Gold and Goblins

Greetings mechanics and tinkerers!

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Today the steam drills dig up: Gold and Goblins Idle Merge

Today I bring you a game that reminds me a lot of Lego Rock Raiders for the PC. You shoot out goblins from a cannon and then merge them to force them to mine up rocks. 

The game uses simple idle mechanics of buildings generating coins that you use to buy more goblins or upgrade mines once you dig them up. Each rock or gate has a number on it. A goblin can mine any stone regardless of the number displayed. If a goblin has a higher number than a rock or object, it mines it extremely fast. If the goblin has a lower number it can still mine but it gets a time multiplier added. It's hard to tell how time is calculated in this game because it seems a bit random. As you progress on you unlock the ability to go to event levels. The other buttons in this screenshot are locked but I will go over these soon. In the normal mode, you get purple vials that are used to upgrade your cards. These upgrades are permanent. There is one premium currency, the Green diamond. This game does not give out these gems too freely and it takes a lot to make them useful.

Now lets move on to the even level. It is the same screen but with the addition of keys hidden in rocks. These keys are the first goal to aim for as they unlock bonuses for your main mine. Each event mine has a theme to it that effects the drops you get at the end. Most of these events last for 24 hours but some events last for 3 days. With this screenshot I can go over the other buttons here. The chest is a shop that I will go over soon but this is where you can claim free random cards every few hours. The next button is all the cards you own. Event cards are seperate than the main mine. It says these cards are permenent in this game mode but I can not verify that until I have a repeat event. To the right of the goblin button is a wheel. These also refill a charge every hour and you can watch a video to get free goblins, vials or time boosts. The last button is the event button. You use this to switch between mines.

Here is the settings. A lot of links to social media a and linking to cloud saving.

Here is a portion of the shop. There are may things in here to help you advance quicker but a lot of this is expensive. I feel the prices for the stuff in this game is over-priced compared to most other mobile games.

Now we come to the main mechanic in this game. The semi-gotcha style card system controls a lot about what you can do. Each mine you find uses a different goblin and ontop of that you have to have them at a high enough level to run the mine. Some cards affect mining speed or the amount of coins you can collect.

When you click on a card you can see how many you have and the number of viles it costs to upgrade a card. These numbers start to get expoential fast. 

Here's a shot of some of the things you can view on the wheel. You get at least 1 free spin a day.

When you hit the event button you get a preview of the them and what kind of rewards you can collect for collecting keys.

This game has a small amount of achievements that do not give you many rewards for completing them. According to this, there are at least 6 events that seem to rotate around.

Lastly, here is a preview of what you can collect from a chest. There are different levels of chests that offer rarer cards in them.

Overall:

 5 of 5 cogs.

Overall this is a fun game. You have a lot of waiting to do sometimes but that is also the issue. The goblins do not continue to mine unless they are next to a new valid target. Placing your goblins is important. The events are very short and seem designed to eat money if you wish to make it to the top 100.

Story:

 0 of 5 cogs.

There is a little story in the begining then nothing else.

Amount of ads:

 

  optional only.

You only have optional ads to worry about.

Accurate Advertising?:

50%

At first, the ads for these games were straigh forward. Those ones got my attention on the game. Later on they use click-bait ads like a game I have previously blogged about. I feel this is a very cheap way to get people to play.

Graphics:

 5 of 5 cogs.

The graphics are high quality and have an odd charm to them. For a mobile game these graphics look great on my phone.

Gameplay:

 4 of 5 cogs.

The game doesn't have too much mechanically going on to keep you playing and there is limited things you can do. I feel the only thing that keeps someone going are the many events and the sense of wanting to discover more in this game.

Free play:

💯%

For the most part, this game is very easy to play through without paying anything. The gems are very rare to earn and but you don't need them to progress.

Fun factor:

🔨 Hammer time!

Are you an indy programmer or game dev?

