Picked up because my friends are into it and abandoned.

Good:
- Beautiful art.
- Funny story if you bother to read it.
- Devsis is pretty generous with their premium currency and you can play the game for free without much of an issue if you don't care about being competitive or buying limited edition decorations.
- Character animations are very fun to watch.

Bad:
- Resource management is so tedious it made me want to hit things. And it never ends. You're going to be reissuing sugar cube mining jobs until you're dead.
- Most early story battles feel like they're just there to be there. There's no challenge and I've won at least 15 using the auto fight feature. I don't understand why this isn't classified as an AFK game.
- There are so many things to keep track of. 3 or 4 different currencies, several gacha shops for seemingly similar items, cookie stats, cookie special ability stats, cookie toppings and topping stats, etc. I wouldn't have a problem with this if what everything did was stated explicitly.

Played this on a whim because I couldn't sleep one night, chosen specifically because its art style is kind of stellar. The character designs and lavish amount of unique animations therein are the perfect concoction to bring Ruby Gloom ass kids into the realm of gambling - welcome to the world of vice and brain rot, children. The first three hours or so is literally just tapping Next on tutorial prompts, which is hilarious considering this game essentially just plays itself. You've seen it all before, base building character upgrading stat treadmill that will only end when you, dear reader, physically perish. Deviously designed quests that reward JUST beneath what you need to meet your next progression requirement, spurring the lizzid brain into Just One More Mission fancy. The bare minimum level of player input combat that runs at like 15fps tops, just spitting upgrade items into units until the numbers cease to mean anything and you're left completely zombified. Mobile games are so good dude.

The dream is that maybe this studio will use what I can safely assume to be their incalculable "fuck you" profits to make a game that uses these designs for something less like a pachinko machine, but maybe i should just get really into cartoon network instead.

I feel like all gacha games eventually fall to the need for constant key jingling and new tedious activities to keep players brainless and open to spending. Despite being one of my favorites of the genre for the aesthetics it offers, Cookie Run is ultimately no different.

When I take a month long break and come back to 20+ popups for an overwhelming amount of new lobotomy-tier activities, it's safe to say that I won't be chomping at the bit to get back into the swing of things.

I'll just keep taking my life sized cardboard cut-out of Affogatto Cookie out to public dinner dates, without worrying about the game. Dropping the 2 hours a day of cookie chores just gives us more time to kiss.

Look I'm gonna be real for a second. This game is like if Genshin Impact had POC characters, and that really sucks when you realize that this is a game about cookies.
The worst thing about being caught in its gacha trap for two years (I left this game a year ago already) was the fact that the art and world of this game have deeply impacted my autism circuits. Not a joke, this franchise (kingdom especially) has some of my favorite art direction of any mobile game ever, and I am deeply inspired by it. I could never download this game again because of what it does to me but I could never let it go because of how it changed me.

I have a gambling addiction now

A really fun game with a great sense of progression until a brick wall comes out of nowhere stopping all forward progress. The game is challenging but manageable up until this point. This forces players to either grind a lot or pay up to roll for better characters. For a hard stage before this, it would be a very minor grind to overcome it. Past the brick wall, every level takes hours to grind for. Everything up until this point is phenomenal however with great pacing and decent gameplay. The gacha isn't too egregious either.