Your Chronicle is a pretty great idle/increment game that focuses on unlocking individual actions and storytelling, alongside a bunch of mechanics that become available over time and some good focus on managing resource production/consumption, party composition and planning. I ultimately couldn’t keep playing it after a certain point when I realized that it required a bit more active playing than what I was willing to put into it, which is a damned shame!
Antimatter Dimensions is a recent idle game released on Steam where you buy dimensions to create antimatter. You buy dimensions that create dimensions that create antimatter until the point where you can reset the world, buy upgrades and start again. There are a lot of challenges to complete, achievements to unlock and the numbers get really big. That’s kinda what turned me off from the game; it seems like forward progress only meant that the number got bigger through some extra layers above the basic gameplay and at no point I got curious about what I could be unlocking next.
Clicker Heroes 2 is the ill-fated follow up to the web idle game of the same name, attempting something quite daring - being a non free-to-play idle game on steam - so that got my interest when it was announced. Because of many factors, the development of the game didn’t go so well and the early access phase was as far as it went. I had still bought it, so I wanted to give it a look and see what was there. It was a bit of a mess for sure, some mechanics felt underbaked, others were quite interesting but underutilized, and overall there was nothing that grabbed me in the game.
Wizard and Minion Idle (WAMI) is an idle game inspired by NGU Idle, which I reviewed about six months ago. The basic concept is fairly simple, you cast spells to accumulate “Attack” and “Defense” which you use to go through “stages”, unlocking gameplay mechanics and features that all synergize together to ultimately improve your attack and defense some more. These features were a bit more engaging for me than they were in NGU and I had a good time with WAMI! I wish I could’ve stayed with it until the ‘end’ but at some point progression felt like it was dragging on forever and I didn’t know how to improve it, so I stopped.
I had looked at Melvor Idle on mobile a while back, and while finding the core ideas of the game interesting, I had been left disappointed by the mechanics locked behind in-app purchases and mostly by the game’s too open pacing, where the player was bombarded with things they could do with very little logical progression or path they could logically take to get stronger. The PC version, being a premium title, does away with the in-app purchases, but does not change the core of the game much, so it left me with the same overwhelming feeling than the mobile version. Needless to say, I dropped it quickly.
Cmd C is an okay idle game themed around programming and computer science tasks. While I enjoyed the concept it has of tiered mechanics, challenges and upgrades, the act structure really took me out of it because I rarely play idle games for their story. It’s not completely a bust, but I didn’t stick with it too long.
Stuck In Time is a game that tries to be an idle game with the twist that you constantly loop, moving your character around, fighting enemies, leveling up, collecting items and mana, all to stay alive and have the longest loop possible until you eventually run out of power and need to restart all over again, keeping small incremental upgrades and familiarity with the map in order to make further loops easier. It’s also a neat-looking world that is like a big puzzle to solve. Sadly, for my tastes, it fails in both aspects.
I’ve played NGU Idle for over a year now and I would’ve played it a bit more, but idle games live and die for me either by the promise or new mechanics to keep things interesting or by the visible incremental progress towards being able to do more things. For the longest time, NGU Idle did that for me. There was always a new mechanic coming around, there was always some system to power up until it was high enough that I could go and blast through and see something else to do. I’ve also spent a few bucks on this game, because I wanted to support it although the crude humor wasn’t really for me. Do I recommend NGU Idle? In a sense, yes, it might grab you like it grabbed me, although it ultimately starts to break down, let’s say at the one year mark.
State Connect: Traffic Control, a game that looked like it was about connecting cities, collecting money and buying upgrades and more connections, just served me ads non-stop. I wasn’t going to pay 14 dollars for a game that couldn’t even have -some- gameplay before bombarding me with randomly popping videos. No thank you!
Tiny Island Survival has an interesting idea - what if a little incremental/exploration game took place on a single screen representing a single island? What could you do then, how much stuff would there be to do? I ultimately do not know, because it’s also a game that has ads so invasive I would rather shut it down and load it back up whenever they popped during gameplay, until it ultimately wore me down and I stopped playing. An interesting core idea, for sure, tho!