If so, you can leave a comment or contact me on social media for a chance to have an interview with you posted to my blog. I am looking for many devs that focus on mobile programming. If you have a cross-platform game, that is fine too as long as it's on mobile.

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Summoners greed

 

Greetings mechanics and tinkerers!

I must sadly call the contest dead now. No one stepped up to claim the prize and now it is off the table. I have no future plans to do any more contests since this one flopped badly.

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Today the summoners of steam summon up: Summoners greed

Today we summon up a Tower Defense game with a gotcha game system. You get to summon a random creature from the basic list. It appears as you progress you can choose to summon premium creatures using the in-game premium currency. A last stage is locked that you must clear the first main story to open so I have no idea what that stage requires.

The first summon you get is a basic slime. It has decent attack speed but a very limited range. The slime is the most common trope and meme in the RPG world and this game sticks with it as there are different forms of slime you can summon, among other creatures as well.

This game has 3 basic currencies and a 4th one I will cover later that is much rarer. The Green orbs you obtain from completing levels for the first time. The purple stone is the main premium currency and this takes a bit more work to earn. You get the purple gem from daily logins and then from achievements. The last currency is gold coins which are used to upgrade a monster's level permently or buy upgrades that I will cover in the next screenshot.

On the main map screen, you get a button that brings up player skills. These upgrades are permanent throughout all the games and restarts. I seem to be missing a screenshot of the enemy page. On that page you can view all the enemies you have defeated and get information of the abilities each enemy has.

When you click on the monster tab, you can see all the monsters you have summoned and their rarity. As you get multiple copies of the same monster it can be powered up and gain more attack power and speed.

When you click on a monster you can see the stats and skills the monster has, and you can see how many cards you need to upgrade the monster. Some monsters can be evolved using a rainbow gem but it takes a lot of these to do so, and the only way to get these stones is to buy them or successfully knock out an enemy that is very difficult to beat for a chance to get only a couple of these gems.

There is an invite a friend system that you have to invite 20 friends to unlock a free legendary monster. I feel this is a very hard to stretch that you have you invite so many people just to get some decent rewards.

Here are the achievements. As far as I can tell every one of them are infintently reatainable. This is by far the best way to gain purple gems. This is one of the most generious games I've seen with the amount of premium currency you can earn.

Here is the option/settings screen. The odd part is to switch maps you have to come here. This is a hidden things that you have to find just to advance to a new map once you completed the firest one. I find this is an odd place to hide such a key feature to the game.

Here is the list of maps and special challenges. If you click on the locks they tell you what you have to do to unlock them. Same for the challenges. It seems the firest milestone is to reach wave 50 in the basic map. Each map has a small amount of story based on the enemies you face.

When you first start a map, you can move around the monsters as you see fit. Once you start the game you can not move them around anymore, but you can click on a monster to bring up the upgrade screen here. Each level up costs gold coins. Some of the statues seem to have a maximum level where-as some of the other monsters do not appear to have a max. 

If you fail to defeat an enemy and it reaches the bottom of the screen they steal away your chest of treasure. You can restart the same level but generally you have to watch a video to do so most times. The first time you can restart the same level for free. It is generally better to use timewarp to start from an earlier level to gain more gold coins to upgrade your monsters.

As this screen shows you also have the option to buy a retry on the same level using the purple gems. It seems once every 24 hours you are allowed a free retry as well.

Every so often you can summon special monsters using the rainbow gems. These gems are very hard to obtain and it doesn't feel fair that you have to try getting them in such a short amount of time just to gain a very rare monster. I do not know if these open on as that third summon option later on in the game.

Overall:

 4 of 5 cogs.

This game has an interesting twist on the classic tower defense game style and makes it less stressful. This system is very generous and relaxed to other tower defense games I've played in the past. Though to really progress to the later levels does seem to require a whole team of special monsters. 

Story:

 3 of 5 cogs.

