IdleOn: The Idle Game MMO | a Review
originally published on 20/12/2023;
Hello everyone, I am the idly dying creature, G.E.M.Simov, a being so idle it is incredibly active, and I have come here to tell you about “Legends of IdleOn”, otherwise known as “Idleon”, otherwise known as "Idleon: The Idle Game MMO".
Simple review details - I rank games on an out of 10 basis, granting up to 3 points in 3 categories, as well as a last, single point from my own self, depending on my experience with it.
In addition to that, this is an IDLE game. Those are barely proper games and so I will put in less effort with reviewing them than I would otherwise.
Gameplay
This game is a pseudo-mmo. More on that a bit later. What it does is present the Player with the opportunity to create a multitude of characters who all feed into each other, through which comes the idle aspect of the game. However, those need to be unlocked first, which presents the Player with a misleading sense of opportunity to wield agency and progress by playing the game in the early stages.
That occurs through a class selection, which provides minor bonuses to a certain pair of stats, after which the Player is off to play. Naturally, upon beginning the game, everything is easy. Enemies die in one to two hits, levels are gained impressively quickly, and progress is lightning fast.
Movement occurs either through the use of the “WASD” keys, with “W” and “S” having conditional uses, or through clicking where one would want the Player Character (PC) to go. Clicking also serves as a means of making the PC interact with whatever was clicked - be it a non-Player Character (NPC), an object or an enemy (also NPCs).
Right off the bat, the first thing the Player is tasked with doing, and will subsequently do, is engage in combat. Combat occurs by clicking on an enemy and waiting - the PC will automatically attack every so often, doing an amount of damage that ranges from X to Y, with the added opportunity to critically strike for an increase of the damage done, which increase can be increased later on in the game and starts off at being around 20% on top.
Combat is incredibly boring, due to the fact that it relies on the Player clicking the “Auto” button and being left in the background for a lengthy amount of time. That’s part of the idle functionality - the Player always has the opportunity to press the “Idle” button, which will prompt their character to automatically, and without need for guidance, to start walking about and picking fights with all enemies on screen, one by one.
That’s fortunate, but also not so. It is unfortunate, because whenever an enemy dies, it drops some kind of loot - be it an item or money - and that loot must be clicked, if the Player wants to collect it. There is a solution - 5 dollars and automatic looting becomes unlocked!
Alternatively, what is the point of doing these things automatically? To grind out experience, for when the PC reaches a certain level - because experience points are also gained by defeating enemies, and they do not need to be picked up - the Player will unlock the ability to make a new character. These Characters are meant to be secondary to the Main (first) Character, and their goal is to gather one of the many types of resources that are available.
There’s wood that can be gathered - which requires sitting in front of a tree and hitting it every once in a while. The higher the PC’s Wisdom stat is, the more likely that a hit on the tree produces wood, and the higher the chance of it being more than 1 unit of wood. There’s mining, which features the exact same gameplay as wood gathering, but it’s an ore vein that is being stricken, not a tree, and the defining stat is Strength, not Wisdom.
Unfortunate as it is, these mechanics present a means of being made fun - yet that is locked behind a humongous time wall. Still, let me explain what it is: A bar shows up on the screen. The middle is green, the outer edges are red. An arrow starts moving over the bar, right to left and then left to right. If clicked while over the green, a point is awarded. If clicked while over the red, the minigame ends. The more points that the Player gets before the minigame ends, the better the Player performs at the task and the more loot (be it wooden logs or bits of ore) they receive.
There are 5 of those available per day, for all the characters the Player has. The Player can have upwards of 6 characters, so consider how incredibly fun it is - and these minigames get exhausted as soon as the Player has started playing the game, thus forcing them into going along with the idle game. Playing the game by not playing it at all - already, we have a massive failure on the gameplay front.
But maybe there is a means of alleviating it? Alas, the solution is to spend money to get some of the premium currency - gems - with which to buy an extra 4 daily minigames per purchase. That’s 2 dollars for that bit of enjoyability. Maybe there is something else to be done, though we already have two different types of pay-to-win…
Alas, the answer remains no. If the Player wants to do things, they will need inventory space - and inventory space is very limited. The way to increase it? 2 dollars for 4 slots. This plays a bad trick on the Player, due to the fact that whilst automatically fighting a large number of enemies over a lengthy period of time, they will run out of room in their inventory to pick the items up.
