MisterAtlas_
i think about video games a lot
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Here we come to the elephant in the room: does this game respect your time? Yes and no. I truly believe the ideal idle game not only possesses the qualities I listed above, but can also be completed within less than a day of play. All idle games I've played that pass this time limit I find are extending their length beyond what interesting content they have. Prestiging is a basic concept of the genre, but so many have you go through an hours long cycle to make a tiny upgrade, and then you do it all again. Repeat for weeks of your life. Gnorp Apologue is definitely better than most at this - I still felt that I was experimenting and learning new things with each cycle even if all I got for my troubles was one or two more prestige points - but it's undoubtable that the rate of new content thrown at you lowers dramatically after the first few hours.
Here we come to the elephant within the elephant within the room (the first one was hungry): you have to pay for this game to play it. I think this game is worth the money, but all paid incremental games hit this wall. A game about manipulating numbers can only have so many systems and layers until it becomes ungodly complicated and/or require an unworthy amount of dev time. So the rate at which this content is introduced inevitably slows down at a certain point of complexity until you've prestiged enough times to beat it. It took me just over 17 hours (with a fair amount of idling) to do so. I believe if the numbers were fudged so that it took more like 10 hours instead, it would be a more consistently engaging experience. But I don't regret any time I spent with this game. After finishing, I went back to get some more prestige points to see the endgame of my overarching strategy, then got the rest of the achievements, which I don't do that regularly. So overall it won't change your opinion on idle games but, if your views on them align with mine, I think you'll get your money's worth. End of review. Nothing else to say. Nope.
gnorp
possibly the worst intro to any game. you walk through an empty vault while someone says a few sentences to you over an intercom. you're presented with a bunch of items, then you walk into a white light and you see... a loading screen. then you're outside.
same studio who made the intro to fallout 3 by the way. they can't try to make it as impactful as walking into the capital wasteland for the first time, or even whichever wasteland it was in fallout 4, because you are no one, it doesn't matter, and they want you to get to the cash shop as soon as possible. i'm beyond tired of blank slate main characters who are never filled in. if the intention was for the character to be literally me and the main interactions are with other players, i never saw another player and i wouldn't want to interact with them anyway.
i had an active frown on my face the entire time. immediately they gave me the option of starting at level 20. i didn't pick that option. i wanted the experience of starting from nothing and scrounging for ammo, and food + water with its mandatory hunger/thirst systems, just barely surviving. after finding a bunch of ghouls, i almost ran out of ammo for my pipe pistol and switched to the first thing on my hotwheel. it was a 10mm pistol with 500 ammo. where did i get it? i have no idea. presumably from one of the many challenges that popped up with a completion! notification for doing literally anything. i didn't think pressing E on a pile of wood was such a momentous occasion, but here we are. feel good about it, please. i want you to feel good. buy atoms. a cloying, desperate experience.
i can't even have the satisfaction of scoring sick headshots, because their heads pop about half a second after firing. they made an affectation towards including vats but they may as well not have bothered if time stays in full speed. i finally found a settlement of human NPCs who looked like they were doing something, anything beyond trying to kill me. i looked wearily over the dialogue options and questions i was presented with. i didn't care. i walked for about 15 seconds away from their base, exited to desktop, and uninstalled the game. fallout 76.
A downgrade in every way from the last one, which isn't good because Just Cause 2 was just adequate enough in most areas to let its huge world shine. That's not to discount the effort put into its systems to make causing chaos compelling and satisfying. The weapons, cars, and in-air movement weren't relevatory but, again, the key word is satisfying. Enough so that I came back to it almost a decade after first playing and still found it fun, completing too much of the map frankly.
I never connected with Just Cause 3, which is a shame because I was so excited for it. Buying the second one pre-owned based on watching a couple of Youtube videos on it felt like finding a hidden gem of jank, and here we are, on the PS4/XBONE, for the series' big next gen premiere with the whole world watching! It's a shame that, although JC2 is absolutely fucking ridiculous, the sequel takes one more step into unreality and the house of cards falls down. The first time I faceplanted into the ground from a height and didn't die, well, to quote Gabe "Valve" Newman, it was a narcissistic insult to my brainhole. This was one of the first times when I realised I truly didn't know what I wanted from video games; I'd died so many times in JC2 and endured so many loading screens that I thought I would love surviving those scenarios. In the sequel, I discovered that a playground with too many guardrails might let you leave with less bruises but you won't remember a thing about it the next day.