Idle Inn Tycoon

Greetings mechanics and tinkerers!

Rest your steam-powered horses in the stables of: Idle Inn Tycoon

I am reducing the overall number of screenshots in my blog due to many issues with my connection that are out of my control to fix. As a result, the blogs will be shorter from now on.

Today I bring you back to the past, where steam power was more essential and magic ruled the lands. Here you become a manager of a run-down Inn in the middle of nowhere. The king of the lands thinks you will fail but still wants a cut all the same. The game is simple. You idly make money from every single thing in the game and you have to wait to gain enough money to buy the next upgrade. Clicking on the exclamation will give you all your current goals to complete. Eventually, your Inn becomes 5 stars and you move on. From what I can tell, the money you make at a maxed Inn becomes useless as money does not transfer between Inns.

Each room in the Inn has several upgrades that affect how much income you get a day. All the upgrades use standard gold except for 1 item you can buy with premium currency to get a very small buff to income. These optional items are not really worth the gems. As you progress, some items require having available magic and you must upgrade your mage room to get more before you can continue to upgrade stuff.

Here's a quick example of the missions you can do. You can click on the arrow and the game will take you directly to the item or room you need to upgrade. No need to search for it. Once you clear out all these missions you normally get a very small premium currency reward and you get more missions to do. Each mission helps you gain stars faster.

Be sure to grab your daily rewards from the shop stall icon in the bottom left of the screen.

Another small thing that drains premium currency is the card system. You can obtain these cards by buying them or unlocking them via the daily spin wheel or by completing some tasks. Rarely even video ads will give you a chance to get these.

When you click on the clipboard you can come to this management screen that tells you how far along something is upgraded or not. This screen will give will also tell you how much you pay your workers a day in the third tab. Other The second tab is for landmarks.

Overall:

 3 of 5 cogs.

Overall, this game is a good 'start' but there isn't much going on in it. There are some events that crop up that can give you extra bonuses but you have very little time to complete them.

Story:

 2 of 5 cogs.

This game has a story but I dislike the characters in this game. They are parodies of real-world actors or famous people and bad renditions at that. The personalities are rude and flat.

Amount of ads:

 

 optional only

None, only optional ads to get rewards.

Accurate Advertising?:

💯%

I have not seen any ads for this game so I can only go on what is shown on google play. As far as I can tell there are no click-bait or misleading screenshots.

Graphics:

 3 of 5 cogs.

The graphics are simple polygonal and very rough 3d models. The characters lack depth or originality.  The rest of the assets are non-shaded graphics. Normally I don't have an issue with this style of art but it feels incomplete.

Gameplay:

 3 of 5 cogs.

This game is one that I feel could possibly be completed in less than a month of playing everyday. This game feels so incomplete and doesn't have much going for it. Once you clear an Inn there is no need to ever go back there. 

Free play:

💯%

You can do everything in this game for free and never pay. You don't even need to watch the optional videos to progress any. Overall this game doesn't feel very sustainable for long-term play.

Fun factor:

👶 Far too easy and not much depth.

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 on 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. Please leave a comment with feedback if something needs fixing or improvement.

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Merge Mayor

 

Greetings mechanics and tinkerers!

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Today we drive our steam-powered cars into town to become: Merge Mayor

Today I bring you a nice merge 2 game where you only have to focus on matching 2 of the same item and not 3 or more to form massive chains of clutter. This game is very simple compared to other merge games and is a lot more chill. You become mayor of a town that is broken and needs to be repaired from the ground up.

The main screen is the city map. It is a 3D voxel world even though the buildings have a lot more detail. You can move around the map to find each quest yourself or you can click the bottom-left of the screen to bring up all the current quests there are. You can click on the green play button to reach the main merge field like most other merge games. This game has 2 different currencies. Coins are used to buy landmark upgrades and Premium gems are used to buy extra items or used to unlock various things. I recommend saving all of these as you need them to open storage space, another part I will cover later in this blog.

Let us get the boring stuff out of the way. This is the basic options page. Not much to see here.

If you click on the button on the far top right of the screen on the building, brings you to the shop menu. Here you want to grab your daily pack of batteries. You can save up these batteries and merge them into better ones to restore energy for free. Other useful things show up here as well as the token shop to buy those rarer items you need to complete a mission.

Clicking on the hat will show you areas with landmarks. From what I can tell, these landmarks affect how much your production items can create before running out of resources. These landmarks require specific items to upgrade and lots of coins. After that, it also takes time to upgrade these buildings as well. 

As you gain more hats, you unlock more passive rewards that will help you progress in the game. The one displayed here ties into the next screenshot.

The third tab has a daily reward. You want to grab this as this item must be dragged onto the board and clicked to collect everything you need to progress in the game. This is the ONLY way you can collect more parts of the production buildings, which are the most important thing needed to progress.

The last tab is a special vault. As you use energy and spend gems, a percentage of them gets stored in the vault. You 'can' buy it to open it anytime or you can save up these keys you find and merge them to open this vault for free.

Here is a quick preview of what a landmark takes to upgrade. You can click on an item to see what producer makes it. 

You click on the number with a circle around it to see your mayor level. This only seems to give you a bonus reward and doesn't seem to affect anything else in this game as far as I've noticed.

Here is the main merge field. The objects with a yellow highlight are the buildings that produce all the different products. There is quite a bit of space in this game to work with compared to other games I've played and blogged about. The cardboard box will bring us to the last screenshot of this game.

This is the warehouse where you will store a lot of stuff to make space for merging rarer items. You have to clear away a lock and open a space to see what the next adjacent objective is. As you can see here there are a lot of locks that require gems to open.

Overall:

 5 of 5 cogs.

