Click and Conquer is a new incremental game from Sockhouse Studios. In this game you drop explosives into a foggy field all in the hopes of eliminating targets! Haphazardly uncover the enemies while blow them up!
The World of Explosives at the Click of a Mouse!
You start out with only four explosives in your arsenal while exploring a 4x4 grid map. There are four enemies lurking within the fog; try your best to hide from them. During my first playthrough I was unable to locate the enemies, so I did not progress in the game. You can purchase upgrades by earning money from hitting a target. The map resets when you have dropped all your explosives or eliminated all targets on the field. For me, as soon as I had hit a few targets, the first upgrade I purchased was the passive income. This feature enabled me to continue earning money even when I failed to hit all the targets. The game offers a meta-progression, referred to as prestige, and a regular upgrade tree. Each map has a level which increases after a certain number of targets are eliminated. The levels are useful when purchasing the upgrade that will increase the passive income based on each maps level.
The prestige tree requires tokens, which are earned by destroying special targets. This requires you to purchase an upgrade to unlock a chance of the tokens to spawn. There are further upgrades increasing the likelihood of them spawning. Initially, you can store only 3 tokens between prestiges, but each map you purchase increases this capacity. My favorite part about this game is that the tokens cannot be acquired from idling; you have to actively play the maps to earn them.
The upgrades available in the prestige tree offer a limited range of options. The common one being increasing money earned either by per target destroyed or increasing the percentage of the passive income. The most useful as first is the increased number and radius of explosives, keeping all previous non-prestige upgrade purchases, and the chance for tokens to spawn. Some of the prestige upgrades, in my opinion, should have been made available later, as they significantly influenced the game’s initial outcome. It no longer became about trying to accurately hit all the targets and more about just spamming the explosives, brute-forcing my way through the progress. Let alone, I only played the last two maps when I was trying to acquire the last upgrade. In the the last bit, of the game all the tokens were used for is to increase my passive income and amount per eliminated target. This was because the last upgrade was exponentially more expensive to get.
The non-prestige upgrades offer similar forms of purchases, with one exception being the passive income. There is not much to mention here, as it’s straightforward: you need money to purchase the upgrade. Each upgrade has a max number of times it can be bought, but purchasing maps unlocks further upgrades. Unless you are blitzing your way through maps, you will more than likely have purchased the upgrades before getting to the next map. Each map will offer an increased grid space, an increased number of enemies, and a chance for stronger enemies to spawn.
Verdict
The game is available on Steam with a demo if you want to try it out. I feel that the game was fun to play, as the setting made it interesting. I appreciated the ending that explains war always follows more war in a never-ending cycle. I do wish that there was more to do in the game or more variety in upgrades, but this seems to be a shorter idle game. The developer has been adding different language options in the game, so they are active in the development of the game. I am interested to see if the developer adds more or does another idle game!
