Nonstop Knight is a great idle experience. With graphics that reminds someone of an action RPG and with a few gameplay systems to engage the player, I was completely hooked and played it for much more than I usually play these games. In a sea of idle games, I would totally recommend Nonstop Knight for many reasons including the progression, level of customization and potential for unlocking new stuff that are all so important in a game like that.
Slash Mobs is a perfectly competent - although I've had pretty bad performance issues on my iPad which prevented me from enjoying the game - idle stage-based monster killing game very similar to Clicker Heroes and other idlers of that style. It adds a few mechanics like player equipment and skill trees to differentiate itself from its various competitors, without much success.
Plantera is a neat, although simple idle game where there is much less automation than in other games of that genre. You plant different kind of fruits and vegetables, wait a bit, then collect them to get money, which is used to plant more stuff, expand your garden, buy animals and upgrades and repeat, seemingly forever. I had some fun with it, even if the UI was a bit difficult to use at times and if ultimately I lost interest when I had unlocked all kinds of things you could buy and figured out it would be value upgrades from now on. Unlocking new mechanics and doodads in idle games is a fun thing and slapping a new game + system is always a good way to have the player go through the whole thing a few more times, but Plantera didn't have any of that.
Egg Inc. is an incremental clicker-like game where you press a button to hatch chickens that lay eggs that you then sell for money to buy upgrades to hatch more chickens and lay better eggs faster, to get more money so you can upgrade your eggs and then prestige to get even better eggs. It's a really neat idle game - even if it's idle component isn't free by default - and I sunk a ton of hours into it, and even a few bucks! It's a cool game.
A Firelit Room is a graphical overhaul on A Dark Room, a game I've reviewed earlier, it improves a bit on the gameplay as well and makes it a bit more bearable. While it improves on some systems, I feel that it worsens the experience in other ways. I enjoyed the idle aspect a bit more, but world exploration and overall upgrades were even slower this time around; Worse, some of the new UI changes made the game even less playable.
Maybe Doomsday Clicker is a neat game, but it ran like butts on my gen 3 iPad. It's a bit boring to review a game poorly because of performance, but if I'm allowed to buy it on my decide and if it's 'supported', it should at least run well. Doubly so for an idle game, moving the menus around shouldn't be a time-consuming effort, with each clicks taking a few seconds to register properly. It's kinda of a shame, because at the same time, some systems in DC were interesting.
A Dark Room is half an idle game, half an RPG and both part aren't that great. You start from nothing and build up to having a bunch of people working under you, then you go explore the world with increasingly better stats and random events occur from time to time. It's an interesting game to be sure, but I stopped having fun with it when the idle elements became too slow to build up to unlocking anything new and I can't say I cared much about the narrative either.
Tap Tycoon has some trappings from Venture Capitalist - upgrading your revenue generating items will improve their speed and percentage-wise value - and being allowed to buy helpers that automatically collect stuff for you, but I didn't enjoy it as much as I did VC. The idea of old-school tapping a bunch on the screen to collect trace amounts of cash isn't that fun and in the grand scheme of things, you're better off generating passive revenue in these kind of games. There's some 'war' aspect where you send soldiers to fight for your country and some card system, but both were obtuse and confusing in their own ways.
SquareSpace ate my Frontier Defense review.
It's a neat tower defense cross idle iOS game, the premium currency is fast to get and there's plenty of stuff to do, heroes and shooting units to upgrade and buttons to tap in order to attack and unleash special abilities. I had a fun time with it.
I didn't exactly know that Soda Dungeon was going to be an idle game and I was pleasantly surprised when I hit the sweet spot of the gameplay loop. You hire adventurers to run through a dungeon, get gold and items in order to make the next batch of adventurers go further while allowing you to buy upgrades for your tavern and unlock new classes as you go. Then after a while you reset the game and start over with some bonuses. You can manually control the battles, but otherwise, everything is automated. It's a great game and I can't wait to continue playing it.
Trimps is a great idle game; It's got everything you need from one of these, progression, interesting choices to make, lots of unlockables with multi-tiered upgrades and challenges, time consuming activities, a simple and clean gameplay loop and a few new ideas that make it stand out from the other idle games of this world. This is currently my idle game of choice and I play it everyday, managing my Trimps to continue progressing through the game while also doing other things. It's a really neat thing.
Mucho Taco is a bad idle game on iOS that first might have been a cool cookie-clicker rip-off but instead does nothing new or interesting with the genre and eschews some of the things that I would expect in an idle game. With bad core controls, slow progression and random consumable items, it's not a game I'd recommend to anyone.
I've spent so much time on Adventure Capitalist. Countless hours tapping things to upgrade them so I would get enough money to buy more things and upgrades to get more money to do that ad infinitum. Then you reset your things but you get even more money next time. And the numbers go really really high and you can buy things to make the numbers go even faster. It's basically the only iOS game I've played so far that made me watch its ads gleefully - because it made the numbers go faster, and watching a 30s ad is always worth it to do that. If you like idle game - which I'm not sure what that says about you, or me - you gotta try this one.
Time Clickers is an idle game where you have to shoot at cubes to destroy them. Doing so nets you money, which you use to upgrade your pistol and to buy other guns that auto-shoot at cubes to destroy them. Doing so nets you more money, which you use to upgrade all of that stuff until you get to a level where the cubes have so much health that you can't get through anymore. But never fear! You get special Time Cubes at certain levels, and you use them to upgrade many stats, in order to be stronger, to be able to destroy more cubes. You get the idea!