I’ve played NGU Idle for over a year now and I would’ve played it a bit more, but idle games live and die for me either by the promise or new mechanics to keep things interesting or by the visible incremental progress towards being able to do more things. For the longest time, NGU Idle did that for me. There was always a new mechanic coming around, there was always some system to power up until it was high enough that I could go and blast through and see something else to do. I’ve also spent a few bucks on this game, because I wanted to support it although the crude humor wasn’t really for me. Do I recommend NGU Idle? In a sense, yes, it might grab you like it grabbed me, although it ultimately starts to break down, let’s say at the one year mark.
The core concept of the game is this: You have attack and defense that go up over time, you use these to fight bosses, which gives you experience and unlocks new mechanics. You use these mechanics to do a bunch of different things - fight enemies, harvest plants, go on quests - that ultimately more or less all feed back into each other with their own subsets of stats. You’ll have “adventure attack and defense” to fight monsters, but you’ll also find equipment that boosts the effect of plants you harvest, and some plants will give you bonuses to quest rewards, and with quest rewards you can boost the speed you collect cards, and cards will boost your hacks that you use to power up your adventure attack and defense stats… And then you Rebirth, funneling all of that into a big “NUMBER” that is used to multiply your attack and defense afterwards. The story and flavor text around NGU Idle is also a pretty weak part for me, I kinda wish it would’ve played it straight, but that’s fine.
But at the beginning, things are much slower. You get attack and defense very slowly and you are capped by resources like ‘Energy’ that slowly goes up over time. These resources are core to the game and you spend a lot of experience making them go up faster, increasing their effects and increasing your cap. Besides experience, the game has Arbitrary Points that you use in the Sellout Shop to buy upgrades like more equipment slots and other mechanics. The game gives AP at a steady rate, but you can also buy some with real money.
The Adventure mode at the beginning was also really delightful - there are a bunch of zones with various enemies, you automatically fight them - or you can manually use moves if you want to - and they drop gear that you can merge to level up, and boosts to improve the stats of gear. It was delightful because you could get from zone A to B to C simply by collecting gear, maxing it and moving on. At the point where I stopped, getting from zone A to B would require weeks of powering up, because the differences in power was just too great. You also would get set bonuses if you max items from specific zones, which was great at the beginning because you would really feel the upgrades, but when I stopped, the bonuses were really uninspired.
You get gold from defeating enemies in Adventure mode and every few hours you can throw it in a bottomless pit to get some upgrades that range from great to totally useless, even after one year of play, and you have a daily spin to get some rewards that slowly improve over time, also featuring some baffling “rare” rewards that just stop being useful the moment you get them. Energy you use to boost your Attack and Defense stats is also used for new mechanics like Augmentation, which is another way to get Attack and Defense, the time machine that gives you gold every second based on the highest amount you got from enemies. You also get a ‘Magic’ resource used in various places like the time machine, but also blood magic, split into rituals (to get blood) and spells (to use blood to gain various effects, like a higher NUMBER, bigger adventure mode stats, and more). There’s also a system named Wandoos that gives you more attack and defense by filling bars using your energy and magic. I felt at some point that too many systems fed into the same numbers and it made them a bit boring.
Adventure mode opens up to an infinite dungeon where you get PP by killing enemies, which can be used to purchase a bunch of different perks that have a wide impact on the game, which I definitely needed to power up. There are also Titans in adventure mode, though bosses that you can’t really idle and must instead fight manually, sometimes by figuring out puzzles and gimmicks beforehand. These give good gear and unlock new mechanics but the later ones take forever to be strong enough to defeat them.
One such mechanic are “NGUs” which improve various stats as you level them up using energy and magic. Yggdrasil, making you harvest plants that grow over the course of 24 hours - if fully maxed, gold diggers that improve various stats by draining the Gold Per Second provided via the Time Machine, Beards that give you a temporary and permanent bonus to various stats based on the speed your energy and magic goes up. MacGuffins, items that you can level up and equip to get bonuses - you guessed it - to various stats when you rebirth, quests that require you to collect items in specific zones to get QP, which are like PP but give a different set of Quirks, Hacks that unlock a new resource (I’ve named mine “Flops”) that slowly… Wishes use energy, magic and flops to give you various bonuses and finally Cards that are split between generating “mayo” of different types in order to use cards that give bonuses. Written as-is, although I love seeing the numbers go up, it’s clear that most mechanics in the game did nothing new and just gave multiplicative bonuses to core stats.
After a while you unlock Challenges that I really enjoyed! These usually reset your NUMBER to 0 and make you do something, like defeat a specific boss under certain conditions (no Augmentation, your equipment has no effect, etc.) for great rewards. This also was great at the beginning, where rewards were new mechanics but at the point I stopped, the rewards were just some EXP and a text that said “More rewards coming soon!” But they never will, the game is ‘done’. This was part of why I’d decided to stop playing. The most challenging challenge was “the troll challenge” where every 2 minutes or so a bad effect would happen (your energy would go back to 0, you would be spammed with popups, a giant cat would scroll on-screen) and then after 15 minutes a really bad effect would happen. These usually gave great rewards, but couldn’t be idled.
I had a good time with most of NGU idle, but the end came after I had been playing for about a year. New unlocks just didn’t do it for me - getting new skills for adventure mode that don’t actually do anything interesting is a downer, for instance - and the difference in stats between what I had and what I needed was getting too great. The fact that challenges stopped giving anything other than pithy EXP and AP didn’t help. The treadmill became a bit boring… but it stayed fairly interesting for about a year, so that’s not so bad!
