Botam

 so for this past year and a half ive been exclusively playing cookie run kingdom to stock up on crystals for when millennial tree cookie finally releases (which is 100% going to be in the latter half of this year), which has made me fall behind hard on pretty much everything in the game seeing as i avoid spending crystals as much as possible. i only play for less than a month, which is how long the returning players event lasts, and then i fuck off for about 45 days (the amount of time it takes to trigger the returning players event again). this makes kingdom a very unfun game to play, when i already thought since launch that the game was pretty unfun. its basically a waiting game where you wait for timers to end and timers to end and timers to end so you can progress through the game (read: beat more people in arena or get a good score in some other mode).

i was a pre-reg player and have been with the game since day 1; dare i say, even day 0. i also had problems with kingdom since its launch, seeing as the day it released i couldnt play it because devsisters decided my phone was no longer fit to run the game - even though it was before - so im definetely kind of biased when it comes to my own opinion on the game. i know theres a lot of people who like it, and thats fine, i guess, but overall i just dont think its that fun. its a game, in my eyes, where you wait for something to finish, or you pay with crystals for it to finish faster. i can totally stomach that kind of gameplay, but when it comes to gacha games im way less kind to it.

which is why i find it pretty funny that i still prefer to play it over cookie run ovenbreak...

ive known about cookie run since 2014, but only started playing it in 2018. i remember very distinctly, it was like somewhere around may, and blackberry cookie had just been released. i have a specific memory of looking at one of the event screens and going, 'what the hell?'. i think the first 100 million score in trophy race would be achieved only a few days after i started playing: it was blackberry main, adventurer relay, and magmabird pet. i was really enjoying the game, dare i say it was my favorite for a little while. im not gonna pretend it was perfect, but it was a neat little game.

as time went on i started drifting away from cookie run in general. in 2020 i came back to it and it was an on-and-off relationship as a whole, but even when kingdom released i maintained the opinion that CROB was the better game. i still think that its foundational gameplay is way better than kingdom (to the point that i play kakao cookie run and i think its still better than both games combined, even if its older and has less content overall). but then march 2025 i decided to make a throwaway account to see how the game was going, and honestly, i think its worse than kingdom currently.

i dont even know how to describe my experience with CROB... it was very overwhelming. the games become a ship of theseus. its still got most of its main components - breakout, trophy race, cookie trials - but its changed so much that i couldnt navigate or tell what i was doing. i dont understand how the new breakout works, trophy race felt very familiar but also very different, and cookie trials (in my POV) went from a neat sidemode for seeing how far your cookies had come to a really annoying chore - granted this was already the case when the gacha removal update came around, but thats how it felt then and thats how it feels now. not to mention that i genuinely got lost in the UI. i was just clicking buttons and hoping they did something cool.

i think that my personal problem with CROBs evolution vs CRKs evolution is that ultimately kingdom has had a vision for its gameplay and its sticked to it since launch. theres been a lot of changes to kingdom that i dislike - beascuits are the main offenders, but the costume gacha shop, the introduction of a hundred billion different rarities, resonant toppings, crystal jams, and ascension, are also other gameplay additions that i think have made the game worse, especially for F2Ps - and i think in general CRK is definetely worse when it comes to F2P friendliness. i mean theres like, 7 different ways of upgrading your cookies, and they become progressively more difficult to keep up with if youre not willing to sell your soul or spend real life money to speed things up, but when it comes to the foundations of the gameplay itself, its sticked to what it wants to do. arena is the same, the world exploration is the same, bounties are the same, guild arena is the same, alliance is the same. i know the cake towers changed, but i honestly didnt pay much attention to the old tower to make an accurate comparison.

on the other hand, CROB is absolutely nothing like the game i liked playing back in 2018. i do recognize that part of this is that back then the game wasnt even 2 years old yet, and now its 9 years old, and thats a lot of time to make changes to the game, but even still, theres a lot of games out there that have ran for longer and didnt transform this much and this exaggeratedly. i just didnt have fun in CROB anymore. i dont know if this will be the same experience a complete newbie to the series will have, because they dont have the bias of being around back then, but for the time being, im not sure ill come back to CROB as an actual player.