Much like the iOS game I've reviewed a while back - and much like Cookie Clicker and Anti-Idle in a sense - Clicker Heroes is an Idle game where you mostly click a few times and then let the game run for a while before clicking a few other times and waiting. Most of these games have some kind of progression where at some point you reset your game in order to get bonuses for the next run that will allow you to go even farther. There are not real goals in such games, but they're nice time wasters - and are much more appropriate on PC than on mobile devices. Clicker Heroes is pretty neat, although since games like this live and die by how frequently they're updated, I can't say that it has my attention as much as it once did.
When you start CH, you start with only your clicks to defeat enemies, after a while you get a hero that boosts your clicks. Then the automatic DPS guys come in and you buy them slowly. Heroes have upgrades that increase their damage, or the damage of all your heroes, or some other abilities like critical hit damage/chance, gold gained, stuff like that. It's a bit boring that the late-game heroes have all the same basic damage-boosting upgrades and nothing more interesting. As the game goes, you get stuck at some point where you can't kill the boss - they are on a 30 seconds timer, if you fail to kill them you can't progress - and you need to restart the game to get some souls that can be used to boost your damage and buy ancients that have a bunch of abilities.
The ancients are fine for a while, you can either play in 'active' mode or 'passive' mode. There are ancients that boost your DPS and gold gained whenever you're idle, and there are others who increase your click damage the more you click, for instance. A lot of ancients boost the skills as well - and these break being idle. I feel that there aren't a lot of options after a while if you just want to let the game run without clicking much. All the ancients I have left to buy wouldn't help me, and they cost precious souls that can be used to boost my ancients I already have or just increase my DPS. The skills are okay and they help blast through more difficult enemies during some phase of the game.
After pushing through the levels, you get Gilded heroes, they get 50% more DPS per gild and you can stack them so there's an incentive to get to higher and higher levels. You play for a while, then you can blast past the level on which you were stuck, after another while you can buy pretty much all the first heroes instantaneously, and then new walls are in front of you at level 1200, 1400, it kinds never ends. I wish there were a way to buy X levels of all heroes, or at least to buy a multiple of 100 or 25 of all the guys you can buy. You can buy hero levels in shots of 10/25/100 and at each 25 levels they get stronger by a factor or 4 times. So your DPS increases to astronomical proportions during the game.
Clicker Heroes isn't for everyone, the stream of updates really slowed down since the developers talked about working on a mobile version - and it's not really a game you play as much as an excel spreadsheet with characters drawn on it. After a while I'll surely get bored of it, but right now it's still okay.
