I started playing Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms three and a half years ago, and having ticked off 99% of the achievements there's not a huge amount left to do in there. I still hop on, particularly for the monthly events to unlock new characters, but not religiously, so I was poking around for some other options. Doctor Who: Lost in Time popped up in the Play Store, I thought I'd give that a look being a bit of a fan.
Frankly, it's not great. The artwork is nice, pleasing cartoon renderings of various doctors, companions and monsters; they pop up in little chunks of story as you progress rather like a comic chopped into three panel strips. Some of the stories are quite fun, others don't really seem to capture the voice of the characters, they're all pretty incidental. The gameplay itself is standard idle clicker; tap on a thing to collect currency to upgrade a thing to produce more currency to unlock another thing producing yet more currency, eventually automating the collecting so you can wander off and watch telly while it ticks along. There's a bit of obfuscation with different types of resources and currencies but very little in the way of compelling challenges. Needless to say you can fork out real cash for virtual trinkets to boost your progress, or watch adverts to be grudgingly thrown a few free scraps. If you're sitting there thinking "you know, I just haven't seen enough adverts for Temu in the last seventeen seconds" this might be just the game you're looking for, although psychological help may be a better long term investment.
There've been plenty of games I've played for a few hours to get an idea of key mechanisms, usually some sort of puzzle, resource collection, or turn based combat with endless layers of gacha upgrades. A few I played for longer, where the monetisation wasn't too obnoxious. Where they hit a sweet spot of cash items being a useful little boost without unbalancing things I've actually spent a bit; Marvel Puzzle Quest and Idle Champions are a couple that I've played for years and spent a few quid here and there. They have cash shop options for frankly ludicrous amounts of real money, and tuck rewards away in chests/packs with random content, but don't feel overly coercive about it all in the grand scheme of things. Most importantly a free player doesn't feel especially disadvantaged. Idle Champions has no competitive aspect so it really doesn't matter what other players are doing; MPQ does have a form of PvP, and PvE rewards based on leaderboards, but in both cases they're primarily dependent on time, so you just need to make peace with never cracking the Top 10 unless you make it your sole life mission.
Progress in Lost in Time is dramatically accelerated by spending money, a very direct connection with leaderboard results in events. It frequently shoves adverts and 'offers' at you, and there isn't much in the way of interesting decisions to take. I can't really see any compelling reason to keep playing, and yet... I have been. Certainly not spending money, and I'm not sure I'll keep going once I find something else, but there's something there. I guess making numbers go up just scratches some sort of itch.
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