There is a little bit of story inbetween when you fight a new boss. There isn't a deep story to this game with a start and finish, it mostly has just small snippits and mostly that is infered by the type of enemes you face and the information you read about them later on.

Amount of ads:

 

Optional only.

The game has only optional ads and there are no forced pop-up video ads that slow down gameplay. This game allows you to play as much as you want without being bothered constalty to buy something.

Accurate Advertising?:

💯%

I do not recall seeing any videos ads for this game. The screenshots in the google shop are accurate and shows you what to expect while you play.

Graphics:

 4 of 5 cogs.

The graphics are simple and for the most part are cohesive. The art does seem a bit on the cartoony side and has a bit of humorous look to it. I feel the art adds a bit of comedy into the actual game.

Gameplay:

 4 of 5 cogs.

The game handels the T.D. aspect in a unique way. The creatures you summon are completely immune to any kind of damage even though some bosses can temporairly freeze them. The only things that can be damaged is the rocks on the field and those can be upgraded much later in the game. The only way to restore the rocks is to use purple gems to reset them. I did not have time to discover what the other maps are like sadly before I had to write this blog.

Free play:

💯%

This game is very generious for purple gems as you need a lot of them to upgrade various things in the game. Though it seems to be extremely hard to earn the rainbow gems in a timely manner.

Fun factor:

🌌 Magical.

Are you an indy programmer or game dev?

If so, you can leave a comment or contact me on social media for a chance to have an interview with you posted to my blog. I am looking for many devs that focus on mobile programming. If you have a cross-platform game, that is fine too as long as it's on mobile.

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

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World Flipper

 

Greetings mechanics and tinkerers!

SWINDLER ALERT!: There has been a large number of mobile video ads on android devices. Each one of these videos shows what appear to be Asian-origin people with very bad voice-to-text voice-overs. These videos not only tell you the exact way they scam you, but they also claim they don't do it. Any apps that claim you can make hundreds of dollars a day are fake.

I have checked out some of these games. Each one of them follows the same pattern and all offer you nothing. A couple makes you think they are legit but they want you to pay them 5 dollars to collect 1000. These apps have you watch an infinite amount of ads and give you some wait time excuse or say that all claims are filled. Then you have to watch 20 videos to get your winnings. These apps are just gaining as much from ad views as possible before disappearing soon. I can not believe how much they spend on ads just to scam people into money. I will show a couple of screenshots of the games to avoid. As there are literally a hundred new games that dropped, and are in 'early access', that I can not post every possible one.

EZPZ Saga

 

Greetings mechanics and tinkerers!

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The mechanical troops march up with: EZPZ Saga

The game that I will be reviewing today is a semi-clone of AFK Arena. This game suffers from the exact same problems as AFK Areana and that you have random gotcha pulls for troops and you get a flood of unusable commmon troops that drain away your storage space. I had high hopes for this game but I was instantly put off by the burnout I sufferred from these kind of games.

When you you start up the game, you are given several troops as a start.You must then let them fight idly to level or you click on the attack to take on the level's boss. You have to do this every time to progress as I did not see any form of auto-advanced for this part of the game.

The game also features a season pass that has one set of free rewards and then paid rewards. Not only do you have this paid content, you also have several more microtransactions you can pay to progress more. This game is very much pay to win and just has many systems to drain money from you.

Back on the main screen when you click on the scroll in the top right of the screen you get this menu with several places to go and collect diffrent things including the previous screenshot with the season pass. Some of these screens I cover in the following screen shots, but there is a lot of hidden little rewards you have to find and scout for. These screenshots will be a bit all over the place as this game is very chaotic and it is very complicated to figure out what to do.

Another set of daily to weekly quests can be completed to earn varius rewards. These appear to be temporary quests for new players to do as a kind of catchup mechanic.

