Sure, a while back I said I was done with idle clickers. But I’m done with them in the same way I’m done with match-3 games, for the most part: I’ll play the occasional one because I still enjoy the core idea, but I’ve just played too many of them to want to keep diving back in on a regular basis. Doomsday Clicker (Free) from PikPok is my occasional exception to clickers, particularly as I enjoyed the concept, and the typical PikPok production values go a long way here. But it’s still a clicker, and it can only really go so far at this point. Plus, it’s one of this new generation of non-clicker clickers, and I’m not sure I enjoy that development.

What I mean by non-clicker clickers is that they’re not actually about clicking, they’re solely about idle resource generation. For example, Bitcoin Billionaire (Free) has several idle things you can upgrade that give you bitcoins every so often, but tapping to mine bitcoins is still the heart of the game. Instead, Doomsday Clicker has you just spending your coins in-game to upgrade those idle generators that give you money every so often. Thus, the more money you generate, the more you can spend it on idle generators, and so on and so on. Some games use this core loop like Tap It Big (which is coincidentally published by PikPok), and while I applaud the inventiveness of taking out the actual clicking, I think they strip away a core part of the clicker’s appeal, which is to actually play the game. Bitcoin Billionaire didn’t forget that the tapping to mine bitcoins should be the main way that you should gain money. Same with the clicker-inspired The Executive ($2.99) – the idle revenue generation should be a secondary thing, something that compels you to leave when you feel like you hit a brick wall, but makes it so that you have a reason to spend time in the app besides colliding with that brick wall.

See, the best way to get money in Doomsday Clicker is to play the game for a bit, hit a point where you hit that brick wall where you can’t really upgrade anything, then let the game sit for a bit. At least a couple of hours will do, as you get superchargers that multiply your revenue that you need to renew every 2 hours by watching a video ad to spin whether you get 2x, 3x, or 4x revenue. The game gives you the occasional thing to tap to get more money or mutants, but it’s mostly about the idle generation. Doomsday Clicker forces you to go away, and gives you no reason to sit around and do things in the game itself once you hit a certain point.

Now, where Doomsday Clicker does actually do some clever things is in the way it handles the prestige/reset. Namely, it’s actually part of the game here. As you level up your resource generators, you get to a point where you can hit the big red doomsday button and blow it all up and start fresh. The reason to do this is that you get mutants out of it, with a revenue generation bonus for every mutant, quickly growing to massive numbers. The game recommends having your human total be at least 25% of your mutant count, but you can easily multiply the number of humans you have by letting Doomsday Clicker sit around for a while. Still, this at least does a good job at making the prestige be an actual part of the game flow, and something that prevents you from hitting a huge wall in the metagame, as you can literally all just blow it up and start again.

Doomsday Clicker is free-to-play, but it can be played for little to no cost, as there’s video ads for the multipliers, and an initial purchase of gold, the game’s hard currency, for $2 netted me a nice 12x money multiplier. Ultimately, you’re just pushing for the most number of mutants possible, I suppose, so if you want to pay to progress faster, you can just do that. Or you can pay nothing and just progress at a slower rate, but still be playing this with no real impedance to your progress. It’s hard to complain about the monetization at all.

Also, Doomsday Clicker might be worth checking out just for the graphics and music alone. The art and animations are all top-notch, as is to be expected of PikPok. Your various apocalypses are hilarious, such as pulling the moon into the Earth…again. And the music sets a comical mood, with hilarious vocal tracks for when you’re pondering hitting the detonation button, and the admonishment for when you decide to doom humanity to an irradiated future for the 15th time. Yes, enjoying the repeated dooming of humanity to jazzy music is why I’m the villainous Carter Dotson. I thought the victory music in Monsters Ate My Metropolis (Free) was one of the most memorable bits of that game, and I’m pretty sure it’s the same singer. Please include ridiculous music in more games, PikPok.

Doomsday Clicker is not really what I’d call essential, and hardly the apex of the clicker genre, which already has a tenuous relationship with the concept of gameplay to begin with. But, it’s amusing with great music, and had me checking in and blowing up the world in comical ways for at least a few days. And I happily spent a couple of bucks on it and got my $1.99 worth out of it. If you’re still down with clickers and don’t mind having very little to actually ‘click’, and enjoy a humorous experience, why not? Now I go and not play any clickers for the next few months until I forget why I stopped playing them in the first place.