Idle Miners Settlement

 

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Greetings mechanics and tinkerers!

Grab your Steam-powered shove and dig up: Idle Miners Settlement

Today I bring you a fantasy-based game that has a very unique way of how idle elements are incorporated into the level design and how your progress. The basic story is you arrive in an abandoned village and meet the village elder that refused to leave. Your job is to rebuild the village and draw in others to return.

This is an idle game loaded with a lot of story. This is an idle game that has a clear goal of 'defeat the necromancer.' The game uses a progressive system where you must really focus on unlocking all of the mines first before you can build up the village. You have to gain dollars to train and upgrade the pets to mine for you. 

You are given quests that guide you along to what you have to do to progress the story and upgrade buidlings. When you get to a point and you have all your mines, Then the game turns into a RPG where you must forge equipment and then kill many evil monsters. Leveling up does not seem to give you any stat increases and everything is dependent on equipemnt. As you level, you do unlock Rune slots to use magic totems to buff your stats.

The first thing you fix up is a home of your relatives. This is the only building that does nothing at all for you. You can't sleep to regenerate health or anything. You do get a chest beside the house to store stuff you pick up along the way.

As your build up the village, you unlock the pet trainer. It takes a LOT of money to start improving the later pets you open up when you find a new mine. These animals will do all the mining for you and even pick it up for you!

You can unlock the forge later on in the game. Once you do you must then find schematics for severy other items. It takes a long time to gain these from story or from randon drops from the airship. Some enemeies also drop them as well. For a very long time you do not have the ability to many many items. There seems to be many pics and axes but I dont know what effects they offer.

The forge, pet trainer and airship has a special shop that uses purple gems to buy shematics as well. The best way to gain them is by completing Achievements. Sometimes optional videos as well. It takes a long time to gain enough gems to buy shematics.

You personal inventory. You can use the purple gems to expand out your inventory. As you reach to the bottom it takes 150 gems per slots. I did not get to buy all of the slots during my playthough. All your tools are stored her along with any schematics you find.

You can also find persona pet shards as well. Equipping a pet allows you to sell materials from anywhere and you get 5 extra inventory slots for free as we..

Here is where you can have runewords active. As you gain levels you gain more slots to cast potent spells to give you boosts to stats or add protections.

Here is an example of one of the mines. The deeper down you go the longer it takes you to mine the stones yourself. You must manually mine stones as well to gain special colored stones used in various things. Sadly any manual mining you do does not continue on with idle mechanics as you are away. So no idle leveling or getting certian materails while away.

Here has a list of achievements for you achieve. This is the easiest way to gain purple gems for buying inventory slots or schematics.

Lastly is the shop menu. Here you can gain 10 free purple gems by watching optional videos. These packs seem to give you a decent value for what you pay.

Overall:

 4 of 5 cogs.

This game offers a lot of unique mechanichs wiht how an idle game works. At points you are forced to wait a very long time just to progress. Because of this you can only play a couple minutes a day before you can't progress any more. This really slows down the game more than it needs to be.

Story:

 4 of 5 cogs.

For an idle game, there's a decent amount of story. That was one of the most surprising things that greeted men when I started to play this game. 

Amount of ads:

 none beyond optional ads

There are a lot of optional ads that pop up for you to get dollars and purple gems. You really have to watch a lot of videos to speed up the game without paying for anything.

Accurate Advertising?:

80%

The video Ads for this game are ever so slightly misguiding. They only show a portion of the gameplay and 

Graphics:

 3 of 5 cogs.

The art is a lot of drawn pixel art but with a very odd zoomed in scale. Something about this art feels od to be and it's not the best I've seen.

Gameplay:

 4 of 5 cogs.

The gameplay is fairly repeititve and it takes times to progress and discover new things. When you do there's a lot of things to discover and figure out.

Free play:

💯%

You can play this game fairly well without paying anything into it but it takes a lot of time to progress.

Fun factor:

💎idle mining for you money.

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Merge Master Adventure Puzzle

 

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Greetings mechanics and tinkerers!

Today we merge wood and steel to make: Merge Masters Adventure Puzzle

Today's blog brings in a merge game with very interesting merge mechanics. You have a set field with limited spaces to click on item producers and merge items. Some items take up to 10 levels of change as far as I've played. That means you have to have 1024 level 1 items to make a single level 10 item. The playfield that I show next level only has 63 tiles to work with. There are two forms of currency and one energy counter. The blue diamonds are the premium currency and can be used to buy certain things from the shop or reset the item producers. The second currency is golden coins that are used to expand your backpack slots and buy some items. Lastly, as you see here the map is actually very small and seems to have a very limited number of places, and it is set out like an rpg map.

Here is the playfield when you click on the anvil. When you first start off, there are several locked spaces that can only be unlocked once you merge the right item with the grey items. Later on, you unlock a backpack that will allow you to store extra items but the upgrade slots get very expensive.

The wheelbarrow is an example of an item producer. 1 energy will get you a random tool or spool of thread.

Here is the shop. You can buy diamonds or coins, and you can also buy energy or get some for free from optional videos. There is also a section of items that give you coins and energy but it takes multiple of them to reach a max level of 3. So save those up for big boosts of money and energy every few days.

You collect quests from the map. Some areas you completely clear give you bonus quests daily to earn chests that give you many bonuses. Each individual quest progresses the story and gives you different rewards.

Here is the backpack. This screenshot shows the unlocked backpack button on the main playfield. Here each new slot costs a large amount of gold and takes a very long time to unlock. I do not know how many slots there is total in the backpack.

