Note: this article marks the first test of an entirely new publishing process for my blog. It's possible things are deeply, deeply broken. Sorry about that!

Package Hero is an IOS idle game by Krögoor Entertainment, a German studio more famous for its Alexa games like Knight Manager.

In package hero, you're the owner of a shipping company. You must spend coins to purchase vehicles, expand into new areas, and buy upgrades. Once you grow large enough, you sell the company in order to get permanent boosts that stay with you over the long term. This is not a new formula; if you've played a single idle or clicker game in your life, it probably sounds familiar. But it's familiar because it works; complete originality isn't a requirement for a fun and playable game. While advertised as a new game, Package Hero is largely an IOS rework of a game that was previously available only on Amazon Alexa. So how did Krögoor do on what they seem to be marketing as their first real IOS outing?

If popularity is anything to go by, they did excellently; the weekly leaderboards are a veritable who's-who of the blindness Mastodon community. It's not hard to understand why, either. The game has no accessibility niggles, provides a well-designed and interesting soundscape, and is easy to leave chugging away in the background while doing something else. There's no real story, no conflict, and no goal other than "numbers go up". While it's simplistic, this purity of design is something to be admired. Package hero knows exactly what it wants to be, and strips out anything that doesn't contribute to its goals.

However, the trade-off is that an ultra-focused game like this really does live or die on the quality of its core mechanic and implementation. Unfortunately, that's where Package Hero begins to fall down. First off, the game was launched with a surprising lacunae of testing. Some of the text remained German only at launch, including in really obvious places like the live activities. Some of the stats just didn't update in real time when they should have. The game would sometimes crash randomly. While all of these things have been fixed over time, they highlight a much larger problem: a seeming lack of playtesting. Thus far, Package Hero has had to make two enormous changes to mechanics in order to fix rampant balance issues. The first change was announced for a Sunday, so everyone could plan for it. Then it was just randomly pushed by mistake in the middle of the week. The second change wasn't announced at all, and a switch was just forcefully flipped on older players without notice, after newer players had already been disadvantaged by the change for days. On top of the issues with rolling out changes, though, the effect of both changes was "numbers go down". And not just a little: numbers went down by several orders of magnitude in both cases. In a game where the primary joy and achievement is watching numbers go up, this is absolutely killer. When players lose trust in the balancing of a game in this style, and when they stop feeling the dopamine hit of progress, they just wander away. As far as I can tell, Package Hero was live on Alexa for years before relaunching on IOS. So I find it shocking that the IOS port launched with as many serious balance issues as it did.

There are also some arguably pay to win elements in the game: upgrades that can be purchased by a currency, called gold bars, that it's possible to buy for real money. However, all of these upgrades are either level capped, or have quickly diminishing returns. It's also possible to get gold bars without paying. The sweet spot is about $24 before any possible returns for the money become nearly meaningless. In a world where AAA companies are squeezing hundreds or thousands of dollars out of players, I really can't get upset about these aspects.

If you need something to fall asleep to, or something just distracting enough to keep the voices in your head quiet for a little while, package hero might fit the bill. If only the actual gameplay was as polished as the sounds and interface. As it stands, package hero just doesn't quite manage to "deliver" (see what I did there?) the perfect idle game. But for what it is, there's still a bit of fun to be had. If you're interested in giving it a try, feel free to use my code for bonuses: EFDYPZ.

Also posted on the fediverse.