Idle Population

Although video games have been getting more complex in the last few years, the casual market has increased significantly as well, and it is actually larger than anyone could have anticipated, thanks to smartphones, tablets and Facebook. Hence, it’s no wonder that the industry is flooded with simple games that are mostly designed to distract people for a few minutes at a time.

Idle Population is a clicker game in which your goal is to increase your planet’s population by simply clicking as much as you can. There are upgrades that can be unlocked once you get enough people, as well as multiple planets to colonize, but it takes quite a bit of work to get there. On the other hand, the game is still in a very early development phase, so don’t expect an awful lot either.

To begin with, your starting planet is Earth, and every click grants you one man. Naturally, you can increase the reward for every click with upgrades, and it’s actually an entirely different clicker game to do so. Hence, you have to click on the upgrade button a lot in order to increase your output, but these clicks do not reward you with people as well, so it’s twice the work.

As mentioned before, the ultimate goal is to spread across the solar system and put people on multiple planets. There are not too many options in this early version of the game, but it takes a while to populate a single planet anyway. You can also focus on collecting Alpha, which is achieved by restarting the whole population in exchange for a different currency bonus.

The interface is about as basic as it gets, given the fact that all you have to do is click on the screen and watch the numbers go up. You can take a look at the map screen whenever you decide to travel to a new planet, but other than that there’s not much to look at. Many components are not done yet, so the interface feels a bit too barren at the moment.

In the end, Idle Population won’t keep you playing for hours, but it’s always nice to pursue bigger and bigger numbers in clicker games. However, it needs more content and variety to really catch you in its spell for longer than five minutes.