Lastly, when you click on a map spot with a quest you get the list of items you need and the rewards you get for completing the quest.

Overall:

 5 of 5 cogs.

This game is a standard merge game but it is done in a different way. An example is Merge Dragons, you have space you have to slowly expand and build on but have 'optional' land you can buy for real money. This game doesn't do silly things like that but you do have a very limited space to work with.

Story:

 4 of 5 cogs.

There is no story, wait, you're telling me there is an actual story in this game? There is a load of story with a lot of easter eggs to find. Most merge games do not contain story and this was a pleasant surprise.

Amount of ads:

 low

There are not any surprise pop-up ads from outside the game but there are some in-game ads trying to get you to buy very expensive packs. You can watch a very limited number of optional ads for energy and more items from item producers.

Accurate Advertising?:

70%

The Ads for this game are semi-clickbaity. The ads show you having a limited number of tries to match up an item into a 'scene' and the example shows someone that is very bad at the game. There is no mechanic showing in the ads that exist in this game. The only thing that matches is the base merge mechanics and clicking on item producers.

Graphics:

 5 of 5 cogs.

The graphics in this game remind me of  Advernture Quest. The graphics are flat-colored cartoony images for charachters, and cutscenes. The map items and the merge items have a lot more detail and seems to be very HD pixel art.

Gameplay:

5 of 5 cogs.

The game is very simple and you can only really play for a short time every couple of hours. This game is fun but the artificial stopping due to no energy mixed with the item producers only creating so many items every few hours really slows down this game a lot.

Free play:

💯%

This game is fairly generous with currencies and some optional videos so you do not need to buy anything to effectively play this game, just a lot of waiting.

Fun factor:

🍣Easy merge.

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Merge Dungeon

 

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Greetings mechanics and tinkerers!

Merge the cogs together into a machine and take it into:  Merge Dungeon

 

Today we have a post-apocalyptic merging game that has mostly idle mechanics with a lot of active merging. This is a very interesting RPG that uses merge mechanics as a form of equipment upgrades. Each equipment has sever different levels of rarity similar to Borderlands. There are two main currencies, gold which is used to buy equipment or upgrade storage space. The second is a premium currency that is used to upgrade everything else. You can earn a lot by playing or watching videos quite often.

If you look in the Shop tab, (the Treasure chest icon on the bottom), you can move to the last place option and watch several videos to gain boosts that slowly decay over time. It says that it decays 10 points every 3 minutes but this seems to be a typo as you only lose 1 point every 3 minutes.

If you click on the cardinal rose at the bottom of the page you can see the level select screen. If you clear an area with different challenges you gain purple diamonds which is the premium currency and is used to upgrade a lot of different kind of things needed to progress.

Here is where you will spend most of your time. When you click on the middle button you force a new item. it takes mana, the blue circle on the right. You can merge the same item to create the next tier up item which tends to be the next armor piece along the hp bar. You have not only 1 character but 3 you have to try leveling up evenly by merging and getting them good equipment. The merging can be tedious and max rarity items automatically lock so they don't accidentally get merged. Even if you merge two separate items that are max rarity the next item's rarity is completely random. Note, each of the characters share the same inventory limit so this makes it very hard to focus on all 3 until you expand that stat.

If you click on the gem on the merge board, you come to this screen. Here you collect and merge gems similar to that of Diablo games. Along the way you find a dwarf that can put the gems into an item, upgrade the items further or reset the item.

Here, back to the compass button you can also go to special dungeons twice a day to collect special powder used to upgrade each character abilities individually.

Here is the sample of the micro-transactions You get a fair amount of premium currency for the price but it will not buy you many upgrades at all.

You click on the anvil and it shows you every item you've found so far from merging. As you collect higher tier items, you gain permanent boost to that character. Also note, across the top of the screen you also gain many small missions that give you a boost of gold or items. These seem to be very random and not a source of premium diamonds.

If you click on the book to find all the big power upgrades. This menu is where you go to get the biggest boosts to progress you game. Here is where you will spend all your hard earned premium currency.

Overall:

 5 of 5 cogs.

 

 

This game has a lot of interesting mechanics with how merging works. Every so often you get a rank updated based on how far you have traveled across the map. Number of deaths do not seem to deter your placement on the list, only the floor number you reach.

Story:

0 of 5 cogs.

 

 

Zero, none at all.

Amount of ads:

 none, all optional.

 

 

 

 

 

Every ad is an optional and could potentially be avoided to play this game without issue as you can play offline as well.

Accurate Advertising?:

💯%

The ads and screenshots on google play store hide nothing and are not click-bait. This is a straight forward game.

Graphics:

5 of 5 cogs.

 

 

 

HUD elements remind me of Diablo 2. The rest of the graphics have a slight cartoony aspect that takes big influence from the 80s.

Gameplay:

5 of 5 cogs.

 

 

 

This is a very simple and easy game. Merge and merge and merge, then buy upgrades. I was able to quickly rise up on the server I played on as it seems many people may get bored with this game very quickly. It's easy to pick up and play for as long as you want.

Free play:

💯%

This game is very generous and you can easily play just by watching optional ads all day.

Fun factor:

💎 Purple Diamonds are for Merging.

Thank You for reading my blog. Please consider donating to the tip jar as these are tough times and every bit helps. You can follow by email or via follow on desktop websites. If you enjoy these reviews please show others this blog by retweeting or liking my posts on social media.

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