Idle Defense: Dark Forest Reviews

First off, I liked this game. I spent $10 for the VIP and another $10 on demon packs. (This game is not fully idle, by the way. It is a tower/lane defense game). It is quite ad heavy, (and I mean HEAVY even for a free game. Ads for gold, diamonds, demons, just for playing longer than seemingly one minute, each time you beat a level, and boosts) but I did not mind because I was enjoying myself. Then came this latest update. It made the grind even harder, changed the flow of the game completely, and essentially made anything anybody did in the past worthless. Your cool demons you spent money on or lucky enough to get in free summons? GONE! Earn them again with RNG that is almost guaranteed to screw you over! Also, it was supposed to fix some bugs. Fixed the bugs, huh? LIARS! Give me back my diamonds and demons! DO NOT SPEND ANY MONEY IN THIS GAME!! Not only am I not able to watch the ads for the free demons, I cannot summon any either because you took my DIAMONDS!! OH AND NOW ALL OF MY PROGRESS IS GONE!!!

**Update**: I was given some compensation, though it did not put me back where I was and still lost my VIP status. Therefore, the rating will be updated.

This is a very fun game to play I pruched a VIP directly though there are some notes I want to mention:
1- The game hangs some times even if you but the graphics in low
2- upgrading the towers and research is so painfull spicily if you reach high levels for example I'm making trillions with my toad furnace but I can't spend them cause the max upgrade is 1000. I spend almost 15 minutes tapping my phone just to add one million lvl to one of my towers. Same in research can you imagine I have to tap the upgrade button more than 2400 times 😄 to reach lvl 5121 🤣

All in all, I'm enjoying this game

While I really like the game with the merge tower concept and lvl based waves, there is an issue that happens at least once or more when I play every day. The issue revolves around the levels and progression within the levels. Every now and then, during a lvl, either early on in the waves or right in the transition from the last wave before the lvl boss to the boss, the game will boot me out. This results in having to start the level over and gets pretty annoying, especially since the issue will scale in frequency as lvls get larger and waves get longer. Please fix this bug. Another issue I have with the game is that there’s no tower tree anywhere online showing which towers lead to the next ones. I understand they are supposed to be figured out as you go, but having a reference tool would be nice. A simple Wiki page showing the progression in a picture would be simple enough with tier and fuse lvls as well.

Really enjoying so far! It is a bit ad heavy in the fact that there’s so much stuff to be collected by watching ads, but none of those are necessary and it doesn’t FORCE ads; it’s always your choice.

I want to collect all these things BUT

HUGE problem is after I watch an ad, some of them just freeze, mainly the ones with the green time bar at the bottom and automatically send you to their App Store page (no x to press, doesn’t go back to the game like it sometimes will). You do not get the rewards from ads that do that, and it happens pretty frequently to me (like just now, lost out on x5 hold after being away for hours) ALSO when the ad freezes you have to force quit and restart which also restarts the progress on the current level you were on. PLEASE FIX THIS, I want to watch the ads, I get stuff, you get stuff, just make them work as intended please

I haven’t been playing for super long as of now, but overall, I love the game mechanics, art style, and general feel of playing the game. The only problem I really have with the game is how slow it can get.

Any time that you try to do just about anything other than watch enemies run through your TD death maze, like upgrading towers, looking at your inventory, or clicking any other tab on the bottom of the screen, gameplay basically pauses until you exit whatever you are doing. This doesn’t sound too terrible, until you realize that your timed buffs, like 2x speed, keep counting down even as the game is paused.

Just as irritating is how at the end of wave in a level, the game gives you a reward of some amount of gold, and then gives you the choice to watch an ad for 3x gold. Not bad for later levels, but extreme irritating for low levels, which if you are fast enough to begin with, does basically nothing except stopping gameplay every other second, for a flat 5 seconds if you are using auto play.

Aside from those two complaints, the game is amazing, though ad-heavy. If you don’t mind watching ads for progression, definitely choose this game. It’ll be worth your while.

The game itself is okay, nice atmosphere, decent art design, and simple to play, however the latest update completely busted the demons in a way that makes them unobtainable and unusable if you previously had any. The game is also incredibly ad heavy and has poor translation, not to the point where you can’t understand it, but it’s still pretty bad. I don’t like that you have to merge demons now in order to upgrade their tier, where previously you just had to use level up crystals. It just makes me want to quit the game, not play it more. And I will not be contacted through Facebook or my email, just fix the game.