Another random timed even can be done to unlock a rare unit to help power up your team. These missions are very difficult as it requires many gotcha spins to complete them. I feel this is another poor attempt to force players to pay money just to get a possibly useful troop, but by the time you finish getting the required gotcha pulls you may have better troops anyways, making this quest feel quite useless.

Next Is the daily tasks that you can do to get the premium currency of these blue diamonds. I have not played long enough to see what these premium currencies can be used for beyond buying more spaces for troops.

We finally make it to the main screen. You can see a constant chat window that can not be closed off. In the middle of the screen you can watch the idle battle going on while you sit back and do nothing but wait. Right now the textbox in the top middle is covering up the button you have to click on to advance to a new area after taking on the area boss.

You click on the the player picture in the top left and you can see various options in the game. You can also change the music that is playing during the idle screen. This is the most unique thing I've seen done in any of the games.

Moving along when you click on the Line-up button on the bottom of the screen you can choose which troops to use and change thier battle positions. The problem with this game is every once in a while the enemies force you to change the positions as they can sometimes attack the back row first.

You can then click over to the charachter button you can focus on upgrading several aspects of your troops. Now the first troop you get is the main 'hero' and has additional buffs that you can train as you slowly level up the main account. There is many things you can power up here as well as attacks or stats.

Here is the list of the talents you can unlock. as you can see there there are several tabs at the bottom of this box that you can put points into. There is a lot here to decide and plan on as you progress through the game.

Here you can see each skill takes a certian number of skill points to unlock, I feel that an initial skill costing 2 points to unlock is very steep and in order to unlock skills further down the board you have to buy skills above it. I do not know if it is possible to unlock all the talents if you play enough or if you can even reset the skill tree.

Other units have a level of trust with the main hero. As you play along you can interact with the units to unlock stronger permanent bonuses for that character. Each one of these seem to take a unique resource to open up thes bonuses.

The ever growing need to find all the rarest equipment you can cram on a unit and then having to upgrade all of those pieces for even more stats. This game has several set bonuses from armors that all fall into that same set. This makes it even more complicated to find the right equipment for each unit to use.

Lastly, there is a special gotcha that you can roll to try to get rarer units easier but it takes a lot of a harder to obtain resource. These seem to be weekly events that change up and I do not know if these have improved rates or not.

Overall:

 1 of 5 cogs.

Overall, I am not happy with how this kind of game is contstructed. There are no ads but there are so many paywalls where you have to pay just to even catch up with other players. It is only possible to catch up with a lot of grinding and hoping all the top players become inactive long enough for you to close gap. There are many flawed things with this style of game that just leads to toxicity. I've had many bad experiences with this kind of game, that is more akin to gambling disguised as a game.

Story:

 3 of 5 cogs.

There's a fair bit of story as you progress through the story. There is an attempt at some comedy but it just doesn't rub well with me.

Amount of ads:

 

 None, there are no Ads because of the heavy paywalls.

Accurate Advertising?:

75%

I've seen several ads for this game and none of them were accurate enough to show this game is just a clone of AFK Arena. The ads made me think this game would be a different kind of idle game but no it was severely disappointing.

Graphics:

 5 of 5 cogs.

Arguably the best part of the game. All the art is HD and packs quite the punch to the storage of your phone.

Gameplay:

 1 of 5 cogs.

What else can I say? I was highly disappointed by this game. I was expecting something different and instead it was a carbon-copy of other types of games just like it that have many flawed systems designed to steal money from your wallet. The odds of getting decent troops would equate to lot of money to keep rolling gotchas. 

Free play:

10%

Just, no. This game is not very kind to f2p gamers. This game has many traps to make you spend large amounts of money with little to no actual value in return.

Fun factor:

😔 Disappointed.

Are you an indy programmer or game dev?

If so, you can leave a comment or contact me on social media for a chance to have an interview with you posted to my blog. I am looking for many devs that focus on mobile programming. If you have a cross-platform game, that is fine too as long as it's on mobile.

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

Throw a cog(tip using PayPal) to your blogger.