Bugs and Sadness – Clawbert: ToyTown Review

I really wanted to write a [negative] review sooner, but decided to hold off until I had played the game a little longer, hoping that I was wrong to jump to such judgement. I originally installed this game after hearing that the devs might be giving up on the original Clawbert in lieu of it. So far I am extremely disappointed in how buggy and time consuming this game is, even after having contributed a fair amount of money to the developers via in-app purchases. To pan around the map you must ensure that you do not initially tap on a house/building/incubator, otherwise it will zoom you in to that location upon lifting your finger. When you try to zoom in or out on the map, it will dislocate and cause unexpected behavior. There are also times when an item, such as Tronquin (the wood), that normally takes 3:00 (three minutes), actually takes upwards of 18:00 (eighteen minutes), EVEN WHEN BOOSTED. I have experienced all of these bugs on numerous occasions and have tried to play around them. With more than $40.00 USD into the game (I try to support fellow developers on their hard work, but this can hardly be considered such), I decided to skip the food truck and barnyard and spring 9,000 coins for the “Super-Sized Incubator.” This was my turning point. It has a description of “Super powered incubation chamber.” If you try to add this “building” before you can afford it, you’ll see that it takes up four blocks of real estate. Without a full explanation, one would hope that it is approximately four times as powerful as a standard incubator, or even at least half of that. Well, it’s not; it only has two extra slots (five total) with the last two only being available after unlocking them for 20 gems and 40 gems respectively. Think about that for a moment (if you’ve played the game)...one standard incubator has three slots and cost an insignificant amount of coins (let’s say 100 coins). A “SUPER-SIZED INCUBATOR” has five slots and costs a super-sized amount of 9,000 coins. Wouldn’t you rather have two more standard incubators, even at the “super-sized” and inflated cost of 5,000 coins each? If you side with math, your answer to this question would be “yes.” Two standard incubators at 5,000 coins each would cost a total of 10,000 coins, a mere 1,000 coins more than their super-ripoff step-sibling. However, these two standard incubators would yield one more slot (six instead of five) for the same amount of gems (10 gems and 20 gems for the 2nd and 3rd slots [don’t forget to multiply these numbers by two!]), but would only take up half of the real estate! (if you haven’t played this game yet — real estate doesn’t come cheap — you pretty much have to make a purchase to get more of it.) If you’re still reading this review and you still need a good reason to not play this game, please read the previous paragraph again.
Review by dale3h on Clawbert: ToyTown.