So it’s been eight months since the last update completely broke the game and all of the update feed is just full of “bug fixes” but the biggest bug that broke the game still isn’t fixed. Clearly the devs don’t give a crap about their game anymore so don’t even bother playing it

Impossible to really advance too much without watching a ton of ads. This is really just a money gran for the producers. If you play it with any regularity you will just end up watching 30 to 40 ads every day.

UPDATE: Check out the developer’s response. They know its true and don’t care. To top it off, I was actually kind in my review and left out the fact that they are essentially stealing from players daily because I regularly would watch an ad and not receive the reward or benefit I was supposed to two or three times in a row in one sitting. I can use real money to purchase this benefit, so there is an easily definable dollar amount that was stolen from me. Look at other reviews and you will clearly see I am not the only one. This os not about remotely trying to entertain. It is about creating a fat passive revenue stream for the developer. I recommend staying away from anything with their name on it.

After a recent update I found a bug when attempting to summon demons, up to this point I had made a few purchases but the bug made the game impossible to play correctly. After a few days of no improvement I decided to reinstall the game to see if it would correct the bug but to my surprise there is no way to restore my purchases. I will change my rating if I get my money back or progress restored

Edit: I don’t use Facebook so “please send us a message on Facebook” won’t work for me ( I have no interest in creating an account there)

I sent an email the same day I made this review. no response 🤨

.... Hello, first allow me to say it has been several days since I posted my review of your game Idle defense. No response was ever made to my review instead I see it had been removed. I’m not sure where the problem occurred but as a consumer this is pretty disheartening. I play your game and enjoy myself, I decided hey why not support these guys and pay for a few things only to find an update removed my purchases and the game itself is basically broken. This is my last attempt to request you make good on your product. I’d expect you to reply to my mail if you need additional information seeing as how there is no (obvious) way to submit a proper request form. Thanks

Amazing game, been having loads of fun, good challenge, rewarding progression, and it’s the only game I’ve seen in this whole App Store who’s VIP pack is worth the money. But please change the max upgrade to more than a limit of 1000. Around the later stages of the game it becomes extremely time consuming to level towers when they are in the millions and you can only go up by 1000. Possibly make the 1k option it’s own thing. Add in a 10k and 100k option and let the max button use all available cash to actually MAX a tower. Would gladly 5 star with these upgrades.

1 out of 3 times that I go into an ad the little x button to cancel out of ad doesn’t show. Now you may say quit watching ads, to which I reply I’m heavily “medicated” and when it says 5x idle money and 3 times in a row it fails to load an ad, or the x doesn’t show and then I get into the game, as by the 4th time I’ve grown smarter, and I have none, I repeat none, of the ad gold , well my feelers were hurt. Then y’know, I’m playing and decide to watch an ad, for rummage, or diamonds, or heck everything has an ad button, and it locks me out of the game, well I just about have had enough. Anyway, it is fun, seems like price upgrades increase pretty quick, but worth the play if you put it on airplane mode.

I love the fact that you could “hire” demons to do your work. But that’s not what I’m here for. You see I kinda got bored of the game and deleted it. But after a while I wanted to play again and guess what? All my progress is gone. I’m logged into Game Center as XxGaming_DevilxX and I was at the point in which the crystal was evolved and could attack. Please if there is anyway to help because I don’t want to grind all over again. Please and thank you.

I have an iPhone 10s so I would assume I should be able to run this but alas no. After 10-15 min it just gets lagged down and is pretty much unplayable. Edit: now leveling my towers is impossible. When adding levels it locks up my game and crashes.

It restarts quite often. This makes you start the level over and you don’t get rewards your second time through a level. Also if you have any buffs going you lose them.

The more and more I play this game the worse it gets. So many of the games aspects make it worse the more you play it. Every advantage becomes an unusable disadvantage.

I don’t honest know how this has so many stars other than the fact that everyone that helped make the game must have rated it 5* and even the I read some of the reviews talking about how bad the game is and they still gove it 4-5*.

This is a fun game and if they fix the above two problems I would give it 4 stars. It is pay to win but they allow you to watch a crazy amount of ads in order to offset a good portion of not all of the pay to win. I like the tower and level progression, it’s a pretty solid time waster.

I’m really enjoying the first impressions of the game. I know everyone loves offering their feedback on games and how to make it better but there are a few issues that caused me to rate this 3 stars. Combining Tower Defense with Idle components is awesome but...