 

Overall, this game has kept me playing for a long time after trying it. This is one of my current top favorite merge games to play at this time.

Story:

 4 of 5 cogs.

There is surprisingly a lot of story as you rebuild up the city. The story is simple but there are some random special missions that pop-up that give you some small behind the scenes building of the game from the devs.

Amount of ads:

 

    Optional Only

This game only has optional ads. You only have to watch an ad to gain free energy, up to 3 times a day or to upgrade the daily reward to gain more items.

Accurate Advertising?:

💯%

I only recall seeing the ad for this game maybe once or twice and this game doesn't use any click-bait tactics to get people to play.

Graphics:

 5 of 5 cogs.

The graphics are simple but they all match the theme of this game pretty well. The only odd thing is the people are 3d Voxel while the rest of the graphics are not voxel-based.

Gameplay:

 5 of 5 cogs.

Simple, Easy, and relaxing to play. This game has a lot to discover to keep you going for a while.

Free play:

💯%

This game is very generous to you. You can eventually unlock anything you need as you just play the game.

Fun factor:

🏬 Not so Sim City, but easier.

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 on 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.

C.U.E. Cards, Universe & Everything

 

Greetings mechanics and tinkerers!

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Today we sit down at the card table to play: Cards, Universe & Everything

Today I bring you a game that I was initially excited for but kind of turned into a bit of a disappointment. The ads for this game hype up this game so much and it has a very bad and costly system to try to gain new cards. 

There are a lot of things on this screen. Most of it won't really be used starting out. There are 2 forms of currency, magenta gems, and coins. The gems are the premium currency needed to get a 'chance' to collect the better cards in the game. Coins are used to buy some card packs as well as a few different late game tasks.

When you click on the avatar icon in the top left of the screen you get a statistic of all the things you have done in the game. You can even toggle if you show online or not. 

The next tab is all the available avatars you can choose from. You may be able to possibly unlock new ones but I did not find anything as to unlocking them.

Lastly is the backgrounds that display on the main screen. These are high-detailed images of real-world places and this is the nice part about the app is spreading history.

The main part of the shop shows some deals that help you grab a specific theme of cards that could potentially give you hidden combos.

The next section has a set of packs that rotate out. There is a mix of premium currency or very expensive packs. This gives this game a very high pay to win feel and makes it seem rather unfair to the plays that can not pay into the game. Futher down are basic cards you can buy with the coins or gems.

The third section is the premium currency tab. It has a standard rate that I have seen among many online games.

The last page is the coins option. These are fairly inexpensive compared to the premium currency, but yet does use the premium currency to purchase.

As you level up you can gain coins, gems and free packs. These packs contain a small number of cards but nothing that will really get you too far because there is a large pool of cards that could possibly be obtained, and this makes it very hard to get any good combo cards to battle with.

Sometimes, you will get very strong and powerful rare cards. These cards normally require other rare cards to combo with or a matching set. There is a counter on the bottom left of the screen that shows you the remaining number of items in a pack.

Here is a quick example of the daily spin wheel. You have a chance of winning some rare cards or packs from them.

When you look at your collection, you can read all the information o a card here. I won't go over how the rules of the game work as there is an extensive tutorial that explains all of it. You can click on the card to learn about the history of the object, person or creature.

You can create several decks of 15 cards. These card have many different effects and affect your score differently. Some cards seem good initially but then end up actually harming your over-all score in the long run. Some of these cards really need better explanations on them.

There appears to be a way to craft random cards in this game but I did not make it far enough to figure out how to do these things.

There appears to be a system in this game if you have a set of a specific card you can transform all of them into very a single rarer card. This requires you to buy a LOT of random card packs and just hope you get what you need. This is unfair and reminds me of bad loot crates.

Here is a quick example of what it takes to fuse cards into stronger cards.

This is the crafting screen. You have to get rid of a LOT of copies of cards to get anything useful from this menu. It gives you a slight comfort as all those commons are not going to waste but it takes so much of them it's not worth it.

For the most part you can only play in causal mode until you get to a certain level. Here you could run into any cards or opponents. There are specific rules as listed here that affect how the game is played. Other battle modes have different rules that constantly rotate out and makes the whole game confusing to master.

And at last, the main battle screen you will see a lot of. The game explains everything here in a tutorial.

Overall:

 2 of 5 cogs.

This game had so much potential but... it is so hard to gain any strong cards to use against opponents and because of that, it makes it impossible to be competitive without spending a lot of money in this game.

Story:

 5 of 5 cogs.

I only mark this as 5 cogs because this game is based on real historical facts. As far as I can tell it appears to be accurate but there are thousands of cards in this game and fact-checking them all is impossible.

Amount of ads:

 

 optional only

This game has optional ads only and very limited amount of them.

Accurate Advertising?:

80%

Now, the ads for this game are very much click-baity. The mention you could learn a lot of information and just by playing this game you become smarter. They also mention specific things found in cards in this game that simply does not exist at all. The ads are over-hyped and is misleading as the information you learn about each card is nothing more than just small amount of flavor text.

Graphics:

 5 of 5 cogs.

The game uses HD images of real-worl places, items, people, objects or animals. 

Gameplay:

 4 of 5 cogs.

Asside from the fact that the game is pay to win, the main combat initially feels balanced in as you start off but at some point there is a significant amount of fall-off when you start to face higher level opponents that have better cards.

Free play:

50%

You can unlock some things slowly as you play but if you want to get access to the strong and powerful cards you have to spend premium currency, which isn't the easiest to get in this game without paying. The game is uses loot crate methods to get money out of people.

Fun factor:

😩 disappointment.

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 on 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.

Or you can donate with CashApp at:  #HakuzoSionnach.