Kittens Game

Overall this is a good game. It gets to be a bit of a slog at certain points, and there’s zero explanation for what anything does or what to do, so you are just kinda flailing in the dark your first playthrough. Which is fine, but it can be really intimidating and I almost quit several times out of frustration at my lack of progress. I did enjoy it, but I’m going to be clear: the turn off pollution switch does nothing. It’s a straight up lie. I’m fine with the creator choosing not to have the ability to turn off pollution, but I’m not down with being lied to. It made me really suspicious about what other things in the game are lies or at least misrepresented, and I’ve definitely found a few. The game messes up very small percentages so you get less than you were promised (looking at you, alicorns,) and there’s no correlation between real life time and time in the game. Something will say it’ll take an hour, but if I check in 45 minutes later it’ll say half an hour. The mobile version also has a tendency to delete/reset short amounts of progress, even with saving. It’s especially frustrating when you, say, trade and get some rare resources then change open windows on your phone after saving, only to come back to everything in the app reverting to how you loaded it before trading. All in all this is an acceptable way to burn some time despite its problems, and despite my gripes with the game I think the programmer/creator is amazing for creating this. I encourage people to try it on desktop first before getting it on mobile, but if you enjoy it, get it and support the creator!

I love idle games like this! I enjoyed the simple design that hides a great degree of choice and customization to optimize your society. It was shaping up to be one of my favorite mobile games. The part that warranted this one star in my mind was with the policy tab. In it you can use various societal policies to influence the growth of your cats. At first this was cool, until you unlocked more complex policies. The best policies number-wise were in reality monstrous. The fascist policy gives great optimization with almost no drawbacks, but the socialism policy costs a great deal of resources and literally does nothing(it even says it in the purchase description). This seems to be the creators attempt at a joke but it ignores the real world effects fascist governments have had. Also the only hostile species you interact with are the zebras which feels like a racist dig at Africa. I wanted to love this game but the problematic views built into the design have left a bad taste in me mouth.

It’s okay I guess. I’ve never played an idle game before. At first, getting alerted when something was ready was fun and exciting. Now it just seems boring. That’s not the game’s fault though — and if you like idle clickers, this is clearly the queen. There’s a lot to unlock, it seems. The descriptions of each upgrade makes me smile too. Very clever. I don’t mind spending the $2. But if you want something similar to A Dark Room, this isn’t it. If you want something with a fair bit of micromanaging, this isn’t it. If you want something where you’re actually doing something, this isn’t it. Some people say this has a little more to do than most idle games. It doesn’t have much to do, though. After about an hour you have to wait for stuff to automatically get researched and whatnot. You don’t get to do anything. I still like it. It’s just not my favorite game. And I’ll still play something I paid for. I haven’t found any bugs either, so in that department, it’s a clear five stars. Who knows, maybe I’ll change my mind after a few more hours. I’ve barely touched the surface it seems.