Developer: LeGingerDev
Publisher: LeGingerDev, GrabTheGames
Platform: PC
Tested on: PC
All Hail the Orb – Review
Both idle games and clicker games are still most popular on mobile platforms, but they have slowly but surely been making their way to PC and consoles as well. These games often provide a relaxing experience while you’re working on other things or just have it running in the background while you watch a movie. On top of that, these games are often so popular simply because they don’t require a huge chunk of your time to actually make progress. That brings us to All Hail the Orb, a semi-idle clicker game in which you’ll have to manage a dungeon full of cultists to prepare themselves for the return of their master.
Story
The story of All Hail the Orb takes the backseat for most of the experience, but essentially, you are a lone cultist in a small dungeon who encounters a glowing orb. Upon touching the orb, a small demon appears, who tells you to show your devotion to free their master. That’s pretty much all there is to the experience, with the occasional text blurb popping up to introduce some of the NPCs or to tell you about the progress you are making.
Graphics
All Hail the Orb is a cute-looking cultist-themed clicker game with a bit of variety when it comes to the different rooms you’re able to unlock. There’s always something going on in your dungeon, as cultists are running around, rubber duckies are jumping all over the place, and you’ll constantly see different resources being harvested. The rooms all have different backdrops that correlate with the function of said room. We did notice a few cultists getting stuck or floating midair, but other than that, the game looks quite cute.
Sound
It’s probably the sound design where All Hail the Orb falls a bit short. The soundtrack is fairly limited yet catchy, but it loops so quickly that it eventually becomes annoying. Luckily, there are some new songs to unlock after you’ve been playing for a bit, but these loop equally as quickly, which still isn’t helping that much. We eventually turned off the music altogether and just put on our own playlist in the background. The same could be said about the SFX, as the resource-collecting sounds were satisfying at first. Sadly; after a while, we turned down the volume almost completely, to turn it into white noise rather than a very active part of our experience.
Gameplay
We could best describe All Hail the Orb as a semi-idle clicker game. There will be components you’ll click on to generate resources and handle some management tasks, but there are also many automated components where your cultists do the heavy lifting for you. This makes this an ideal game to run in the background or on a second screen while you do other things. The offset is really simple; you’ll have to gather resources, level up the dungeon, unlock new rooms, and summon cultists to hopefully prepare for the return of the master.
Truth be told, quite a few things are going on by the time you unlock more and more rooms in your cultist dungeon. You’ll find yourself amassing different types of resources, where you’ll need to upgrade the resource generators with different currencies, to then gather resources even quicker. You’ll find yourself placing devotees at different altars, you’ll have cultists research new abilities, while also planting mushrooms and doing mining tasks. Thanks to the diversity of things to do, the game remains interesting enough for you to keep managing everything that you need to keep track of. It’s fun seeing resources come in quicker and quicker, and it’s easy to assign tasks to your cultists. At the time of writing this review, we encountered a bug where cultists would get stuck and become unresponsive, which was something rather tedious after a while.
Our biggest issue with the game was that it was extremely short. We beat everything All Hail the Orb had to offer in the course of a single day. For a clicker game with idle components, that is way too short. The content itself was fun, and we were mainly disappointed it was over so quickly. It would have been nice to spread some of the elements a bit further, even if it meant things would be dulled down a bit.
Conclusion
All Hail the Orb is a lot of fun as a semi-idle clicker game, but it is way too short compared to other titles in the genre. Don’t get us wrong, for the price of entry, you’ll have a fun evening or two that you can pour into this silly cult-themed game, but we simply wish there was a bit more content to go around. Nonetheless, the gameplay loop proved to be very enjoyable, the pixelated visuals were nice to look at, and the plot behind everything was a good way to set the atmosphere. The music and SFX did become a bit grating over time, but that’s only a minor remark about an otherwise fun bite-sized semi-idle clicker game. If you’re looking for something short and sweet, this one might be worth checking out.
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