Despite its shortcomings, we recommend you give Summoner’s Greed a try. It is a decent idle tower defense game, one that idle veterans might not enjoy due to the slow pace, but still one that is worth trying. It features cute monsters, each with their own unique abilities, and it does not really push the microtransactions as heavily as other Gacha titles on the app store.

Gameplay

Roles are reversed in Summoner’s Greed, you will be putting monsters on guard in this Idle Tower Defense game as enemies make their way through from the top of the screen down towards your treasure chest. Every monster is unique, some have high single-target damage while others do area damage or slow enemies down.

With 87 different monsters to unlock, upgrade, and experiment with, there are endless combinations and arrangements that you can place them in. Every time you clear a wave for the first time, you will get a summoning stone. These summoning stones are used to pull monsters, just hope that you get lucky!

Monetization

Something that we noticed over and over is that the advertisements may not seem worth watching as the rewards offered are often not enticing enough to justify the time spent. But the advertisements, while “optional” are just as bad as forced advertisements because of how they are introduced.

At the same time, the game’s Gacha mechanics, where players use summoning stones to acquire monsters is very unpredictable in nature, as you are never sure about your rewards. Players may find themselves spending real money in hopes of obtaining rare or powerful monsters, without any guarantee.

Content

As far as content is concerned, we have different maps, plenty of monsters, and quite a few charms. Players who do not get bored of the slow grind will love Summoner’s Greed as it provides a somewhat linear progression with the occasional wall you need to break past.

Depending on how active of a player you are, it might take you months to finish all the maps in Summoner’s Greed, there are seasonal events as well, with monsters that can only be unlocked during their event.

Summoner’s Greed is a great pick for players who want to keep the game running alongside their routine work, the slow progress makes it a fun title to Pomodoro your way through chores and to-do lists.

We initially covered this game as part of our list of the best Idle Tower Defense games, and this game provides you with exactly what it advertises. A beautiful presentation of idle TD elements combined with a standard merge game. You are defending a dragon sitting atop a tower as enemies spawn and make their way towards it.

Gameplay

During the early game, you will be manually selecting targets for the dragon to attack. Soon after though, you will unlock the auto attack toggle which will let you finish battles without having to invest any time yourself. Unfortunately, you still need to manually start the battles to progress through the game.

You need to beat missions in the main campaign to unlock other parts as well, these include the wharf, events, your town, as well as additional units, heroes, and dragons. Here’s what everything does:

• Island – This place acts as your “home”, kind of. We thought the home would be the tower you are spending so much time defending, but apparently not. The island is where all the menus are hidden away behind buildings,
  • The Academy is where you view cards of all the monsters in the game.
  • The Mailbox is where you get random gifts and rewards from events.
  • The Shop is where you spend your hard-earned dollars on microtransactions.
  • There’s a few more, but the Wharf deserves its own bullet point.
• Wharf – There are some games out there which let you send out a party of units on expeditions. These units can bring back rewards and other bounty if the expedition is successful. The Wharf is exactly that, you have boats, you send the boats out on expeditions to bring you back loot.
• Events – In some other party-based idle games, you have dungeons where you can send your party off to for rewards and bonuses. These events are very similar in nature and design as well. With scaling difficulty and generous rewards, you’ll have fun until you hit a wall.

Monetization

You might not like what we have to say about this, but we didn’t really have a problem with the way monetization works in North Tower. For the most part, things were pretty standard, like a no-ads package and some QoL in exchange for loyalty in the shape of VIP rewards.

Unfortunately, there is a lot of RNG involved when rolling cards and you might get some unlucky streaks in the process. We generally dislike Gacha mechanics but in our experience we did not feel limited by the game’s monetization practices at all. It’s a game meant to be played when you’re on a break and it’s best you keep it for that. The offline progression is also fairly limited for new players, to only two hours of away-earnings, you are incentivized to keep checking the game throughout the day, something we don’t particularly like or approve of.

Content

We already discussed most of North Tower’s content in our gameplay section, but we skipped talking about the Merge mechanics until now so we can delve into them further.

The game’s merge mechanics are fairly straight forward, you pull additional units by using gold. The gold is earned as a reward for missions, events, and as an idle currency. But the costs scale up much faster than your idle earnings so if you have come to North Tower in hopes to find a merge game then look elsewhere.