That means that a lot of loot will stay on the ground. What happens with that loot? It disappears when the Player leaves the area, so you are being punished for playing as the game intends you to play - spending a lengthy amount of time AFK, playing the game by idling, only to find out that when you return you can only pick up half of the items that have dropped. The other half? Gone.
This issue is even more exasperated when one considers that Quest Items - yes, there are quests in this MMO-esque game - also take up slots in the player’s inventory. And quest rewards don’t normally show up in the Player’s inventory, they get strewn about all over the screen, requiring that the Player clicks them all, separately, to collect them. That is made even more enjoyable when these items fall in front of a portal - that leads out of the zone - because clicking the item will make the PC walk over to the portal and leave the zone, thus destroying all the items that have been dropped as a reward from the quest. Some of those items can be the premium currency.
In theory, this issue is solved through the introduction of the “reclaim item” button in the Codex, which features a list of all completed quests. Unfortunately, this is either buggy or broken, as it does not work for more than half the quests that show up with it being available for.
Now, allow me to summarize once more - this game features a very small inventory, a very time-consuming “gameplay” loop, a very time consuming set of mechanics that literally require that time be spent away from the game, whilst simultaneously punishing the Player for spending too much time engaging with those mechanics through monstrously limited inventory space and a reliance on clicking, which clicking is the only means of interacting with objects, and the traversal through portals into different zones, which can delete items dropped on the ground, does not require a confirmation.
So we already have conflicting mechanics and/or design. But it does not end yet. If the Player is being punished for being AFK too long, then they are also punished for actively playing the game, because the fun means of playing the game are limited to 5 per day, exhausted in 5 minutes, and requiring 24 hours to recharge. The alternative is actively looking at the PC performing the same action over sixty minutes, rather than being AFK and allowing the PC to do the task Idly, because that way the amount of loot that will drop will be able to fit in the Player’s inventory.
But it does not involve playing the game at all. It involves looking at a single animation. That is another contradiction, and, unfortunately, this is the entirety of the game. The game constantly presents the Player with “new” mechanics, which are simply the old mechanics but recolored, and tells the Player that they need to engage with those mechanics, and the means of engaging with those mechanics is via using a secondary Character and specializing them for the purposes of that mechanic, while spending 24 hours of playing another game or doing something else.
As a result of that, the game is purposefully made to be as lacking in the fun department as possible, because all of the issues it forces upon the Player can be solved by paying. Alternatively, the Player can spend hundreds of hours to play the game and get the things that they are missing, but to do so would be equatable to torture.
Should I, then, talk about the other mechanics that the game presents the Player with? The stats are interesting - in the sense that they appear simple, initially, but grow more and more complex. Each level brings with it a number of talent points which can be allocated, increasing certain stats. The higher certain stats are, the better the PC performs in a certain regard. The more Strength the PC has, the better it is at Mining, whilst also increasing Damage for the Warrior Class and Accuracy for the Archer class.
Oh, there it is - the complexity is showing. Classes are an improvement that shows up later on in the game - not very far from the start, but a discerning Player would have already been assailed by the horrible User eXperience and would have deemed this game unworthy of their time. Regardless, the game offers three classes - Warrior, Archer and Mage. Mages are good at chopping trees down and doing massive amounts of damage. Warriors are good at Mining and taking loads of damage. Archers are good at smithing and going fast - they neither do lots of damage, nor do they take a lot of damage.
And each of those classes presents the Player with more talent options which take certain stats and intertwine them, making one or both of them higher, based on the value of the other. What they also do is monstrously reduce the power wielded by the Player, by lessening the damage and health of the PC, except when the Player picks Warrior, because the “Beginner” class that is given to the Player for the tutorial is, actually, capable of dishing out more damage than what Archers and Mages can offer early on.
Following that, the Player will start climbing. Going through zones, collecting materials over hours of play-time, using said materials to craft slight upgrades for their weapons, making use of the coins collected from enemies to purchase stamps - yet another mechanic that increases power and can be manipulated with the premium currency - they will get their hands on a pet that will provide them with some bonuses, they will start collecting cards and reaping rewards from said cards (also purchasable in the store), they might do dungeons and find out that those are also time gated and the gate can be opened through the use of a wallet…
The more I talk about this game, the more I realize that it is purely made as a means to latch onto a certain type of person and drain them of the money they’ve allocated for spending on recreational activities. It’s a game that has impressively complex mechanics, which grow more and more complex the further down the rabbit hole the Player goes, which, by merit of being that complex, are interesting and captivating.
