Mobile Friday this week is Cat Snack Bar, a game that's out across iOS and Android app stores by treeplla.
This is a game that had been advertised to me in a few games and i was curious if it was actually as cute and fun looking as those videos showed. i had an idea that it might be an idle game, but no idea how it would go about doing that.
Starting it for the first time, it became quite clear how it was going to work. there is an option to buy red crystal/ruby gem things, but the game's main push is for you to watch adverts. whilst it's nice that it's not recommending/pushing purchases, what's not great is how little reward there seems to be to watch an advert. for example, when you watch an advert you get 5 minutes of double earnings. in other games i play that is 4 hours of double earnings.
another thing that becomes clear quickly is that the game gets grindy quicker than other idle games i've played. a while ago i checked out Star Trek: Lower Decks: The Badgey Directive, https://youtu.be/5rA9Fb4SVhI, and that video is much longer than this one. that game didn't start to feel grindy until near the end of the hour. Plus, that game is also telling a story so it was nice to stop and read the story. in Cat Snack Bar, i started feeling the grind by the third stage of the first area. the first two were done in around 10 minutes, but after 20 the third stage was maybe half way there. the first area had a further 4 stages.
It does look good and cute, the colors are bold and the designs work. for picking up and playing for a few minutes it's fine. but the game's poor music, loud sound effects, and immediate grind do work against it. i feel like the first area needs rebalancing to get players to the main goal, to the thing that was highlighted in adverts and in treeplla's own videos, they need to get players to the first big shop where we, the player, can see and watch the cats in action all at once. but until then, the grind is the main thing holding back the game for now.