Clicker Guild is a fairly standard clicker game, but with a slight twist. Like games like Hero Clicker, you ostensibly control a group of heroes; the heroes all attack on their own, while you can upgrade yourself to improve your clicks.
Unlike many such games, the heroes you hire are actually displayed on-screen; they stand around the enemy and, rather than dealing a constant DPS, swing their weapons and deal damage when their swings connect. Adding to the complexity, they have a chance to critically hit, and unlike most such games, the enemies drop equippable items; each hero has three slots, and the item is automatically assigned to one of them when you pick them up. This adds a small element of strategy to the game – the items sometimes have slightly variable abilities, and while it is obvious that some are better than others, and they get better over time, deciding whether to prioritize, say, criticals or straight-up damage is at least one more choice than most such games have.
However, the game is still at its heart the same thing as every other clicker game; you click on enemies to deal damage, your heroes idly deal damage even when you aren’t clicking, and you have a handful of special abilities with cooldowns to temporarily boost your output of clicks or passive damage output. You can buy new heroes, or you can upgrade existing ones, and each one has a new (usually passive) ability that unlocks at levels 25, 50, 75, 100, and 150. Because of the scaling, it is mostly not really worth upgrading heroes above level 150, as the new heroes are better/more efficient and the upgrades are linear rather than quadratic, meaning that adding +1 level to your first guy is always about the same – thus, going from level 1 to 2 is a huge jump, but going from 150 to 151 is not even noticeable.
Unfortunately, like many such games, there comes a point at which you hit a brick wall and must “ascend”, restarting the game from scratch. And herein lies the rub – the game really gives you poor rewards for ascension. Like all clicker games, you gain some static boost, but in this game, the boost is very small indeed – you gain “stars”, which can be spent on permanently raising some global attributes, but the boosts are very small and the star cost is large compared to how much you get for ascending. This means that even after five ascensions, getting past the start of the fifth area (which is actually 40 levels in, as each area is split up into 10 zones, though the differences are purely aesthetic) remained basically impossible unless you waited an hour for a cooldown timer to expire. The game becomes extraordinarily grindy at that point, and it never got better, unlike other clicker games, where at least you can make additional progress after ascending.
That being said, this at least felt like a bit more than blindly clicking, though only a very marginal amount more. It still remains the same old core, bog-standard gameplay, with only very minor adjustments, and there also seemed to be a bug preventing some characters from having items spawn for them at all.
All in all, this is not something I’d suggest for general audiences to get, but if you’re a clicker fiend, this is at least a bit different while still being mostly the same.
1.5