to re-plant your garden plants when they are ready to harvest, but after hundreds of hours of gameplay and multiple days of doing the same thing, you want to automate certain processes. At first, I thought this would be there Ascensions come in, because most upgrades tended to do just that, but at some point it seemed like they would also just become numerical improvements. I wanted the upgrades to automate some things I had been doing for quite a large number of days, but it didn’t seem like the game was going to give me that.
So I stopped getting at Ascension 15! I still had a good time with Farmer Against Potatoes Idle. It was deep enough and had quite a lot of mechanics and systems to go through that it kept me entertained in it’s own incremental idle way for a few months. There are still some more mechanics I haven’t even talked about here, so if you enjoy this kind of game, check it out!
