Review: Click and Conquer
IndieLoupe’s first ever review was on Digseum, and hey look! It’s another Digseum article!
Wait.
This isn’t Disgeum.
What the hell is it?
Image: Sockhouse Studios
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Developer: Sockhouse Studios
Publisher: Sockhouse Studios
Release: 25 June 2025
Retail Price (Steam): 5,49€/$5.49/£4.58
Click and Conquer is a new release from Sockhouse Studios, and despite what the name might have you believe, it’s not the mobile version of a popular RTS franchise. I have to admit it popped up on my radar a little over a month and a half ago, and I’ve had an eye on it ever since. I was quietly hoping that the creator of my new obsession might see some sense and decide against releasing it, based on the feedback they’ve received in every corner of the internet I’ve tracked it to. Be it itch.io, Steam, Reddit or over on YouTube (where this article had its origins as a video, and is arguably a better way to enjoy it), everywhere I’ve looked I’ve found there to be some pretty valid criticism.
Some of that’s been scrubbed from the internet; the game’s itch.io page was reuploaded without the comments, but courtesy of the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, it’s not too difficult to find what the original complaints were. A dev attempting to purge criticism from the internet does rather set off a few alarm bells… or a ‘red alert’, if you will. Get it?
Before we move on with the critique, I wanted to highlight a decision we made here at IndieLoupe relatively early into starting it as a project: that, if we were going to publish negative reviews, they needed to be earnt. There’s a couple of our earlier reviews that go against that: namely for Talented and Knights in Tight Spaces. I don’t want to unnecessarily drag their names back into the mud – because, full disclosure, I stand by neither game being good – but in both instances there was clear intent from the developer to create something worthwhile. It feels mean to use our platform to denigrate that sort of game when there’s plenty of good games we could be drawing attention to, or, if we must focus on the negative, games whose problems are significantly more egregious than having boring mechanics or being underwhelming.
As such, there’s a handful of games I’ve played over the past few months whose reviews will never see the light of day. That could be for a multitude of reasons, but in each instance it wasn’t because the developer hadn’t put the effort in: they had clearly tried to make a good game. They just, in my opinion, hadn’t necessarily succeeded.
There are other negative reviews we published that I stand by, where I’m more sceptical about the developer’s intent. I’m happy to leave you to discover those for yourself: if you’d rather have your cynicism served fresh, you needn’t look any further than this article.
I’m not sure what I was expecting when even the studio’s name and logo feels somewhat like a ripoff of another studio (Sokpop Collective), but I’m going to try my best to be as fair as I can with Sockhouse Studios. But, continuing on from last week’s theme of “reviews that aren’t really reviews,” my criticism can be boiled down into three distinct parts. Maybe you agree with it all, maybe you think some of it’s fair and some of it isn’t, maybe you think I’m totally in the wrong and that Click and Conquer should be making my top ten list at the end of the year. But we’ll start with it’s quality.
Image: Sockhouse Studios
This is the least important point, so we’ll try and get through it quickly: it’s not very good. I know I just made a big point about how that wasn’t enough these days for me to publish a review of it, but there’s caveats here: the two massive ones coming up later in this article, but also the question of the developer’s intent. It’s harder to believe that a developer is legitimately putting the effort in when there’s no original idea involved, everything is made from assets, and they’ve got a self-proclaimed plan to ‘build a commercial game’ in a very short timeframe: 300 hours. That last one is obviously made significantly easier by the first two: when someone else has done all the work thinking up your game’s mechanics and gameplay loop, your work is effectively trying to remake the thing that already exists, and using assets certainly speeds that up. For what it’s worth, I think using assets can be legitimate – look at Vampire Survivors – but not really when the game idea itself is just a clone.