North Tower has incredible graphics, a wide selection of content, but the game feels unpolished.

If you’re looking for an idle game with tower defense elements then look no further, Idle Monster TD is exactly the game you should try. It offers a steady progression curve combined with very f2p friendly monetization practices. New players will easily find themselves progressing through the early game and figure out the mechanics fairly quickly as well.

Different Maps, Different Bonuses

While the game does offer a vast range of maps for you to play on, which one you go with ultimately depends on what your goals are. For example, the default Enchanted Forest has a very generous 20% bonus to prestige points, so the Enchanted Forest is a decent map if you are planning on pushing your prestige bonuses in rapid succession.

On the other hand, if you are trying to push in tournaments, Snowfall might be a more attractive option since it has a significant bonus to your DPS while also slowing down enemies, effectively providing you with two multipliers to your damage dealing capabilities during a wave.

Pulling Monsters is Free

Monsters are your towers but despite the Gacha-like system of pulling monsters with varying rarities and being able to upgrade them if you collect enough cards, the game is incredibly generous with the currency you use to pull monsters. Not only do you get the currency for free when progressing through the game, but you can also farm it up by prestiging and replaying through the waves.

All it takes is time, but that’s why we play idle games in the first place, right? In other games that we have tried, the summoning currencies are kept very scarce by design. This is done to either force players into microtransactions, or to ensure that they cannot progress beyond certain points without a considerable investment of time, but we found no evidence of such artificial barriers when playing Idle Monster TD.

Content Depth

As far as content depth is concerned, we found absolutely nothing to complain about. The game has multiple layers of progression which is always welcome in an idle game, here’s the few we noticed during the first couple of hours our gameplay:

• Monsters – Monsters require energy to pull, you gain energy by progressing through the waves and through daily rewards.
• Artifacts – Every ten waves you can unlock a new artifact, advanced tiers unlock as you progress through the game.
• Research – You can also spend energy on upgrades on the research menu, higher tiers of upgrades require gems to unlock but you get a healthy sum from daily challenges anyway.
• Prestige Points – You earn prestige points by starting over, then you invest these points into various upgrades.
• Tech – Progressing through the tech tree need tech points (scrolls) to unlock, you can earn these by beating necromancers that you unlock at wave 400.
• Tournament – Tournaments have their own separate upgrades that you can invest in, you only earn these points by participating in tournaments.

There are a bunch of other upgrades as well, including some active skills as well as a wide range of premium upgrades as well, but the game’s content itself is completely accessible to free and premium players alike

With the perfect marriage of the Tower Defense genre with an incremental experience, The Tower provides a slow upward journey towards bigger numbers and higher doses of dopamine for you to enjoy. This game combines a minimalist art style with equally simple mechanics to provide you with an experience that traditional tower defense “idle games” simply can’t replicate.

Gameplay

The Tower focuses on providing you with a simple tower defense game where enemies can spawn from all edges of the screen and make their way towards the single central tower. Your health, damage, and everything else that you can imagine relies on this single entity in the middle of the screen that you must defend with all your might.

By avoiding the use of multiple towers, the developers have created yet another example of the age old phenomenon that when you limit yourself to a narrower scope, you end up creating a far better product than you would otherwise have built, more constraints lead to better innovation. Twitter used to be an excellent example of this with their limited tweet length but sadly we can’t use that as an example anymore.

Back to The Tower, the game has two core mechanics upgrade mechanics that new players will unlock fairly quickly. The Workshop and The Research Lab. By earning coins, players can purchase upgrades through the workshop, these upgrades are the same as the regular upgrades you purchase during a run, except that they essentially give you a head start without actually increasing the cost of upgrades in a run itself. Sounds confusing? Don’t worry, we’ll get you a guide for it.

The Research Lab also plays a crucial role, utilizing earned coins to unlock upgrades. Each upgrade requires a certain amount of time to complete, forcing you to eventually just put the game down as you wait for researches to finish. These upgrades serve to unlock new features and provide multipliers to existing attributes like damage and attack speed. Moreover, players can also invest in upgrades that accelerate the game speed, letting you get a sense of accomplishment as you watch enemies move faster towards your tower to destroy it.

