MiniHeroes

I downloaded MiniHeroes with low expectations, figuring it for an idle game to tap at while waiting for dinner, because it's hard to think anything else when you see a bunch of bug-eyed potatoes. The first eight minutes went by very smoothly, but on my tenth hunt a line in the corner of the screen said I didn't have enough Hunt Orders, and suddenly the whole map had nothing left to do.

The first eight minutes fly by, then the game runs out of things to tap

The game opens with a short character creator: you pick male or female, a helmet, an outfit and a skin tone for your potato, then tap Start Adventure. For the name, the game picks a random English phrase for you, mine was PeeledLychee741, and there's a dice button next to it to reroll if you don't like it.

The intro has your character waking up in the middle of a forest with a groan of pain, before a knight named Entos runs over and says the King sent him to help. After a few more lines of dialogue you're dropped straight onto the Green Meadow map, and from then on the game has more or less one button worth pressing.

How a hunt on the Green Meadow goes

The biggest button at the bottom of the screen is called Hunt, and every tap spends one Hunt Order. Your character runs off to another spot on the map with Entos in tow, and a pack of monsters appears right around where you stop.

From that moment you don't have to do anything, because the two sides fight on their own, yellow damage numbers keep floating up and the monsters drop one by one. When the fight ends, the left corner shows your rewards, usually Gold Coins ×5 and Hero EXP ×5, plus a few green drops on the ground for you to pick up.

That's the whole core loop, and to be fair, it's exactly what an idle game should do. You tap once and sit back. There's no dodging to watch for and no skills to press.

The monsters here come in good numbers. At times I counted five or six surrounding me at once, wild boars and green slugs alike. They don't chase you out of their area, so every fight wraps up within seconds.

Entos is with you from the start, and the other four slots are locked tight

Tap the Heroes section and you get a row of five slots: the first holds Entos with his axe and shield, and the other four all show a padlock. Right below the character are two skill slots, one Attack and one Passive, both starting at level one.

What I liked is how clearly Entos's stats are laid out. Health, attack, defense and speed sit in a row right under his picture. He's also tagged as a Tank, and that tag tells you up front that your squad will need someone to deal damage later on.

I couldn't upgrade the two skill slots in my first session. They're there, lit up, but the game hasn't opened that part yet. The Challenge and Campaign entries in the navigation bar were the same: tapping them didn't change the screen at all.

What you're short of is Hero EXP, not gold

Upgrading Entos costs fifty Hero EXP each time, meaning the green drops you pick up on the map, not gold coins. I poured everything I'd picked up into him and took him from level one to level five in about a minute.

In return his power rating jumped from forty-five to one hundred ninety, his health rose to one hundred eighty-three and his attack to seventy-three. The level cap for the Tank tag is twenty, so you can picture how many more green drops it'll take to get there.

Gold kept rising steadily, yet I couldn't find anything that really needed it, at least in my first session. You start with a hundred diamonds when you create your character, and that's the currency the game will invite you to top up later on.

The Chests section sits right next to the hunt button, and the name says it all. The publisher describes the game as chest-opening combined with role-playing, so that must be the other half of the game. My first session never got that far, because the beginner tutorial keeps you at the monster hunting.

Where the game makes you get up and go do something else

Hunt Orders are the only thing holding you back, and you start with just ten of them. Use all ten and the Hunt button stays lit, but the game says you don't have enough, the counter next to the button sits at zero, and you have to wait for it to refill.

Yet the game's very first quest is to hunt ten times, so you burn through your Hunt Orders before you realize how precious they are. Claim that reward and you get three hundred Hero EXP, the next quest asks you to bring a hero to level five, and by then there's nothing left to tap.

This is the familiar idle-game squeeze, which doesn't block you with a hard level but with a clock. Fights are quick and tidy, but you only get a few of them a day, and most of the remaining time is spent waiting.

What stings is knowing you still have things to do and being unable to do them. Your hero is waiting to level up, you're short on green drops, and the only way to get more is to go hunting. That loop only opens again once your Hunt Orders have refilled.

Three speed levels and the real number behind each

The VipMod mod has exactly three options, and all three are speed-ups. We didn't make invincibility or one-hit kills for this game, because those calculations happen somewhere we can't reach. Better to say so plainly than to sell an empty name.

Turning it on is quick. In the game there's a red octagonal MOD button on the left edge. Tap it to bring up the control panel, flip the switch for the level you want, then close the game and open it again.

To find out how much faster each level really is, I timed it in the middle of hunting on the map and counted the game's own update rate. With everything off, the game runs at about fifty-three updates per second, and that's the baseline for comparing the three levels.

The ×2 level brings that number up to one hundred five, which is 1.97 times as fast. The ×4 level gives two hundred eight updates, 3.9 times, and the ×8 level gives four hundred six, or 7.6 times as fast.

Those three numbers are clearly different, so whichever box you pick, you get exactly that level, not three names for the same speed. All three levels belong to VIP 1, and the MOD menu marks them with a gold padlock.

Why we stop at ×8

At ×8 I could still tap the Hunt button as usual, rewards still came in, and the quest counter still ticked up correctly. The picture may stutter on weaker phones because the phone has to calculate eight times as much, but the game doesn't break and you can keep playing normally.

We keep ×16 off the list. In an earlier test session the game's update loop got completely stuck at that level and had to be reopened before it returned to normal, so even though it ran fine this time, we still don't dare call it safe.

Let me be blunt so you don't expect the wrong thing: this is an online game, so the server still makes most of the decisions. The speed-up helps you spend your Hunt Orders faster, but it doesn't create more Hunt Orders, and it doesn't change the reward of each fight either.

So who is this potato army for

If you're looking for a game to open for a few minutes a day, watch the potatoes fight and close it again, this one does exactly that. The interface is tidy and the text is easy to read.

The publisher also looks after its players fairly well. Right on the game's opening notice they put their Facebook and Discord links, along with a promise of gifts for anyone who follows. I didn't try claiming any gift pack, so I can't say how generous they are.

And if you've ever downloaded an idle game and dropped it because of the feeling of watching your character trudge along step by step, the three speed levels above are exactly what fixes that. Switch on ×4 or ×8, and using up the day's Hunt Orders takes only a small fraction of the time it does in the original game.