I don’t often feel shame playing a video game. Getting an easy 1000G on Avatar: Burning Earth was probably the pinnacle. But somewhere in the Top 10 of most shameful gaming experiences is my love for idle games. I know that they’re barely games, I know that I spend more time away from the controller than I do with it in my hands. But there’s something that makes me rub my hands together with glee when they appear on the store. Then I’ll look around to make sure nobody’s watching.
It’s probably the MMO blood in my veins. There’s something inherently satisfying about watching numbers go up, particularly if I’ve done very little in the way of work to make them that way. And it’s even more satisfying when those numbers are exponential, as the computer can barely keep up with the increases. It’s the thrill of pressing that prestige button, and watching the multipliers kick in.
Which explains why I gave a little yelp when DPS Idle appeared on the store. Not only is this a pure idle game – none of those genre mash-ups like Totally Accurate Battle Simulator – but it’s free. Gloriously, completely free. We prepared to ‘play’ it (inverted commas needed) for an entire weekend.
The first impressions are a bit rubbish, really. Idle games are rarely pretty, but DPS Idle seems proud of how ugly it is. It’s horrendously upscaled from what looks like a 486 PC. The sprite art is blurry, lacking in detail and the cards across the bottom of the screen are barely legible. Tab to the various game screens, and there’s a hodgepodge of art styles – some interfaces look like they’ve come from vintage RPG, others a mobile gambling app – that makes this a true mess.
It feels like it’s missing the basics, too. There’s no screen with your telemetry, the nuts and bolts of how you’re making your cash. That’s a bizarre miss, as it can be difficult to know exactly where your money or DPS is coming from. And there’s no tutorial or explanations of basic concepts. We know that we’re poisoning enemies, but we’re damned if we know what that means.
But idle games are notorious for being clunky, so we embraced the clunk. And, for at least the first couple of hours, the embrace was a warm and reassuring one.
In DPS Idle, the aim is to ramp up your damage-per-second, as you might expect, so that you can take down an assortment of beasties. You can tab through these creatures with a press of the left and right d-pad buttons, and you will soon come to those that aren’t beatable – yet. You might start with the mundane boar or frog at the start of the bestiary, farming them for cash and some resources. But soon the law of diminishing returns applies: kill them enough, and their health increases to the point that they’re not worth fighting any more. So you move to the next creature and the next.
DPS Idle has a cracking idea to combat the grind. Using your cash, you can open chests. These chests are like booster packs in a CCG. You gain cards, and those cards have effects. If you haven’t received that card before, then it slots into your library. If you have, then you gain some resources, which can be cashed in for random upgrades to your cards. The aim is clearly to give you something useful, no matter how small, from every chest opening.
Soon, you build up a deck of these cards, and their various abilities – flat DPS increases, % multipliers on DPS, that inscrutable poison – synergise to create a total DPS score. That’s what munches through your enemies, generating you more cash, and the circle is complete. You keep on farming cards to raise DPS to stick heads on spikes. It’s a loop that’s claimed many hours of idle gamers’ free time.
It’s pretty damn moreish, and for the first moments of the game we were smitten. There’s a delight in opening a chest, seeing the swirling cards pop out and then land in place. You’re hoping that you gain a new one, rather than a pitiful resource, and soon the library of cards becomes complete. Then you ‘prestige’ the cards, choosing one to make Silver or Gold (powering them up and keeping them forevermore) and losing the rest. The next round of card-gathering continues, but this time you’re more powerful.
It’s got its downsides, we will freely admit. You are at the whims of RNG, hoping that THIS card will be the one you need, and there’s no mitigation in place to help you. You can’t buy that missing card, you can’t increase your luck in getting it. You have to hope, and often that’s not enough. There’s also a weird loophole where the one resource you need to prestige your cards is also the one you get from duplicate cards, which means it’s entirely possible to get stuck without the resource you need to prestige, since you are unable to open any more chests. It’s an odd oversight.
Still, it’s ambrosia to idle game nerds. And the ambrosia doesn’t stop there: DPS Idle layers on another tier of prestiging. You can not only prestige your cards but your character itself. If you reach a point where the kills just aren’t coming any more, you can choose to align with a guild and then abandon said guild, which gives you a multiplier for the next runthrough of the game. Suddenly, we could prestige in two different directions and the dopamine was real.
Hold up there, because now comes an almighty BUT. The prestiging doesn’t work, not properly. In the haste to bring DPS Idle to console, someone has neglected to test what happens when you abandon your guild. The multipliers you receive for a run don’t stack on those that you already have: they delete them and replace them. Not only is it entirely possible to lose progress rather than gain it, but you will get stuck at about the twelfth creature and fail to progress any further. There’s no exponential growth, allowing you to beat the ultra-beasts. Getting the big numbers is where the idle game joy resides, and DPS Idle’s big numbers don’t actually work. Therein lies a honking great problem.
We felt deflated. We’d been given a taste of what DPS Idle might be like as we moved through the guilds, heroes, potions and beasts of its progression track, only for it to pull up the shutters and stick a ‘closed’ sign on the front. In idle game terms, it just doesn’t work.
Being a true addict, we tried to bypass the problem by throwing cash at it. We bought a gem pack and a starter pack – but then we got clubbed by issue number two. The gem pack didn’t register, but the money was taken anyway. So, we were left with a broken game and a wodge of cash missing from our bank account. Serves us right, we suppose.
We can’t wave the red flag fast and hard enough: DPS Idle is not ready to play – not by a long shot. Its progression is broken, and – more heinously – the purchases aren’t working either. It might be worth trying as a demo for ‘what might be’, once fixes have been applied, but it’s otherwise a waste of time. Some people would say that about idle games as a whole but, in this instance, they’d be right.
