Coin Flipper is a decently fun clicker game considering the price. I feel a little silly about it, but I guess I'd consider myself a big fan of clicker games. I have spent thousands of hours in Cookie Clicker, and have been following the development of that game since I was a kid, so a lot of my comparisons will be made to that game. If you've never played a clicker/idle-style game, I don't believe you, they've become somewhat ubiquitous since Orteil essentially invented the genre. There's a lot of very meh idle games, especially in mobile games, and usually what sets a good one apart from the rest is good mechanics, variety, and flavor-text. There's a basic gameplay loop, where you start off manually having to click to produce resources, then you can upgrade and earn more and create automation. Costs typically scale exponentially in some varied way so that at some point your production stalls and you have to reset, wherein there are some kind of lifetime currency that accumulates between resets and allows you to upgrade your next run and make it farther. I haven't played the mobile version of this game, but I assume that it's similar to this version of the game, where it's a single purchase and there's no in-app purchases or advertising. I much prefer being able to purchase games and enjoy them without having ads or timed energy limits prompting me to pay or wait. Good on you, developer, for not following into those kinds of lame tactics. The basic gameplay loop in Coin Flipper revolves around your hand, which starts with a single magic coin that gives you another coin every time it lands on heads (or tails, you choose each run). At first you must manually click the hand to flip the coin. You can invest these coins in upgrades, like making your hands stronger so you gain more coins each successful flip, buying more hands to flip more coins (max of 21), increasing the odds of the coins landing on your chosen side, and eventually you can get into some dark magic to make boatloads of coins (self-replicating coins is probably already dark magic, and after all the weird potions and steroid injections your character has probably lost any sanity they had left anyway). I didn't really encounter any game-breaking bugs or issues, performance was good, sometimes closing the game crashes it instead - task manager fixes that. Auto-saves every 30 seconds are essentially seamless, and it seems to support Steam Cloud Save although I haven't yet tried moving my saves between devices, some people complain about that in other reviews so YMMV. Unlike other idle games that I've played, this one is interesting in that this largely relies on probability. From the very start of the game they offer a gambling mechanic, which lets you go double-or-nothing with all your coins at any time with a single click (yes you can save scum it, just watch out for 30 second autosaves). You start at nearly 50/50 odds for each coin flip (0.5% reserved for lucky coins), but you can get that to something like 98% chance with inflation upgrades, or you can alternatively go for better lucky coin chance (up to 15% I believe). Pretty much all of the upgrades have some fun flavor text that adds some variety to the world and it's decently challenging to unlock the last few buildings because of the cost scaling (there's a big price jump to get to Magic Flips). On the topic of inflation, that's the name of the reset mechanic in this game. Unlike some other games where it gets harder to earn those lifetime currencies after each reset, this game rewards you the same each time. Which is good because inflation points don't provide any direct boost to your earnings outside of spending them in the inflation menu, so it takes a few inflations to buy enough upgrades to see big improvements in earnings. There's a decent amount of inflation upgrades which alter the prices, probabilities, starting cash, etc. You can also start any run in one of four challenge modes, each of which has their own special reward. The challenge modes were fun, and I actually preferred them to those in other clicker games that I've played, but they're somewhat short-lived. The rewards were definitely worth having though aside from the one that disables auto flippers. All it gives you is a button to flip all coins, but you can only press it every 3 seconds AND only if you've disabled your auto flippers... even with the late game upgrades that give you more coins for manual flips, it's not really worth it. I guess it's mostly a reward for people who have given themselves carpel-tunnel trying to complete the challenge and who hate automation. You can do a good amount of automation in this game, and I recommend that approach. Auto-clickers are less effective since you can only click each hand once per second or so, but the automation build into the game works perfectly. Upgrade a little bit, put it in the background while you work on other things, and then come back and upgrade. Offline idling works well enough and isn't walled behind anything besides auto-flippers. Like other games in this genre, leaving it idling for super long periods doesn't yield a ton because of the cost scaling. If you're struggling to get up to the next tier of upgrade, idling for a bit and letting your wealth accumulate can help you get there. Going up tiers increases your earnings a lot (the next tier may be 10x the cost but 30x the performance), so usually it's worth saving up for. There's diminishing returns in buying lots of any one tier, I'd usually only buy 10 or so, and there's no reason to buy earlier-tier upgrades once you've moved past them. Now we're getting into the cons a little bit. This game is short. Unlike Cookie Clicker where buildings have synergies and work together to produce more cookies than either could produce on their own, you end up leaving a lot of that behind with each upgrade. There's not a lot of achievements, and the achievements are pretty straightforward, kinda boring. I love the art in Cookie Clicker, and the whole thing is crammed full of jokes and lore and secrets, that game has a lot of character and a lot of varied strategy. Coin Flipper is comparatively lacking in these areas. I've now finished the game in under 100 hours, and I have no more reason to return and play it again unless it is updated with new content. I feel like this was a really good start to a game, and I wished that there was just a bit more content, maybe some different mechanics could breathe new life into it. It seemed like there was a foundation of jokes and lore that could have been expanded more, there could easily be more upgrades, but it seems like the developer has simply moved on. Maybe they're trying to diversify and work on a lot of ideas to see what sticks in a landscape that's already decently saturated, to find something they really want to work on and polish to perfection? Or maybe they will abandon their other projects as easily as this one, leaving behind their potential. Overall it's a decent short game, 3/5, I'd recommend it on sale if you enjoy this kind of game. I got 80 hours out of it before getting all the achievements, that's easily worth a dollar. If you're undecided you could always flip a coin.
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