Idle Lumberjack 2 12+

Sooo.. i usually do not leave reviews but I just had too for this app... im going to keep it short.. I have anxiety/depression/Insomnia (I’m up @ 3 am writing this) and I’m on meds for it. Any who. Whenever I am feeling down or just angry or worrying a lot.. I literally can open this app .. swing at some trees and calm down. It even gets to the point that I’m so relaxed; it makes me sleepy.. which helps sometimes for my insomnia. No this app is not “curing” me but it helps.. yes sometimes it does get boring and repetitive... so I dnt play it every hour every single day. But I notice I play it more regularly than my other apps.. really who plays games on phones allll day. (No life) any who. I finally paid for the “no ads” especially it is helping me feel better idk if that’s what the intended to do... I’ve spent money on worse. I recommend downloading and take a swing at it (see what I did there... no? Ok..) see how it makes you feel!

P.s. nice soft soothing music, rain or oriental type music would be a nice add on to the game instead of dead silence/vibrations lol

The gameplay is fun, if repetitive. Your avatar does the same thing over and over, so it’s a good time waster and when you get bored you can put it away and come back to it later. The problem lies with the ads. To say that they are tedious is an understatement. Every 30 seconds regardless of what you are doing you get an ad. Upgrade your ax? Ad for the first one. Upgrade your storage? Add for the first upgrade. Out of money? You can do an upgrade...for watching an ad. I would genuinely estimate that you spend 50% of your time in game watching ads or waiting for the ‘x’ to pop up so you can get out of the ad.
On to the game: if you are within reach of a tree your axeman swings automatically, so all you have to do is move him around the board. Up and down are your only choices, so I usually go up one side of a section and down the other side. As you move through the section the trees get progressively harder to chop but there are only about five different shapes, and then the colors change also. I’ve gone through level 30 so far and no changes to the game at all. It would be nice to see some variation, like huge trees that takes a while to knock down and rewards special items. This would normally be a middle of the road three star game, but the lack of variety combined with the mind-numbing number of ads take one off. I may bite the bullet and buy the $3 no-ad version to see if it improves my opinion, and if I do I’ll update my review.

Look, I almost exclusively play phone games these days, so I’ve grown accustomed to watching ads during gameplay or for bonuses and boosts. But this game is absurd. I figured I’d count them out to try and get an average for time spent watching ads. After a 30 minute period, with playtime varying from 32 seconds to as little as 13 seconds, on average I watched an ad every 19.3 seconds. THAT IS INSANE. It’s almost as if they’re purposely brow-beating you into spending the $2.99 to stop the ads. Which, in reality isn’t a whole lot of money, but seeing as how the game has no offline reward setup like so many other “idle” games it’s not really worth it. Besides, all you do is chop down trees. When you have power-ups going the game is actually quite entertaining. Something about cleaning down 15 trees with one swift blow is fun. But, for obvious reasons, it’s pretty redundant. It needs some kind of boss or something. Some sort of goal to achieve other than “level up your axe to cut stronger trees.” The game is lacking serious purpose. I would be willing to rate the game much higher if it had some sort of additional goal, or even if there was an offline reward program where you continued to cut trees.

TL;DR - So many ads, needs more of a purpose, no offline rewards. If you have 5 minutes to spare. Chop some trees. Otherwise, keep it moving.