Every day, I am sent two or three incremental games to review or demo showcase. It is very clear that this indie trend has become saturated, bloated, and quite stale. There are a few titles that are trying something new or keeping a game active, and I welcome those games. There are a few titles that feel generic and mindless, and these are the titles I struggle with. Enter Smashing Bottles. This is a title that does exactly what it says on the tin. It is also utterly devoid of engagement.
The game gives you a baseball bat, a single-line narrative setup, and off you go, smashing bottles. The more you smash, the moey money you make, the more things you can unlock on your skill tree. Slowly more types of bottles unlock, including the extremely phalic cola bottles that spurt out their contents like tomato paste tubes over the screen. There are only a few bottle types, and the main upgrade tree relies on shrapnel shards to trigger combos that break multiple bottles. Prestige events happen when you’ve earned enough meta progression currency to unlock automated bats, more bottles on screen, and bigger radial damage. Do this for 2-3 hours, and you’ll have seen the game.
Everything in Smashing Bottles I have seen before and seen done better, with more variety and with more player engagement and intent. There is no player agency when playing the title. I used Smashing Bottles for something to do whilst I was stuck listening to hold music and arguing with terrible automated phone line bots that send you to the wrong department, and I was still bored and disconnected. Smashing Bottles has more in common with bottom-of-the-screen games that are designed to feel like a second-screen game. I hate this trend. I don’t gel with games that actively aim to be a second-screen passive nothing burger. This title comes with an active and an idle mode, but the active mode relegates the player interaction to being less than 20% of the total damage caused, so the two modes merge together in my eyes.
My score is reflective of the complete disinterest the game had in me as a player, and me feeling engaged in the game. It’s also the straw that broke the camel’s back. I won’t be playing incrementals for some time, and I certainly won’t be slogging through such mind-numbing tasks like this. It’s the gaming equivalent of children’s TV AI rainbow yawns. Devs, add something to your title to make sure you stand out. Don’t go for the lowest common denominator. Bills Must Be Paid is a better example of what this title is aiming to do.
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