This allows you to set conditions and actions - for example, activate Clickstorm if Energy is at least 90% full. Alongside this is a brand-new and very interesting addition - the Automator. As you defeat monsters you gain experience levels and thus skill points, which allow you to buy skills that function sort of like the ancient bonuses in the first game. So even though you were repeatedly losing all progress on a given loop, you did it to get a bonus on the next loop and bring you further along your overall progression in a chosen direction.Ĭurrently, Clicker Heroes 2 has a very different distribution of interesting choices between its loops. Like, the bonuses granted by various ancients actually fed into each other in interesting ways and enabled at least two different play styles. This is true, but I left out the fact that the mechanics are complicated enough that you actually had some interesting choices to make along the way here. I wrote in my review of the original that leveling up heroes speeds up the monster-killing loop, leveling up ancients speeds up the hero loop, and leveling up outsiders speeds up the ancient loop. And while there’s a lot about it that I like better than the original already, in its current form it’s hard to see how they’re going to give it long-term appeal.
It’s still in Early Access, and while I don’t normally play games before they release I finally tried this one out after a recent major update when I was sick and wanted something low-pressure to play. (My complaints about the fact that they needed to explain this is a separate rant.) This prompted me to pre-order Clicker Heroes 2 in support of their philosophy. The CEO of Playsaurus (the developer/publisher) put up a blog post in November 2017 explaining that Clicker Heroes 2 was a one-time purchase so that it could be a better and more ethical game. Once the game started leaning its design in this direction by adding a social element with daily responsibility, I wrote it off as (mildly) evil.īut the sequel is very specifically and purposefully avoiding this. It does a few interesting things and it’s a mostly-harmless way to pass a few minutes here and there as long as you don’t get addicted and let it become a bottomless time-sink - the problem is, it’s free-to-play with microtransactions, so the developer/publisher is incentivized to try to hook the player.
The original Clicker Heroes is one of many idle/incremental games based on a series of concentric gameplay loops that get slower as you go, intended to provide a functionally infinite treadmill of progression.