Wildlife Planet: The Incremental

Most budget idle games in this price bracket look like they were built in an afternoon out of default engine assets. Wildlife Planet: The Incremental doesn't. Its regions — Amazon rainforest, wetland, primeval forest and more — are rendered in a lush, painterly style with real compositional care, and the store page's claim that species descriptions are "verified by professional biologists" gives the whole thing an educational angle most incrementals don't bother with. It's a genuinely appealing pitch: a relaxing, nature-themed idler you could recommend to someone who'd never touch a clicker otherwise.

Two currencies, and a question mark over one of them

The core loop is straightforward — collect "drops" passively and by tapping, spend them to level up unlocked species, and use a second currency, gems or diamonds depending on the review, tied to rarer unlocks and an "Expedition" system for bonus rewards. That second currency is where the game's reputation gets complicated. Reviews posted in the days after its 25 August 2022 launch are specific and consistent: "Already a paid game," reads one. "Then levelling up is blocked by things like 'collect more cards' and 'drops' that acts as time cap pushing you to buy diamonds for cash. The system is unrewarding, boring and honestly feels like cash grab." Another from the same week is blunter still: "No, microtransactions..."

The developer responded quickly. Its Steam news feed shows a post dated 31 August 2022 — four days after those launch reviews — titled "In-game Purchase Has been Removed," following an earlier post explaining what the shop had contained. Taken at face value, that should have settled the complaint. It doesn't appear to have, at least not for every player: a review posted in January 2026, more than three years later, opens with a formatted warning block reading "Warning: In-Game Cash Shop" and describes being "expected to give money/credit card details to the developers through this cash shop." This library can't play the current build to check which account is accurate — whether that's a leftover, non-functional shop screen still visible in the UI (a pattern seen in other CapPlay Interactive Steam ports), a re-added feature, or a reviewer describing an old experience without checking whether it had changed. What's certain is that the developer's own announcement and a recent, detailed review directly contradict each other, and that's worth knowing before you buy rather than after.

The rest of the experience

Set the monetisation question aside and the remaining complaints are milder. One 2023 reviewer calls the game "meh," noting decent presentation undercut by progression that "doesn't get interesting enough" and pointing out there aren't any Steam achievements to chase — correct, per Valve's own achievement API, which returns no schema for this app at all. Another flags a more specific annoyance for an idle game: it apparently needs to stay in the foreground to keep progressing, so you can't minimise it and let it run in the background while doing something else, which cuts against the genre's usual appeal.

On the positive side, several long-playtime reviewers are genuinely fond of it. "Used to play in my mobile," reads one, at over 118 hours, calling it "a very good idler" that doesn't force spending and prices fairly. Another, at 235 hours, pushes back directly on the progression complaints: "the game gives you the necessary [resources]... Idk what the people complaining about the progression are on about." That split — happy long-term players against a specific, dated monetisation complaint from launch week that seems to have resurfaced years later — is the honest shape of this game's reputation.

5.5 out of 10. Wildlife Planet: The Incremental earns real credit for looking and sounding better than almost anything else at its price point, and for trying a genuinely different theme in a genre that rarely bothers. But its monetisation story is genuinely unresolved in the public record — a developer's "removed" announcement sitting across from a 2026 review describing the opposite — and that uncertainty, on top of thin progression and zero achievements, is enough to keep a beautiful-looking idle game from an easy recommendation. Check the current state of that cash shop yourself before deciding.