Idle Empires is a run of the mill idle game with an interesting (?) story conceit and a grin sense of humor. Although it has a few ideas here and there to break the monotony of idle gameplay, there wasn’t enough for me to stay engaged with it more than a few hours. The game’s reliance on very costly upgrades paths with few immediate effects and the general starting curve of revenue generation combined with the ticking revolution clock made this a weird mix for me.
The core concept of the game is that you’re a time-travelling king that went back before a revolt (that he caused because of his malpractice as a sovereign) and then you start doing the same thing by replacing buildings with profits-generating versions that pollute, increase crime, destroy the environment, etc. By doing many actions, unrest builds up and when it’s at a certain point, you need to time-travel back again and reset the game, starting anew with some skill points to invest in a few upgrades. Between the various screens of buildings you improve and then tap on to get money - the system to navigate in the world is kinda slow and not very fun to use - you get into fights which involve you sending troops to fight enemies, and again everything you do raises your unrest, summoning troops and casting spells alike.
At some points in the map you get choices between two upgrades and they always costed way too much than what I could afford, which was a bit annoying, why have the promise of an upgrade dangled in front of your face instead of just making them available when you unlock them? After a while inevitably a revolution happens and you have to reset with slightly better numbers. There seemed to be a bunch of other things like chests with collectible artefacts and the ability to change your chancellor and many more things, but I just got bored too quickly by the core idle gameplay to keep going at it. I don’t really recommend Idle Empires.