The core gameplay loop in Click and Conquer is dropping bombs on people to get money, and spending that money to upgrade your bombing capabilities – more on that frankly insane thematic choice a little later in the article – but let’s, just for a second, pretend it’s totally normal. When you click in, I dunno, Digseum, you get this meaty feedback each time; in this one you’re dropping literal bombs and it feels less impactful than digging a hole in the ground. Primarily, I think that’s down to the mediocre animations and sound design — they’ve tried to copy things like the little screen shake that Digseum gives you but it just doesn’t tie together nicely when the explosion sound is so weak, when the ‘bomb drop’ animation is just an asset getting smaller with a little trail, when the fog of war dissipates like it’s been blown at by a gentle breeze.
The one obvious mechanical change they have made: making regular, non-prestige, upgrades into a skill tree rather than a handful of clickable bonuses, eradicates the variation between regular gameplay and prestiging: with both being skill trees, when you prestige it doesn’t feel special or unique, and so the gameplay loop isn’t broken up in a distinct and satisfying way. Effectively, as we’ll get onto very soon, any changes that have been made from Digseum just serve to make the game worse: it ends up feeling less like a release-worthy game and more like an exercise in game development, where you’re trying to make something that already exists in order to practice and learn how to do it — not in order to sell it to anyone.
Image: Sockhouse Studios
Okay, my second criticism, which has already been covered fairly extensively, and which is why this article exists: if Digseum wasn’t a thing, or I wasn’t familiar with it, I might’ve had Click and Conquer pop up wherever it was that I first saw it, not thought much of it, and forgotten about it before the day was over. As it was, I looked at it and thought: “This is a Disgeum clone.” And I paid attention.
Some efforts have been made since I first saw it to make it slightly less Digseum-like: originally Click and Conquer also had a green bar at the top that went down with each of your clicks: exactly like Digseum. This was removed, one can only assume, to make it look less like Disgeum and, simultaneously, made it look worse and removed some visual information for the player. In both games, you’ve got a the rather specific mechanic of a blue bar that fills up as you level up your locations, and doing so gives your incremental income a boost: in Digseum, it’s an extra 30% per visitor, per second, in Click and Conquer it’s just an extra 15% per second. No visitors to worry about: you’ve probably already dropped a bomb on their heads.
Initially the UI showed you the previous percentage, i.e that you’d gone from, for example, 15% to 30%, with a nice little arrow made from a hyphen and a greater-than symbol between the two – funnily enough, also exactly like in Digseum. Now, it just shows you the new percentage. Again, objectively worse design that gives the player less information and is implemented, presumably, just to make the game look ever-so-slightly less like the one it’s copied.
It’s these sorts of changes that I find, in a way, the most irritating: anyone familiar with both games knows you’ve ripped-off Digseum, you know you’ve ripped-off Digseum, why not just own it at that point? Will the half-arsed tweaks to dedigsify it make it less obvious, when you’ve still got so much in common with the original game? Is it because they read the comment about getting DMCA’d and thought those changes would be enough to avoid that? I’m not going to pretend to be any sort of legal expert – my guess would be that it falls into the ‘not illegal but pretty unscrupulous’ category, like your dad dating an 18 year-old (you’re welcome for that image) – there mightn’t be anything legally wrong with it, but come on, you know what you’re doing.
I mean, look, I’m probably being a little too harsh. The black bar that comes across the screen at the start of each level has 90% transparency, whereas it’s got 60% in Digseum. The wavy ‘level-up’ text is in a different place and is rainbow-coloured instead of boring-ass Digseum blue. The name of each zone is above its picture rather than below it… I mean, it still has a level, and that level is still shown at the bottom in blue, and the XP required to reach the next level is shown on hover, and once you’ve clicked on the level you need to click on another button to confirm, and then you get a full splash-screen with an icon above a word (in green, not orange, and with kinda blurry un-animated text, so again, completely different)... and then the aforementioned black bar comes up (but it says ‘ready… go’ and not ‘start’) and then you can start clicking on a board which has a one-tile border all the way around it, to uncover what’s hidden below.
Initially I had a joke in there about how the prestige screen doesn’t have those ‘floaty circle things’ in the background as another example of an inconsequential difference, but it turns out that even that entirely pointless feature has, inexplicably, been replicated.
