Pretty good, but a few suggestions – Idle Crafting Empire Review

So this game is nice: the graphics are good, and its fun when you bulldoze through sections in a matter of seconds. Ads are also made a cost; a literal cost, rather than a forced inconvenience. Which is actually really great. But I have a few complaints: 1. Prestiging. As others said, it needs to be improved. This is too small a bonus for such a relatively large jump backwards in world progression. It also doesn’t help that you aren’t told it’ll reset your progress; that needs to be fixed. 2. Getting secondary currency (namely, the purple gems). There are ways to get what might seem to be relatively large quantities of gems, but using them always has costs that are pretty big in comparison to the dribble. There’s gotta be quicker ways to get these things, especially when the pay off of using them most of the time is relatively minor (and if so, you can always add more things to use them for, increasing the frequency of how useful they are). 3. The ads. I’ve already praised this, my only complaint is that there isn’t more things to use ads for. 4. Some of these resources that you need for crafts seem pretty rare; the jelly, specifically. Possibly make it more common...? Aside from that, it’s a pretty great game. Perhaps you can additional ways to destroy blocks besides the current way? Maybe add a separate mode with its own benefits where you can perhaps lob explosives at clumps of blocks in neat ways...? Other ideas would also be pretty good. Additional notes on further playthroughs: I’ve already said that gems are too rare, and they really are. There are occasional blocks on levels that give off 1 gem, but that really isn’t much. Perhaps have the chance of finding them improve as you go along...? Perhaps from like occasionally finding in the early 100 levels and then finding them at least every 2 levels once you get to 1000? It would make farming them much easier if you get caught up in the loop you get when you fail to break a jelly. Another thing is that there REALLY needs to be a baseline improvement when you go back to camp. The crafts do not honestly improve your character that much. I went up from about 45 base damage to 1.2k damage when I purchased a bunch of the crafts (around half), and repeatedly upgraded one of them. I had gotten to level 700 when I prestiged. That is not a good payoff for a month’s worth of effort and it would be great if the prestige also added a level bonus. For example, once you get to level 70, the level you are on will contribute to a multiplier. Every 10 levels contributes 1x to a multiplier for your damage upon returning to base. So at level 70, I’d 7x more damage output applied to my base damage. Considering that the scaling of levels is exponential instead of linear, this would basically only get you boosted up past a few worlds or so upon prestiging. However, it would get you back to where you prestiged much quicker than just relying on the crafts (which would stack with that multiplier). This way, it doesn’t feel like as much of a waste of time to prestige. Another thing is the jello resources. The stacking of jello gained from these jello blocks really peters out after a while. For example, I was on level 500 when I started used skippy to boost up an extra 200 levels. The jelly gains however, only went up from like 300 or so to 500. Considering the effort it takes to slog through all those levels when things get slow, and the even more tremendous effort it takes when you’re picking away after the skip, it would be really neat if there was a much more noticeable increase in jello per 10 levels, especially since it’s almost as rare as gems, but only slightly less costly than other resources (it goes from taking 5 or so jelly potions to upgrade a craft to thousands of them, while the other resources go from needing hundreds to needing thousands, which is scaled pretty fairly all things considered...). Another thing I’d recommend is the upgrades to crafts. Again, since the levels become exponentially more difficult, it should scale similarly for upgrades to crafts; exponentially, not linearly. This’ll make them retain some sort of value as the game progresses, but I know that after getting them all and upgrading each 10 times, it’ll be diminished returns from then on out compared to the effort needed to get these upgrades.
Review by SurpriseFluffyKitty on Idle Crafting Empire.