Fun concept. The four elements don't seem very balanced imo. Fire is by far the most useful and nothing even comes close. Lightning requires nonstop active play which is annoying. Rock is pretty bad in every aspect, and ice is kind of ok but either requires an autoclicker, the fire path already upgraded, or for it to be near maxed for it to have any use. I was hoping to unlock everything by the end but only managed to have maxed fire and partially maxed ice at the end. In the 3rd region, the elements aren't very strong and the game drags unless active play with an autoclicker is used. I think if 2 elemental points were given instead of 1 then I don't think it would be over powered and it would give more freedom to idle play of the game.
I know the game is still early in development but something needs to be done to help the idle aspect of this game. A good potential fix for this would be to have an autoclicker upgrade that works on large items. I think the autoclicker needs more buffs. even with everything maxed the idle gains are extremely small compared to just clicking a few large items. The autoclicker could be buffed x2 and that would help but I'm not even sure if that would make a dent.
I'm think 90% of my idle gains are just from the fire element and nothing else. the autoclicker helped a little at the end, but seemed minimal in the 3rd region until almost all upgrades were purchased
Some of the missions are unbalanced and it was extremely annoying having to keep my game open in previous regions for multiple hours so I could unlock QoL upgrades that should have been in the game way sooner. Having to farm the upgrade to keep bottle/plate/mug upgrades was a nightmare and needs to be looked at because I was already in the 3rd region before I got it finished and having to spam buy all each reset was horrible.
I think there should be a "buy all" button on the main screen that I can click and have every available upgrade bought would be great (excluding hammer upgrades). This game feels more like a menu clicking simulator where each run has 90% of the time spent clicking between different item menu upgrades and then 10% of the time chilling to get more hammers at the end before another reset. The buy all button should be unlocked a lot sooner as well or should just be given at the start of the game.
I do like a lot of aspects of the game. I appreciate the cosmetic currency being abundant and able to be used for game skips. Most of the backgrounds make it hard to see things so I think they could be updated. Everything except the starting one and the sky one are unusable imo but maybe that's just me.
Everything else about the game is captivating and has relatively good balance. This game could be great if some of the above things get addressed in future development. I'd say currently this game starts out as a strong 8/10 and in the third region I'd probably rate it as a 5/10 due to the above.
I know this review sounds negative, but I wanted to provide input on things that this game could improve on. I really enjoyed my time playing it and look forward to it's future development.
Viewing post in Smashing Simulator Idle comments
Hey, thanks for the lenghty review, though most of these things are intentional design decisions.
The element tree is split between idle (fire/stone) and active (lightning/ice) elements, encouraging mixing, for example using fire to smash ice. It's not meant to be fully purchasable. I will look into having stone being more on par with fire though.
Not planning on having an auto smasher for big objects, since the point of idling is to earn less, and you can get a good chunk of big objects with the elements anyway, but.
This game is primarily on mobile, so it's designed around more active play with idle kept in mind.
For the third region, yeah, they're not very useful yet since there aren't enough upgrades, they are more used to slow down the objects and then smashing them with the elements, but yeah there'll be a x1.5 damage upgrade.
The bottle/plate/combo/mug upgrade is not meant to be completed fast or farmed, it's more like a reward for those who play really idle or just achieved after some time.
Partly agree with the menu clicking comment, there's auto buyers coming in the next update and overall future upgrades should require you to check the shop less. Just adding a general buy max button wouldn't really work since that'd just make the player not look at what they're buying and some upgrades are more useful than others.
There's a background dim setting and a setting for changing the smash text color - see if that helps.
Editing this because I thought more about the mission - will update it so it's a bit faster.