Idle Defense

Another reviewer summed up my thoughts pretty well. It's one game (red colour enemies) multiplied by six with some health scaling. Once I was clearing red enemies easily and had a few prestige upgrades for it I had no need to do the same thing for the 5 other colours.

Beware 3D graphics in idle games. The game itself doesn't have specific problems. There's some buggy UI stuff with windowed mode, but nothing that prevented me from playing the game. The problem is that the game is boring. A good idle game is an expression of mechanics. As the game progresses, new mechanics are introduced that force the player to reevaluate their strategy. Here, the mechanics are all put up front. I think the intent was to provide the game with a "sandbox" feeling, but without introducing them systematically then the game feels like a bunch of useless upgrades with an overreliance on a few core upgrades and there's no feeling of progress. As an example of a useless upgrade, there is no reason to use the knockback mechanic at all early on in the game. You can only afford a few upgrades to the knockback mechanic, and a 0.5% chance of knocking back the enemy the minimum possible distance has no strategic benefit in the early game. At that point, the mechanic is taking up space. Speaking of which, the introduction of new colors doesn't provide any feeling of progress because there appears to be no scaling or introduction of new features by moving from red to orange. The scaling of red, orange, and yellow blocks appear identical. The end result is that the game invites us to play the game with red, then to play the *exact same game* with orange. Then with yellow. And because there's no power scaling, we are actually disincentivized from using higher tier towers because they start out the exact same as the red towers. The yellow towers are actually weaker than the red ones by the nature that the red game is further progressed than the yellow game. It makes progress in the game feel backwards, and high friction. While I think to make this a good idle game would take substantial retooling, idle games are not about creating something that can be played forever and are instead about maximizing player time before you get bored. I got about 3 hours out of this game. Even with some basic scaling, this playtime could have easily been tripled. While I can't recommend this game, I hope the developer continues to work at it.