There have only been two games in my life where I’ve ever had to forcibly quit because I was so hopelessly addicted to them. One is Diablo 3, Blizzard’s ARPG that has just sold over 30 million copies.
The other is Clicker Heroes, a web browser game.
Now, Clicker Heroes has finally made its debut on
The game is deceptively simple. At its lowest levels, you click monsters, they die, you earn gold. You move on to harder monsters, which require more clicking, and they die. You spend your gold to upgrade various ”heroes” which add to either your click damage (now tap damage) or your general DPS (how much damage is automatically done to monsters per second).
The goal is well, infinite. Eventually, after you beat a 100 or so worlds, you can “ascend” and start all over. But then you get a new type of currency that allows you to buy “ancients” which have special abilities, like increasing the frequency of gold-laden treasure chests, or increasing the damage you do when you don’t click, and just let DPS run its course.
At higher levels, the game becomes in exercise in exponential math. When you start, 1000 damage and 10,000 gold seems like a lot. But as you progress, able to race through early levels more quickly, the numbers start being so high they don’t even fit on the screen, and have to be reduced to symbols alone. 100 quadrillion damage ends up being rather low, in the grand scheme of things.
The PC version
High level Clicker Heroes players have discussions about which heroes to upgrade most, or which ancients to focus on for maximum efficiency. It’s as simple game that can easily turn into a cult if you get sucked into it enough.
And it’s absolutely perfect for mobile.
I wrote an article last year called “Why Clicker Heroes Could Be The Top Mobile Game Of 2015,” and I stand by that statement now that I’ve been playing the long-awaited mobile port all morning on iOS.
Here’s what I said last year about the game’s potential on mobile:
“The game encourages both active and passive play. You can sit there all day long clicking away (or in mobile’s case, tapping), or you can simply let your DPS auto-kill monsters, which allows you to check in periodically to spend your pile of gold on upgrades. It’s a perfect blend of active participation that begs for constant tapping (Flappy Bird) while also making players wait for upgrades as they save up resources (Clash of Clans). And it’s hopelessly addictive, perhaps the most notable hallmark of any top mobile game. The only problem is that a complete lack of time gates (seemingly a good thing) means it would be an enormous battery life-killer in its current form for the obsessed. And they would indeed have to figure out a way to monetize it, whether that would be introducing microtransactions or in-game ads.”
And monetize it they have, but in a way that doesn’t seem terribly obnoxious. The game is still free, and there are no obtrusive ads. Rather, like many mobile games, Clicker Heroes now sells “gems.” Gems buy temporarily boosts to abilities or gold, or you can permanently double your DPS if you have enough of them, a very significant upgrade. To do that once costs the equivalent of $5, and yet, you can earn gems on your own by completing in-game challenges, such as number of clicks (taps) or total amount of gold collection. The earn rate is (very) slow, but it’s still possible, which makes it better than many other games that use the same system.
I’m currently stuck at lower levels because there’s simply no faster way to progress this early in the game, so I can’t speak about “endgame” related content all that much (and apparently there's some sort of new clan functionality as well). But for now, the port is pretty excellent, and I was happy to see it does still have "constant play" where gold will collect itself even if you're not around to scoop it up. In this genre, there have been a lot of imitators that have hit the market since Clicker Heroes became popular on PC, but none hold a candle to this official adaptation.
I do believe if it catches on, this could be the next big thing in mobile. But the mobile market is notoriously hard to predict, and anything but logical, so who knows. Still, it’s something to keep an eye on, and you should definitely give it a try for yourself and see if become as hooked as I am.
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