Over the last 16 years, mobile gaming has changed significantly. From Plant vs. Zombies and Angry Birds to something almost unrecognizable. With more funds and micro-transactions being put into every game, it’s safe to say that mobile gaming is far dead compared to the competition from console and PC. One genre of mobile games I want to look into are the “Numbers Go Up” games, or what I’m going to refer to as “Maxxing Games”. I want to give a small overview of these games to help you decide if it’s worth Maxxing out or maybe .
First things first, what is a Maxxing game? While any game that has a seamlessly endless or constantly updating story could be considered to be a Maxxing game, a lot of those games use a a Powercreep (the act of making older content/supplies useless in the modern day compared to newly released content/supplies) and limited time events, I’m going to primarily avoid them and focus on games that solely focus on getting the damage or production number as high as scientifically possible. It’s important to note that most (if not all) mobile games use the same tags and mechanics that might make it harder to identify a Maxxing game such as a gacha function to get better units/characters, (Gambling) an AFK/offline feature that get you rewards even when the game is closed, and an abundance of Login/Daily Rewards to keep you coming back everyday. With this in mind, I’m going to talk about three Maxxing games that I’ve played, and my thoughts on how clear the progression was, how easy it was to prepare for the “end game,” and more.
CookieRun: Crumble – Idle RPG (CRC). Compared to the other 2 games, CRC is an infant,as the game has only been live globally for a few months. Despite that, the gameplay is fun but very repetitive, as the same “quests” pop up one after the other with the same clearing condition every time. The Gacha system for CRC is very ambitious as it’s a “Progressive Gacha”, meaning you’ll get better pulls the more in-game currency you put in. In short, this is an okay system for maybe one or two gachas… but it’s for every gacha in the game, making the game feel like it’s moving at a very controlled pace. It’s worth mentioning that the quests I mentioned before do give you currency to pull on the gachas but to level up the Progressive Gachas you need to do about 1000 pulls, making the gameplay even slower as you’re just begging for the Legendary characters that have a messily 0.7% chance of being pulled. Outside the gacha, the gameplay of your sentient gingerbread people fighting off other candy-like creatures is charming, but gets a bit dull after the 43rd time. I’ll give the game props for its abundance of login bonuses, cool character based synergy that helps to counteract Powercreep, and a generous offline system…but besides that, I’m just going to wait until the game gets more updates because despite the near endless levels and attack power the game is quite dull after a week or so.
The Tower – Idle Tower Defense is a relatively well received game, but starts to show you just how much time and attention Maxxing games need to become fun. The game is very simple: you have a tower to defend and a gun to shoot the little blocks trying to destroy your tower. The Idle part of this game comes in the form of the gun auto shooting for you, meaning you only have to worry about buying upgrades for your tower. Compared to most other games on the market, The Tower has a more “trial by fire” process with permanent upgrades you buy before every game and a limited amount of login bonuses. I’d argue that this game is the least “pay to win” out of the three, but the start of the game is very slow and doesn’t really tell you what upgrades will help you progress. Overall, The Tower is a fine game I would download if I was going on a plane ride or road trip to help keep my brain stimulated.
IdleOn – The Incremental MMO. IdleOn is the main reason why I wanted to write about Maxxing games, and I think it’s the quintessential Maxxing game. The game has you make different profiles that all share the same resources, tons of skills and items to help skyrocket your numbers, and an extremely generous AFK system. The main issue with IdleOn is just how much time you have to put into the game to make it out of the starting worlds. Even though there are only 7 worlds, they do not make it easy to beat them as each world can have up to 50 stages in them with their own different enemies, quests, challenges, etc. Another interesting point of controversy is the amount of micro-transactions the dev seems to be pushing onto the game despite saying he would make the game “Free to Play” friendly. Although the game has a ton of features and content, you have to put in a large amount of time and attention into IdleOn to get the full experience.
These are just a few of the more popular Maxxing Games that are out there, and while I understand the appeal of them I think the sheer amount of time you have to put into the games to get the most enjoyment out of it ruins the experience for me. Especially when playing CRC when I’d get bombarded with micro-transactions for everything I did, which just made the experience less enjoyable knowing that 20 dollars could just skip a week’s worth of playing. I hope to try out other Maxxing Games in the future that aren’t on mobile to see how different they are from the games I covered today.
