Idle Crafting is a depressingly badly balanced idle game with a nifty style and a cute premise. What if you destroyed blocks in order to gather materials that you then use to craft tools to make you better at destroying blocks? In theory, that’s fine and fun. In practice this game is an ad-fest with blocks getting so difficult to destroy that you need to leave the game and come back later to upgrade your character and automatically-attacking pet friends. What I want from idle games are reasons to stay there and play, not reasons to put them down extremely quickly, and Idle Crafting gives me plenty from the second category.
The game starts simple enough, you are presented with blocks that you swipe in order to attack. These blocks give you resources and gold, you use the gold to improve your characters (increasing the damage you deal when you swipe, for instance) and the resources are spent when you reset your game and can be used to craft items to make the next runs easier. Both concepts fail quite quickly. The upgrade curve gets too tough too quickly - you have to deal enough damage to pass certain levels - so you need to grind quite a bit before you can progress and the reset crafting system only allows you to create very specific things. You have no freedom of what you’ll craft so the upgrade path could almost be linear.
The game tries to keep things interesting with goals to complete and a bunch of systems to increase the power of your automatically-attacking friends, but it failed to grab me because of the poor core gameplay loop. Other systems are much more craven; The golden hammer doubles your damage, but it’s a premium item, there’s a ‘jackpot’ minigame where you select random rewards and lose everything if you pick the wrong one and there’s the dreaded ‘resource drill’ that gives you a bunch of rewards but requires you to watch SEVEN ads in a row in order to get everything. All of these things, combined with locked chests and other systems on timers (that you can skip by spending currency) make the whole affair rather sad.
I quite enjoyed the visual style of this game, but playing it wasn’t actually fun. I’d recommend you skip it.
