Starting from now, I won’t be reviewing one iOS game every three weeks anymore. ADventure Ages isn’t the sole reason, but it is symptomatic of an ecosystem of free to play blandness that all merges together into a Skinner Box network of sorts. I’ll be only reviewing the odd paid game from now on, so things will slow down. Maybe I’ll subscribe to Apple Arcade, maybe I won’t.
ADventure Ages is a reskin of ADventure Communism (because apparently the red scare is still real in TYOOL 2021 and made that game perform worse than they wanted) where you buy things that make things that make things. It’s just bars filling up and clicking on buttons to make them fill up. Some fill faster, others take a few minutes. I played it way too much, because the weekly events felt kinda addictive - you could get neat rewards if you played it for almost four days straight. I’m still not a big fan of the ‘population’ mechanic that hard-caps the speed at which you can progress, but you could always pay your way out of it, so I guess that’s the point.
I’m done with free to play games. 3/5
