Idle Acorns

This has become the nicotine patch of idle games for me. Some other reviews have complained about its slow burn, or that you can’t speed it up much through a bunch of manual interaction, but that has become one of the things I appreciate the most. It doesn’t cause me to get into the usual idle game cycle of getting addicted, spending way to much time on it, and eventually deleting it in a moment of sobering self reflection. It doesn’t give that massive dopamine rush like other games, but thank goodness for that. It is fun, deeper than it first appears, and completely supports checking in from time to time and then leaving without a nagging tug to go back right away.

So this game is pretty great all around, but it gets the clicking very wrong. There's a button to click to get acorns (your main currency), and it does some very wrong things with it. It doesn't register clicks as fast as you can tap it. There's apparently a cap to how fast they want you to click and collect acorns. Dumb, but it would be acceptable IF clicking too fast didn't also cause the game to not recognize the majority of your clicks (98%... It's almost as good as not clicking at all). You will collect MORE acorns by tapping slower. This might sound like a good thing, but the problem is that there's no good indication of where the line is between "optimal collection speed" and "oops you're going too fast so we're only registering one click every few seconds". I have to go way slower than I need to just to make sure I don't cross that line. Either they need to show an "acorns per second" thing so you can tell when you're going too fast that guess from 500aps to 25aps, or preferably, they need to reprogram it so that it can register every click - even if they cap the collection speed, but having it be where clicking too fast is as good as not clicking at all is really bad. Five stars if they fix that.

I haven’t realized how satisfying it can be actually having to play a mobile game and not feeling at a disadvantage because there’s some in app purchase that if I just used I could speed up my progress that much faster. Having no way but to progress through the game gives you such a feeling of accomplishment. Despite this being just an idle clicker it has brought me more satisfaction than most games with much more content that contain in app purchases. On one note there is one small bug I have found when using the swipe function to change menus if done so on the shake acorns button the button remains pressed regardless of player interaction. I’d assume this isn’t an intended feature. Other than that this game is great and definitely worth those 2 dollars.