In-App Purchases in The Tower

The Tower does make use of a Gacha mechanic, to give you cards that you can equip to power up your runs – but these cards can easily be obtained by watching the in-game advertisements. There is also a microtransaction to permanently remove all advertisements from the game, which is a great way to both save your time while also helping the developers make some extra cash upfront.

There is no need to purchase any other packs or diamonds from the store, but doing so will significantly speed up your progress.

Keep in mind that because of how idle games work, you are making the various walls and hurdles easier by purchasing these bonuses, especially the multipliers. So a 2x bonus will effectively make all progress twice as fast, halving the time you spend farming up coins for your bonuses.

Have you ever played those old-school text-based idle games that have an incredible level of depth? No? Well there’s no reason to play them now that CIFI is here. When it comes to idle games, CIFI is one that you find yourself playing for a very long time. It is currently our favorite game to play and has managed to peak our interest enough to write about it!

Developed by the amazing team at Octocube Games, the makers of ISEPS.

Much Slower Pace

CIFI is a slow-paced idle game that manages to keep you hooked with the ridiculous depth of content that it provides. Progressing through the game, you will unlock mechanics with enough thought put into them to be their own separate idle game, but this depth comes at a cost: one that will keep you farming for days before your next prestige.

Unlike traditional games that revolve around hitting that prestige button as soon as possible, in CIFI you are rewarded for longer runs by built-in mechanics that boost your rewards the longer you stay away from that prestige button. Succeeding in CIFI is all about finding a balance between long and short runs, prioritizing the bonuses you pick in each run, and planning your short runs days in advance.

In-App Purchases

You will not find any forced advertisements in the game, you can watch ads to receive tokens, diamonds, or a resource boost. Unfortunately, the game is balanced around the assumption that you will purchase the No-Ads package along with the auto-clickers if you have any plans to seriously progress through the game. The tokens you receive from the yellow chests provide multiplicative bonuses to almost every aspect of the game itself, and the daily diamonds you can collect will let you purchase the countless premium packages in the diamond shop.

At first glance, the game may seem pay-to-win with so many bundles and packages, but all you really need are the auto-clicker bundles which you unlock after purchasing the no-adds bundle.

Keep in mind that CIFI developers have stated that you are allowed to set up your own autoclicker for collecting the chests since the total number of chests you can get per day is fixed anyway.

Do We Recommend CIFI?

Absolutely! It’s an idle game that requires strategic thinking, planning, and patience. It’s not just about clicking to gather resources and increase your resource generation rates. CIFI inherits the basic concept of idle games but takes it up a few notches. The incremental mechanics are not monotonous, they continually evolve, and provide players with a brand new discovery as soon as something starts getting old.

Here’s what we love about CIFI:

• Amazing depth to its mechanics
• No recurring monetization rip-offs
• Developers who love their community
• Frequent updates (sometimes too frequent!)
• As addictive as Factorio

Posts & Guides about CIFI

Here are the various posts and guides that we have written about CIFI, with more to come in the future!

Have you ever wanted to play an idle game that takes resource management and decision making to the next level? Idle Kingdom Clicker is exactly that. Unfortunately, this game is only available on Android so iOS users will be missing out on this experience.

Here’s what the game features:

• Resource Production & Transport Logistics.
• Managing & Planning your priorities.
• Unlocking New Mechanics as you progress through the game.

Replayability

Idle Kingdom Clicker keeps introducing new mechanics and resources through its elaborate research tree as you progress through the game, this ensures that you’re not always doing the same thing in every prestige. There are also several maps to play on, each with far better bonuses than the previous one.

While in some games, this would mean that the older map becomes obsolete, that’s not the case in Idle Kingdom Clicker. You’re encouraged to return to older maps to complete them properly and unlock global bonuses to your progression. These global bonuses are often enough to push yourself past some walls.

Advertisements

The game does not have any forced advertisements, unfortunately the only option to remove advertisements requires a payment every 7 days. The game is still playable and enjoyable without paying for this, so only pick this up if you really want to support the game’s lack of development.

In-App Purchases

The game utilizes a loot-box system where you can purchase Tool Chests with the in-game currency (diamonds) and get a somewhat reliable number of boosters from said chests, you can save these up for when you need them.

Stuck? Check out our Beginner’s Guide for Idle Kingdom Clicker