1) The game stops if you open any menu in the game... annoying

2) Having to collect gold, or wait 5 seconds after every stage completion is VERY tedious... I could see after a boss but the individual stages is way to frequent to stop the game

3) The sheer amount of ads they allow you to watch daily for rewards is absurd... so the VIP actually provides a very tempting offer... I’ve subbed to several games with VIP systems for well over a year in some cases... but I will never support a $9.99 VIP system... if it was 4.99 I’d likely play this game for quite so,e time

Hopefully some of these things get worked out. I’m not expecting the VIP price to change and it saddens me but hopefully in future updates you can make the game flow better... I just may not be patient enough to keep playing until then

I just started playing this game today and I love it. I gave 4 out of 5 stars due to the fact that I can only play for about 5-10 mins straight before IdleDefense crashes unexpectedly and then I notice my phone has overheated quite a bit. I’m using an iPhone 11 ProMax so I shouldn’t have any issues with the game. I don’t like the overheating problem. I can live with the crashes from time to time but I think the overheating issue would fix this. I’ve noticed so far that IdleDefense crashes after I close out of an ad for gems, gold or game boosts. Please fix this for a 5 star review

To get the maximum daily rewards from the game as a F2P player you have to watch 107 advertisements. Pretty much all the advertisements are the 30 second variety. If you have the patience for that then go for it.
Also, you have to watch a video to do a demon summon and then there is still a 5 second timer after watching the video before you are allowed to tap the screen and collect your demon. Then you have to wait 5 minutes before you can watch another video and wait another 5 seconds. Ads in games are expected, but this game is the worst example I have seen. I literally counted all the ads, and it is a minimum of 107 to get all the daily rewards you can.

Anyone who plays the game knows that if IdleDefense is closed while you’re fighting, it returns you to before the stage started when you reopen it. This is already frustrating enough as is, but, IdleDefense has lately been strategically crashing on level 9 of every stage, right before I get to the boss, causing the entire stage to reset. This is infuriating. 1 out of every 10 ads won’t close, therefor causing you to not only NOT get the rewards, but also force close IdleDefense (which as you remember, resets your progress for that stage).

I’ve already got the graphics set to low, IdleDefense is up to date, and my phone is also up to date. This is why I refuse to spend any money on IdleDefense. I don’t want to lose my paid-for progress.

I love IdleDefense SO much, but if this continues, I’m just going to uninstall it. It’s so discouraging to get so far and then suddenly I’m back on my home screen.

If this issue gets fixed, I’ll immediately bump up to 5 stars. Until then? I hope others are cautious when they download this game.

In the recent update everything got glitchy all of a sudden. First the demons hold tab is completely glitched out and also when I just bought VIP it reset my gems and green balls. I had over 1k gems and like 100 green balls but I’m kind of sad that my gems got deleted. Also I would really fix the demon tab as it is kind of making the game unplayable. And last thing I was afk for like 3 days and didn’t get anything from it. The game is good it just need some consistent updates and it would be a top tear idle game for me!

it’s become my go-to phone game when i’ve some free time. other games will hit you with an ad if you just tap it wrong, but all ads here are optional and won’t pop up unless you're wanting the reward that comes after.

there’s a few glitches, of course. mainly:

•sometimes a monster will get stuck halfway down the right hand side. it won’t be able to move any further and won’t die. the only option is to close out the game and restart.

•regardless of the setting you have the game on, it will start to lag after awhile. i’m guessing this is because the cache has become too big. again, closing out the game and restarting will help this.

•if you’ve been watching too many ads for rewards, you’ll sometimes be shown an ad but won’t get the reward. it gives you the option to still receive the incentive if you watch the video, but even if you watch a second ad it won’t give it to you.

•with the above in mind, i do have to say...there are a lot of ads. again, all optional, but there’s a lot. i understand with some things watching an ad is reasonable (like to spin the wheel early), but it can be a bit much for others.

all in all, i’m having fun. i’m gonna check out the pay options, too, because i do appreciate the work that went into this game and how much i’ve enjoyed it.

So this game relies heavily on ads which I am fine with, however. This game will allow you to watch ads indefinitely and not provide the items or boosts that you watched the ads for. I’ve tested this extensively and basically the first few times you watch ads they’ll pay out but within 5-10 within a day they stop paying out. The game says you get 10/10 pay outs a day for some functions. Say you’re trying to get demons through the summons you’ll watch the ad it’ll show the item you’re supposed to get and then it’ll not be added to your bag. This game is nothing more than an ad spam I recommend finding a different worthwhile game... avoid this one at all costs.

It’s a good stable game with great graphics there has been no lag and the simple strategy part of the game is addicting. The only thing I could say about this would be that the ads sometimes don’t work. You’ll watch the ad but it won’t give you the reward. But other than that it’s a really solid game that I’ve been playing nonstop since it’s release. thank-you developers for such an amazing game