About damn time I got to writing another happy little review for everyone. Again I've picked a lovely little gem that will make you so very much crypto in such a short time.

Wait, what am I fucking saying? No, I've picked you another boring fucking dud of a game and ripped holes in it for your pleasure! Let's get to it.....

What it is

Ether Kingdoms is a fantasy mining game where you use some ugly little Imp dudes to mine more ugly little fucking Imp dudes. Yep, doesn't make much fucking sense. Why don't the ugly fucking Imp dudes you are mining just dig their own way out instead of waiting for someone else to do it for them???? They must be fucking dense. Or lazy. Maybe they are just lazy assholes.

There is also some shit about quests, fighting other players, and equipment stuff like your typical pseudo-RPG bullshit.

Since I am reviewing it here, it obviously needs to have something to do with cryptocurrency.... yup, your Imps are crypto as well, known on the market as IMP (who would have fucking guessed??).

Gameplay

The game starts you off with a nice little handful of Impish fuckers for the tutorial mode, about 200 of them, and shows you all the basic shit - how to mine, how to attack a bot etc. It holds your hand a bit too much maybe, in a creepy uncle kind of way, but fuck it, everyone needs to learn somehow.

You start in your kingdom with shit-all available to you. Your castle (which is just a shortcut to the fucking shop) and a single mine. All the other mines are locked until you reach certain levels, but don't worry, by the end of the tutorial you will be level 15 and probably have more than you will ever fucking need unlocked.

So the basics of mining - you throw 100 Imps on a mine tile in your kingdom, and wait. A loooooooooooong fucking time. 100 Imps gives you the astoundingly huge mining rate of 0.0000003 per second........ Fuck me that's slow. That won't even score you a single Imp per month.

So the tutorial gets you mining first, and then it throws you in the shit. You have two types: bot fights and player fights.

In a bot fight, guess what, you fight a fucking bot, which is an exact mirror of you, so you never have an advantage. Wooo!!

In player fights, it is a bit different and you can gain an advantage in these, or more fucking likely a disadvantage.

So the rules of the fight are these: the game always takes 10% of the Imps players put in the battle, because they have to rip you off somehow. Then based on the outcome of the fight you will receive back some of the remaining Imps - if you win, you get more, if you lose, well, sucks to be you because you get back less than you put in, if you draw, yay, you still get back less than you put in because the game ripped off 10%.

Because bot fights are always equal, basically they are a sinkhole for your Imps, but you need them for experience. Sigh. The white paper even points out that bot fights are shit, because you have a 20/40/40% chance of drawing/winning/losing - so 60% chance of coming back with less Imps.

There are also the quests. Completing quests give you shit. Often a small number of new Imps, like 10 or so. Sounds a lot quicker than mining, but still 10 per quest is fucking stingy when you look at how many Imps you may flush down the fucking toilet trying to get the wins or levels required to complete the quests in the first place.

Then we have gear - you get this by spending a fuckload of Imps to buy loot boxes which give you a random piece of gear, but you have to be over level 100 for these anyway, so if you somehow manage to not realize how stupid you are by playing this far, then you'll probably have a number of Imps inversely proportional to your brain cells.

The final feature which I can give you zero information on is the portal. It requires level 30, which I have pretty much no fucking chance of ever going to, so that is there for you to discover if you really want to waste your money.

Design and performance and shit

The graphics are nice-ish in a stylized 8-bit kinda way. You've got a few different kinds of tile in your kingdom, but only 4 of them actually mean something - unlocked mines, locked mines, castle, and portal. The rest are just for looks.

I had a quick look to get a feel for how the game is programmed but I'm kinda fucking tired right now so screw it, I'm not gonna look further. It definitely runs in a HTML5 canvas, which is enough for me to know without a doubt that really old browsers and computers are going to go fucking nuts trying to run this shit. But any mainstream browser from 2006 onwards is probably going to be OK, except for Internet Exploder (typo intentional).

Just be aware that no matter how fucking fast your computer or browser is, some actions like clicking the store or a mine will take so fucking long to load that you might as well make yourself a cup of tea. I guess it is probably reading from the blockchain or something, but shit, it feels like your internet has been rerouted to the Mars rover and back again waiting for this shit.

Where it falls down

The games seems nice and fun at first, sure there is some risk in fighting and shit, but that is acceptable.

Then you hit level 15.

Level..

Fucking...

15...............

When you reach level 15 the game decides to rip off your training wheels and not give a shit that your feet are caught in them.

You lose EVERY single fucking Imp, whether they were from the first 200 or those you mined using that first lot. You get set back to fucking zero Imps.

Now you've got to buy Imps to do anything. The most basic package of 500 Imps will set you back $19!!!!! Or if you are feeling stupid why not buy 3000 for $119, or better yet 10000 for $299 - what a fucking bargain. Me being the dickhead I am actually handed over $19 for testing purposes (testing my mental faculties maybe????).

So what does 500 Imps get you? Not fucking much, really. Let's do some shit with some numbers and see.....

With 5 mines going I have a mining rate of 0.0000015 per second. This adds up to 0.1296 per day.

Not counting maybe winning (or probably losing) some in fights, how long until I can start a new mine?

...... 2.11something fucking years.

If I put those 100 back into mining how long until my next mine can open????

Another 1.76something years.

Next one?

Another fucking year and a half. Holy fuckballs this shit is slow.

1.3ish years for the next, and then finally 1.2ish years until I have finally doubled my number of Imps. Ignoring the fact that I cut off a heap of decimal bits for sake of my and your sanity and ease of me fucking writing this, that is almost 8 fucking years to double my Imps.

What would happen if I wanted to withdraw my Imps?

Well, first I need a minimum of 50 Imps available to withdraw (check, I've got that), AND you need to have been in at least 5 fights. Fuck. So I'll probably lose some along the way meaning my original 500 is going to be a little ragged around the edges.

Now let's check the value of IMP on the market...... $0.003868 as I write this. If (big fucking IF) I still somehow had 500 Imps, that will net me a hefty fucking $1.93.

Soooooo I would basically lose 89% of the money I put into the game. I am forced into playing the game to have even the remotest chance of getting back the money I put in. Fuck you, you stupid fucking game, and your idiot-faced ugly little Imps with their shit-eating grins.

Ok, breathe, take a second, count backwards from 10.....

They say there are other ways to earn a few Imps here and there. One of which is to join their Telegram. I tried, it didn't fucking work, their bot fucking ignored me. So no fucking free Imps for me!

Or maybe you were lucky and got in on the airdrop. Cool, you might actually make a few cents!

Also note that I had some major problems when I tried to fight a few weeks ago. I figured "fuck it, I might as well throw some Imps away". The game asked me for MetaMask confirmation for the fight (you are effectively spending crypto to do so), but then it never connected.

I tried logging out and in again, but then MetaMask wouldn't connect for that either! Restarting the browser, restarting the machine, nope, wouldn't fucking let me back in the game. It just sat there loading, popping up MetaMask for confirmation, loading, popping up ... blah fucking blah. In the meantime MetaMask was working for other things, so guess which one I am blaming for the problem?

I left it for a few weeks and now it works, so who the fuck knows what it was.

Final words

Don't do it!!!! Just don't cause yourself the pain. Stay right the fuck away from this one.

A bit less scammy than say Crypto Farmer was, but still, Ether Kingdoms can go sit on a mining pick and rotate for all I care.

I'm still looking for more games and faucets to destroy. I've got a few up my sleeve yet, but not too many. Link me your faves, or your fave scams and don't tell me they are scams if you don't like me. But please, no referral links.

Holy shit I must be getting desperate, I said "please".