Look, there are larger developers who are probably as deserving of the ire from this section: if you’re as lucky as I am you might very well receive adverts for Kingshot on every YouTube video you watch – I’m quite sure they’re making more money in a day from ripping off Thronefall than Click and Conquer is ever going to make, but even that is less of an obvious rehash. Again, the cynic in me says it’s because a larger studio would know to cover its tracks better, because just changing the theme doesn’t crack it.
And, oh God, the theme.
Image: Sockhouse Studios
The choice of theme betrays what is such a fundamental misunderstanding of why the game that’s being stolen from was successful in the first place. Yes. it was cleaner, the animations more receptive, the art and UI more appealing, but it’s also cosy. The theme and genre work together. That’s not the case in Click and Conquer.
Take, for example, the little skeletons that remain on the board once you kill a target: it all contributes to what is such an unsettling vibe when juxtaposed with the soundtrack and ostensibly relaxing gameplay. Not that it would be much of an improvement, but think if they dissolved into pixels or disappeared in a puff of smoke then that would at least be better than having that morbid reminder stuck on your screen for the rest of the level. Really I’d struggle to see a way to ever make the concept redeemable, but it’s like the developer has gone out of their way to make it as disturbing as possible. Who knows: perhaps it’s just outrage-bait, and I’ve fallen for it hook, line, and sinker.
Yes, there’s a satisfaction found in Digseum’s gameplay loop which is kind of replicated in Click and Conquer, though I’ve already laid out my argument for why it’s executed poorly here, but Digseum also offers a cutesy, cosy experience. And Click and Conquer obviously doesn’t. Right?
Not according to Sockhouse. In Click and Conquer’s description on Steam the phrase “drop bombs through the fog of war” comes literally three words after the word “relaxing.” This genre mismatch is – apparently, from their own comments – not the developer trying to be subversive: I don’t think there’s much benefit of the doubt to be given here. They’re not trying to make some clever point about, for example, people being desensitised to the awful goings-on in the world: in fact, when someone raised that exact point on the now-scrubbed itch.io page, Sockhouse posted the comment across to Reddit in an attempt to ridicule them. To quote the posts they made: ‘Apparently my cute little pixel game is “desensitizing players to real violence.”’
Cute. They literally use the word cute to describe it. They genuinely saw Digseum and thought that the reskin it needed was dropping bombs into you-literally-have-no-idea-where, and that in spite of that thematic change, it would maintain its chill, relaxing vibe. That a game about dropping bombs on people is ‘cute’ because it’s got pixel art and a mellow soundtrack. The next time a country commits some war crimes it should just stick some lo-fi beats over the footage and presumably, in the world the developer lives in, we’ll all just agree it was a ‘cute ickle whoopsie.’
Image: Sockhouse Studios
Look, I’m not saying games about war shouldn't exist, and I don’t fully agree with the idea that it has the power to desensitise anyone – my issue, really, is that it’s just a deeply unpleasant theme for a game that’s purportedly relaxing. I don’t think I want to meet the person who thinks it is. And I do think it’s more problematic than, say, Call of Duty because here you’re indiscriminately throwing explosives into the fog and hoping it hits the right thing. I think even the most militaristic of people would say that that’s not how bombing is supposed to work, and it has some really off-putting connotations if you think about it for longer than a few seconds. And that’s the game. There’s no story; no political commentary or moral questioning. You’re just meant to vibe with it for your playthrough and, presumably, leave Click and Conquer feeling like you had a similarly cosy and enjoyable experience to what Digseum would’ve offered.
Perhaps there’s more people out there who can do that than I expect: depressingly, the early reviews suggest there might be. I'm choosing not to rate this one, for the exact opposite reason I chose not to rate last week’s game, Many Nights a Whisper – if you’ve got 37 minutes spare and you want to cancel things out with some more positive vibes, you can always check that video out.
The reviewed product was purchased by IndieLoupe.com.
