I feel certain that Timber Rush is a terrible game. I’ve also been mainlining this game about chopping a tree for the last two days, to a point where I’m getting worried about myself. You’re not even actually chopping a tree! It’s just a guy running left and right around a single, static background, collecting logs that magically fly out of a tree trunk. And I just keep playing it. So maybe it’s a brilliant game and I should recognize it as such?
Timber Rush is about numbers going up in the crudest way imaginable, a clicker game that barely even features clicking, in which you move your woodcutter side to side as increasing numbers of increasingly silly logs fly around the screen. Oh, and gold. You chop gold out of the tree. And rubies too. And then between runs, which for the first portion of the game last only 30 seconds each, you spend your logs and gold upgrading your abilities across literally hundreds of branches on a tree (I have unlocked 101 of them, and they just keep coming), as well as buying new axes and upgrading them, and indeed doing the same with lumberjacks (currently I have a Gnome using an Arcane Crescent), and later on new crew members to help with your Sisyphean task of chopping. I think, more than anything else, Timber Rush has crystallized for me the essential core of what I will begrudgingly call a “gameplay loop.”
That’s it. That’s the whole game. I only played this thing at all because of my habit of scrolling the depths of Steam’s new release lists and trying random things. I’ve reached a point now where my lumberjack’s skills are such that I barely even need to do the moving left and right aspect of the game—essentially all the meaningful interaction—because he’s surrounded by so many log-scooping drones and has such, er, wood magnetism, that it starts to essentially play itself. That is, except for picking the upgrades, which come in so thick and fast that selecting them is almost a clicker game in its own right, as I’m picking one of three possible options every couple of seconds. I could tell you at great length how you can play a round (now lasting 70 seconds) in so many different ways, depending upon the in-round upgrade paths you pick, focusing perhaps on Hefty Timber improvements and magma logs and their explosive abilities, or choosing instead to emphasize Stormwood and its lightning power while doubling down on Swift Swings…
Hopefully you can start to see my dilemma. This game, as a game, is objectively awful! My role is just clicking as a barely animated sprite picks up crudely drawn and entirely un-animated logs in front of a static pixel drawing of a tree. (And worse, I’ve no idea how much of this complete nonsense might have been created by genAI: There’s no declaration on the store page, allowing me plausible deniability, and I hope that whoever Allteron Apps might be has had the integrity to create or source all the assets legitimately. But I’m now realizing, after playing two days, that I’m also pretty sure this contains a lot of AI slop.) But for all that, it’s also had so much intricate work done, so many aspects to upgrade and improve, and it paces it all so incredibly well! So maybe this is a great game? Maybe it’s objectively really good? Help me.
This isn’t my first time falling down a hole like this, but I’ve previously been able to rationalize things much better to myself. My son got me playing the ridiculous mobile game NecroMerger for a while there, until I finally hit the far edges of what the free-to-play game would allow without miring me in the misery of ads or IAPs. And then there was Cookie Clicker—the game about which I wrote the post, Fuck Me, I Can’t Stop Playing Cookie Clicker. (I got revenge on my son with that one.) But both games were far more obviously professional projects, and Cookie Clicker is the most brilliantly have-your-cake-and-eat-it spoof of a genre ever created. I can justify them to you, if pressed. But Timber Rush? It’s rubbish! Except it’s not. But it is. But I’m still playing.
I think perhaps there’s something so very pure about Timber Rush. It’s kind of like those crappy Space Invaders clones you might get on a near-disposable device, botched together in a couple of hours by a tired coder, and yet so remarkably compelling to keep playing. Or Snake! Remember Snake, on your Nokia cellphone, that you played and played and played not just because it was literally the only game on the phone, but because it just had that compulsive element? Is Snake a crudely thrown-together minimalist arcade game that runs on almost no graphics or memory, or is it a complete masterpiece for doing all that in a way that makes you want another go?
In writing this, have I just insulted whomever might be behind this daft game? The developer is really responsive in the Steam Discussions, and super-friendly even to people who are leaving aggressively rude remarks, thanking people for feedback and promising improvements. Are they going to see their project on this big gaming site, and then have their elation destroyed when they read my saying it’s “objectively awful”? (I mean, if they’ve used as much AI as I suspect, perhaps that serves them right.) Or will they laugh at me for saying so right before I play another round?
At the same time, do I have to accept that this is good because I’ve enjoyed it, or can I sit comfortably with knowing I’ve enjoyed a dreadful game? Should I have just kept this all to myself, and not publicly shamed myself so obviously? Or am I over-thinking all this to a ridiculous degree? And how much does it suck that, only as I’ve been writing this article have I realized how possible it is that this is the work of genAI over human ingenuity? And what does that say about me, or video games? Oh god, this is developing into a full existential crisis.
I absolutely do not recommend Timber Rush, and you’d be a fool to buy it, and I am a fool.