Idle Lumbercat - Wood Games

I love that there’s an option to pay $20 to get rid of ads forever….but buyer beware…it really doesn’t get rid of ALL the ads. I bought it not knowing this. There are literal pop up ads that pop up when you’re trying to play the game. They clutter the screen and ask you to try out “Office Cat” I'm not sure why the devs think that doesn’t count as an advertisement? Also cluttering the screen are “play *this* event”, two different types of battle passes (one that makes you pay to progress beyond a certain point and one that has free items alongside paid items), spend $5 to unlock the “golden piggy bank”, and another ad to spend $5 to get “star pass special discount products”. Maybe it’s just me but if I pay TWENTY DOLLARS to get rid of ads, I expect to NOT have ads cluttering up my screen. It gets so bad at times that at least 30-40% of the screen is just crap they want me to buy. It would be nice if the devs would at least have the decency to put paid purchaseable items in the shop and not in both the shop AND the main screen of the game - especially for people who paid an outrageous $20 to have no advertisements. We don’t need or want to see it twice. Also, it’s literally impossible to complete the last step of events without spending more money. I stayed up with almost no sleep, glued to my phone for two days straight in order to attempt it and only got a quarter of the way through the last level of the event.

The cats are super cute and the game was fun enough that I paid to not have to see ads, but after having played a couple of weeks, there really isn’t much to do. There are special events that have great rewards, but they have the exact same two events on a rotating schedule. You’d think that with a simple game like this, they’d at least try to vary something about the animation or characters. When leveling up, you change seasons. This changes the background, but nothing about the gameplay or much else. Since there are only 4 seasons, the seasonal look gets recycled consistently. There doesn’t seem to be much incentive to leveling up, and the diamond rewards hardly seem worth it. There is also a bug that the developers haven’t fixed. When switching back to the town and lumber yard in the middle of a delivery, the game sometimes gets stuck. The number of wooden boards increases, but the delivery won’t progress. I have found a way to force the game past this. You have to turn off the delivery contract cat’s automatic deliveries. This will clear the stuck queue and help you accept a new delivery. Of course, you lose any wood already moved to the loading zone or taken away by the delivery trucks, but there’s not much else you can do until the delivery is either deleted while in progress or the game is restarted.

I have to say that it is incredibly refreshing to see mobile game developers who clearly put a lot of love into their work. I have been playing their other game “Snack Bar” for a couple of months and paid the $20 to not just get rid of ads, but to support the developers. I did the same with this game immediately because I have the money and I believe in supporting indie developers; I understand how much hard work goes into making a game and I understand the need to put ads and micro transactions into a mobile game in order to pay your staff and keep making new games going forward. After a long day of work, I like to pull up a no-nonsense game on my phone and listen to an audiobook or podcast at the same time to relax. I really like this new game, it adds extra depth compared to Snack Bar and there’s a little bit of strategizing you have to do so that your lumber doesn’t stack up on one end of production and make the process of earning coins slower. You learn how to make it more efficient through each level progression. I’m a big fan. The graphics and music are absolutely lovely.