There are also some bafflingly bad decisions, such as the presence of no hotkeys, the fact that items can not be pressed with, say, the right mouse button to be moved into a different container and need to be dragged, the fact that the experience required for every subsequent level increases at a rate far greater than the experience provided by enemies, the fact that “auto” mode cannot be turned off while the PC is doing something (such as going down a rope), the fact that even on a computer the Player needs to hold down the left mouse button on an item to activate it, as though the Player was playing a mobile game on their mobile phone, and many, many more.
Ultimately, the game is a bad game from a gameplay standpoint, even if it were a single person’s undertaking, because its main draw is that the Player can not play it and still progress. In fact, not playing the game IS the way to progress! And that’s not respectable. One other thing - this game is meant to be played on a mobile phone, thus some of the issues I pointed out are not as egregious when encountered on a phone - some things are not even issues at all - but the problem is that this game is being offered on a computer (via Steam). That, in turn, means there should be at least some functionality with a computer’s options (the keyboard) 1/3
Presentation
This game looks neat. It relies on pixel art to present its world to the Player, and does so quite successfully. Not only that, but the sights it does unveil are impressive - at least some of them. There is not that much in the way of backgrounds or gorgeous views here, but the sprite work is still quite nice. Unfortunately, though, that’s as far as niceness in regards to Presentation extends.
The game has a musical score accompanying it, but it is far too loud, even when its volume is lowered, and I would not go out of my way to claim that it is good in any way. It is very middling, and, frankly, exactly what one could expect out of a generic fantasy soundtrack, coupled with the pixel-art visuals. It’s not bad, but it isn’t astonishing, either.
This game does one thing very poorly - and those are UI menus, exclusively due to the fact that there is no “X” button that gets the Player out of the menus. Instead, the Player needs to use either the “Escape” key or by clicking outside of the menu that is opened. That might cut it when the game is being played on a phone, but on a PC? Not quite.
Now, what this game does well is its tutorial. It presents lots of information to the Player and teaches them, decently enough, how to play it. The tutorial is presented through a cinematic-esque gameplay sequence, then a series of quests given to the Player by different NPCs. The information is reasonably exhaustive and the fact that almost everything is covered by the tutorial is very good. In addition to that, there is a specialized menu - the Codex - which features a HINTS tab, in which are featured many expanded explanations of the game’s mechanics. That’s great!
What is not great is that a lot of information is withheld from the Player. Examples include - what, exactly, do my stats do? Such as how does my Luck stat improve my chances at receiving experience? Alternatively, how long do I need to wait to be able to perform this activity again? How much experience will I gain for doing this? What is the likelihood of me receiving this item?
All of these bits of information, necessary for one’s proper planning of an “Idle” session is not provided by the game. It might be found on the Wiki, but that is an external tool, and thus not included.
In conclusion, this game looks neat and cozy as a means of attracting Players, and also manages to present itself in a very respectable manner, whilst making many unfortunate mistakes. 2/3
Story
The Player/the Player Character was once a very powerful goon, but then they encountered the space troll and were thrown back down to level 1, and they were then forced to once again do everything they had previously done - to make it from zero to hero!
The game’s story is incredibly bare-bones and situated on the back-burner, whilst also being thoroughly nonsensical and continuously breaking the 4th wall to such an extent that there is no fourth wall - the NPCs are constantly talking to the Player, not the Player’s Character.
Other reasons for the story’s lackluster nature include the fact that it is perpetually unfinished, as this game is in perpetual development (eternal early access). There is little to say about it, other than the fact that it is there and it emulates the type of humor Deadpool utilizes, though it is stifled by having to stick to pg-13 rated jokes.
Overall? It’s neat that there is something there, but it is nothing special. 1/3
Legendary Point
Does this game get the legendary point, so craved and wanted by all and none at the same time? No, without a doubt. This game has so little game in it that I am almost insulted by its apparent success. 0/1
Conclusion
4/10. Purely off of looking pretty, this idle game manages to present itself as a nearly average game, though it is average only when it comes to idle games. I’d strongly advise against playing it, even if you are a fan of idle games, as it is monstrously pay-to-win and stifling for those who do not want to partake in the utilization of real money.
I hang it on the wall of shame. It does look good, but it is shameful nonetheless.