Like, I was driving around the city rocking out to the radio and looking for trouble, now I’m apparently… watching a video feed of that happening instead? I’m trying to pretend I’m actually in the world of the game - why shove this additional camera metaphor in the middle and distance me from that world? Like, when you’re playing a game and it’s raining and some water droplets get rendered on the screen like it’s being filmed with a camera with a wet lens - unless you’re playing a game where the conceit actually is that you’re looking through a camera, this is immersion-breaking, not immersion-reinforcing. To me it’s an incorrect nesting of metaphor, similar to adding lens flares and related effects to video games. I don’t understand the appeal of the toy/diorama/tilt-shift aesthetic for the Link’s Awakening remake. gaming video games clicker heroes 2 early access idle games Once I’ve gotten to the point where I have an actual character build going, there’s no longer anything to sink my teeth into. Spending a couple of minutes on upkeep just to make sure I’ll have something to spend a couple of minutes on again later starts feeling empty pretty quick. This is kind of a weird thing to criticize since it’s basically the core loop of the genre, but for me it makes it hard to stay engaged. And the only thing you do every time you come back is spend the wealth to increase the accumulation of wealth for the next time you come back. The thing to do is just - put the game down and come back later. Some of the most famous examples have been essentially roguelikes, there’s a dual-stick shooter and a town builder in my list of examples a couple paragraphs up as well.īut in Clicker Heroes 2, there isn’t something else. In some idle games, there’s something else to go do while you’re waiting for that wealth to accumulate - something that ties in to the economic systems but can be basically any kind of gameplay. The time between meaningful choices gradually increases - you start out clicking near-constantly and eventually reach a point where it makes sense to put it down for minutes or hours and come back periodically to spend your accumulated wealth. At first you’re focusing on individual clicks or actions, then you’re focused on upgrades or automation, and so on. It’s common in idle/clicker games for your focus to sort of zoom out over time. And, I mean, it kinda does? Ascending still basically resets your skills in exchange for a damage multiplier, but you retain the stat boosts from most skill nodes and even a few of the abilities, so you can still make gradual progress in the direction of a particular build across multiple ascensions.īut I realized what the real problem is for me in Clicker Heroes 2 compared to my favorite idle games: you never get anything else to fill the downtime. I revisited Clicker Heroes 2 in Early Access now that they’ve replaced Gilding with Ascending to see if that addressed my concerns from before.