Gave this a fair and honest try, put slightly over 175 hours into it with idling and active clicking intervals, and it really just falls off immensely after clearing about 30 or so quests. There just isn't enough going forward to keep me invested, the balance is way off the mark, and there is not enough sense of growth to make it feel like it's worth the continued time investment. I enjoyed the beginning for a moment, it kept me captivated, and for 99 cents and tax, I can't say that I feel cheated or anything. However, I cannot in good faith recommend this game to anyone solely because of the middle to late part of the game itself, and the mechanics of the game holding it all together.
To preface, I have to make one thing clear: I would say that the beginning of the game feels very nice and, honestly, for the first 100 hours I played it, I actually enjoyed it. Reminded me a lot of the early Cookie Clicker days. The beginning itself has a nice sense of cohesion and rhythm to it, in the traditional idle clicker sense. The problem is what comes after. Very specifically, it comes from the fact that in an effort to balance itself and separate itself from games like it, it ends up just shooting itself in the foot and makes the game an absolute tedium to play. The list of grievances I have with this game is not short, and by far outweighs any enjoyment I may have scraped from the beginning of the game itself. It feels like this game is a master class lesson in what *not* to do with a idle clicker type of game.
As others have pointed out in reviews here, the game gives you a short "ban" if you use an autoclicker. Not terrible sounding, until you realize that you can easily trip the ban by clicking the mouse and hitting the space at the same time. Or, as some others have pointed out, click too many times in a row. Already that sounds bad, but it isn't even the worst of it, in my opinion. In game, there is an option with 500 Golden Donuts to disable the ban mechanic... where doing the beginning sets of quests only gives 1 and then 5 golden donuts each. Considering how the game massively accentuates manual clicking (I was getting 62.2 tredicillion donuts per click, where as idle time was 14.8 duodecillion), it just feels completely counter-intuitive and redundant to actively limit the main mechanic in which you generate money. Especially when the idle income is so drastically lower than the manual income. In fact, manual income is predominately the ONLY way you'll make real progression that isn't just leaving your computer on idle for an entire day and then realizing that an hour or two of clicking literally makes what you made idling for an entire day and more.
Tied to manual clicking is the concept of "Experience" and "Levels." At first, I liked the idea of actively gaining levels to gain better income, along with there being upgrades to the amount of experience per click you get. It's a fairly interesting take on the clicking genre, as it makes manual clicks have an extra bit of depth to it. Every 10th level, it gives you a random item to place in your inventory, which you can equip to your character for additional buffs, and unfortunately, this is where the leveling process shoots itself in the foot. This is a very nice idea in theory, as it means that as you click and level, you gain items to increase your income and allows you to be strategic with the buffs and buildings you buy and focus on. The problem is that most of the items in the random item pool are just aesthetic donuts that do literally nothing for you except color your donut. You can take another spin by spending golden donuts, but with how precious they are from quests, it almost feels like an active detriment to do so when you can instead just buy upgrades that flat-out increase production by 100%.
And because of that very mechanic with equipping items in your inventory, your donuts per second (DPS) feels extremely shaky and unreliable. At a point, none of the upgrades you buy feel like they give any worthwhile increase, and despite having several hundreds if not a thousand of a certain type of building, it just feels like you hit a stone wall as soon as you reach far enough. Hitting Level 100 greets with you with a daunting exp hike requiring 100k exp in clicks, Quests end up being very boring and tedious to complete with no purpose or meaning behind them, and you don't get enough golden donuts to make it feel like spending them has any worth for you. I stopped by the time I hit the "Satellite" upgrade because going from tredicillion all the way to quindecillion without any way to make getting to quattrodecillion feel worth while and easier just sucked the life out of me when I found that idling didn't even give me a quarter of the way to the required amount, and I'm actively being punished for manual clicking to catch up.
And unlike Cookie Clicker, you can't sell structures that are under-performing to make up the loss, nor can you sell or do anything with the items that serve no purpose in your inventory and just ended up being a waste of donuts or a level up. No early game reincarnation mechanic at all, you're just stuck with a bad rolls and horrible DPS, and that's your lot in life. And it's a shame because this game has several great ideas, and if I didn't have some enjoyment in it, I wouldn't be typing up this strongly worded review with a 175+ hours on my playtime. I WANT to like this game, but there just is no excitement in getting anywhere or doing anything at all. The achievements have a listing for going up to quinquagintillion, and honest to god, that sounds absolutely unbearable if just getting into the decillions is this miserable and tedious.
Get it if you are curious anyways, I can think of worse ways to spend a dollar or so. But like, to be entirely honest, a candy bar is worth about just as much and I struggle to give reasons why that *wouldn't* be a better purchase, as it certainly respects your time a bit better.
