very fun game!!
Reviews for "Planet clicker"
Complete time waster
First, I need to let my hand rest from so much stinking clicking! Don't set the goals so far apart. Second, what is up with the lag? I didn't complain at first, but by the time I bought my first water, it was better for me to just wait and not to click. C'mon man, fix the issues and this could be fun!
I want to like this game so much.
Sadly, I'm disappointed. Everyone else has mentioned the lag, and I'll echo that: as low-key as the graphics are this game shouldn't be chugging along like frozen molasses.
But there's a bigger problem here:
The maker of this game clearly understands the idea of Cookie Clicker's addictive "Click things, buy stuff with points to make more stuff" design. However, they fail to express an understanding of why it works. There's the idea of reward mechanism here: you get arbitrary points, and high numbers are good. Yay! That's the simple part!
Where it's fallen apart here is twofold: price and reward.
See, when I'm playing Cookie Clicker, within a handful of minutes I've got many hands and at least a grandmother or two chugging away for me. Each new level of production provides so much more *stuff* that it's frankly staggering. And the reward of being able to buy something new is repeated again and again early on. It's drilled into us.
Here, I've been playing for an hour and I have less than twenty things.
One sec. My browser messed up and flushed all my files for that game. So I'm gonna see how long it takes me to go from nothing producing clicks to twenty things.
Okay, it's been five minutes. Fifteen cursors (At rougly 8x the initial starting cost) and five grandmothers (at roughly 2x). This in addition to some other things I bought in there--I'm not gonna talk upgrades here, that's beyond the scope of this argument--and it's pretty clear: the game designer doesn't want the players to buy things. Its rapidly increasing prices make every single purchase a slog. Every single one. It seems to start with an assumption that of course we want to sit here and click.
Which, with this game, we very rapidly don't.
So we have part 2: reward.
When I buy my first grandmother, she's pumping out five times what any one of my cursors is doing. The farm is gonna dwarf her, and so on. By the time I get to the upper levels, adding my first whatever dramatically increases my workflow--I may have a dozen or more alchemy labs, for instance, but the moment I get a Portal...did I really think I was going fast before?
Now I will grant you that this kind of works in some cases, but the glacial pace of growth--and sharply geometrically increasing prices--means that, for instance, even though I have enough points to buy plants, I've got to spend even more on water.
...Don't get me wrong. There's some good seeds of ideas here, but this needs to be smoothed out a lot before it's enjoyable.
nice game :D