Idle Acorns is a cute, but way too simple idle game with very little in lieu of interactions, instead offsetting most of its progress on long timers that leave very little to do while you are waiting. The potential was certainly there, with the various game screens - waiting for acorns, fishing, races and cooking - but ultimately systems feed into each other insomuch as they are all gated by a wait for diamonds.
Idle Industries is not that bad if you know exactly what you are getting into - a free idle game loosely based around collecting resources, crafting items and selling them to make money. I had a fine time with it, even if it ultimately was a bit like junk food and if the layers upon layers of free to play mechanics slathered over the whole thing made it a bit of a mess.
Time Idle RPG seemed like a neat idle game with a lot of ideas based around literally using time to do actions such as gathering resources, crafting and fighting enemies. Sadly with too many numbers and too many mechanics surfaced immediately so I was quickly overwhelmed and stopped.
Universal Paperclips is the iOS version of a classic browser based game where you start manually making some paperclips and idle your way into transforming the whole universe into paperclips; A few systems are added on top of each other, like the stock market, quantum computing and game simulations, all to feed into your paperclip making. Ultimately, the balance on mobile didn’t work well for me, and at some point progress became excruciatingly slow, so I stopped.
ADventure Ages is a reskin of ADventure Communism (because apparently the red scare is still real in TYOOL 2021 and made that game perform worse than they wanted) where you buy things that make things that make things. It’s just bars filling up and clicking on buttons to make them fill up. Some fill faster, others take a few minutes. I played it way too much, because the weekly events felt kinda addictive - you could get neat rewards if you played it for almost four days straight. I’m still not a big fan of the ‘population’ mechanic that hard-caps the speed at which you can progress, but you could always pay your way out of it, so I guess that’s the point.
Exponential Idle tries something a little bit different with the idle game genre by seating its simple gameplay mechanics into a bit of lore and some heavy math stuff that I really couldn’t wrap my head around. Even with some attempts to explain everything in a tall instruction screen, I still really couldn’t figure out what was going on and just tapped everywhere. It’s a bit of a shame, because a math-based idle game could be really neat! This one just was a bit too much.
Idle Game 1 is a very minimalist, very simple idle game that takes some of the core ideas of classic incremental games and reduces them to basic interactions, removing most of the player choice you’d find into a more advanced title, but still leaving just enough to create an interesting loop where you very quickly reset your game multiple times in a row until you can reset for a bigger bonus. I didn’t stick with it until the end, but I still found it kinda neat.
Territory Idle is a idle/incremental game where the core mechanics is growing an island by buying or fighting for tiles until you can sail away to another continents, accumulating various upgrades along the way. With plenty of systems working on top of each other, Territory Idle kept my interest the whole way - I managed to beat the game, in a sense - but ultimately I was left disappointed by the strange balance, lack of quality-of-life features, a few small bugs and a breadth of options that weren’t really all equivalent.
Home Quest is an interesting idle game where you build up villages, assign jobs to your villagers, raise an army and fight invaders while discovering new technologies, upgrades and resources. That sense of discovery brought me all the way to the end of the game and while I sometimes felt that you just couldn’t do anything and needed to wait with the game closed for a while - especially in the early game - at the end I was fully enjoying all the different systems you could optimize to beat the challenges the game threw your way. So much so that I bought the gold edition to support it! You should check it out if you enjoy idle games.
Idle Life Sim is an idle game with a really interesting visual style and core game system, but nothing else going on for it. The absolute lack of player actions beside watching ads and not playing the game for long periods of time (also limited by the game if you don’t buy some expensive doodad) made me lose interest quite quickly. I must say that I’ve tried a bunch of idle games recently and this one continues the trend of not letting the player do anything while idling, which doesn’t work for me. I wish they had made something else out of that game.