Legends of Dragaea: Idle Dungeons

I'm going to give this a thumbs up, but I do have some personal criticisms. [b]Things I like[/b] -The vibe/aesthetic/art all that is cool -Pretty good polish overall -Neat character/team build once you learn to ignore the flawed auto-build system. -Manual Optimization/Team Building is required if you want to beat the final bosses without several hundreds of hours of idling for overwhelming stat advantages [b]Things I don't like[/b] -The auto-build system is fine for the super early game, but I think it makes it harder and more obtuse to understand team/character building. It just doesn't account for everything that goes into a build, like perks chosen or other party members. And it's not really good enough to beat fights at a certain point. -Some of the late achievements do just require letting the game run over night for several days. I "finished" the game probably around 50-60 hours. The rest was for achievement completion. -This is a personal preference thing, I like my idlers to be a little less idly than this is. I loved Upload Labs, for example. Where as this is more have some interaction in the town, building stuff, buying stuff, building characters and teams, and then the rest is just hours upon hours of letting the fully automatic dungeons run. When that's done, go back to town and repeat. Just isn't quite interactive enough for me. TLDR: I liked it enough to 100% it, but had I known entirely what the game would feel like to play beforehand, I probably would have skipped it.

This is a neutral but trending positive review; I really enjoy the game, and I think it's worth buying as-is. It has some significant rough spots but nothing that ruins it. (The developers are still active and working on expanding the game, but I rarely factor future promises into my reviews.) The actual offline idle progression layer takes a while to access but if you don't mind letting the game run in the background you can repeat dungeons X times or indefinitely (there's a 'until full inventory' option and you can filter out/autosell all loot to run for just money and xp for as long as you care to while the game is open). There are enough little progression elements like beastiary completion, perk unlocking, guild progress, and etc to satisfy that little sphere-grid dopamine goblin in me, and that's all I really ask for from a progression game. This feedback is mainly for the developer. The two main areas that need improvement are the depth of content (as of this review, there is no prestige system and not many layers of progression in the game) and the UI. The first two-thirds or so of the game has a significant inventory management aspect that is rendered completely moot by one of the last upgrades (items become fully customizeable so there's no longer a need to sort through them). However, during the part of the game that does require inventory management, it's a frankly awful chore. Several different screens display parts of the inventory (shops, the Equip screen, a separate Inventory screen, a screen for upgrading/dismantling equipment, probably more) and they all behave a little differently. The only screen that offers any meaningful sorting of items is the Inventory screen, which only allows sorting by item slot, not by level or grade or by name. The slots in the UI are icons only, so e.g. selecting a particular armor type to sort by requires remembering or figuring out which 'glove' icon means heavy armor gloves vs medium or light armor gloves. This should be improved to offer display sorting by any characteristic, and should work the same on every screen. When doing bulk item selling, dismantling, or other modifications, the only selection options are item level and grade, and each selection includes every level and grade below it. There is a 'lock' feature but no mass 'lock' selection tool. These mean that, for example, if I wanted to dismantle all low grade items (which don't sell for much) and all legendary grade items (which sell for a lot, but have a chance to dismantle into better components) but sell all the intermediate grade items, I can't select the green, blue, yellow and purple intermediate grades to sell -- if I set the highest sell grade to purple, it would sell the common (white) grade items too. I have to dismantle my common items, then sell the other items, then go back to dismantle the legendary items. Given how much inventory management needs to be done these kinds of multi-step workarounds for the sort, sell, craft, and so on actions add up and become exhausting. I was frankly relieved when the inventory became obsolete even though that kind of eliminates an entire layer of gameplay. There are also UI bugs. In one case, the on-click action for a different inventory menu is preserved: when going into the Utilities menu to set up consumable item use, if you don't go and set all of your other inventory access screens to "inspect" on click (so for example if the shops are set to "sell" on click), you won't be able to select which slot your Utility item equips to. Navigating back and forth through menus is often somewhat obnoxious as the 'back' action is unpredictable. Right click sometimes functions as 'back' but may take the UI back one step, to the Roster or character profile menu (even if the Roster menu hasn't been used last/recently/ever), or up to the the town screen. The 'back' menu button on most screens will often take one to the Roster or hero screen as well. This can be frustrating when for example trying to set up gear or perks on multiple characters. There are character select left and right buttons on several menus but these are sometimes inaccessible after nesting in a few steps, and 'back' often kicks one back to the town. This game really needs a prestige system and 'challenge' runs. The boss caves do offer a degree of challenge and I love the idea of the three-party raid mechanic but they become trivialized extremely quickly. Making challenges that require adopting certain tactics, or which are open-ended and have multiple viable strategies but block brute-force attempts, would be a welcome improvement.

Menu slop. That is the most succinct way to describe this game. Every little thing you go to do in this game, you're going through an entire universe of menus to do it. That would be all well and good if the stats and buildout of your teams actually meant anything. Spoiler alert: they don't. Just slap on the newest gear you get, upgrade it to near max which you'll be able to do for every character and then some after a few days of letting it run, slap on some newer abilities with barely a thought to their function, and keep just tossing your party at the wall till they break through. I did this the entire game and never had any issues. It is mind-numbingly dummy-proofed. Before the "expansion", I had an issue with the lack of difficulty outside of self-imposed challenges (if I have to make the rules to have any level of challenge, you failed somewhere in your design, period), it was fine enough for the length it was. After the expansion? Nah, screw this bloated mess. I had completed this game 6 months prior to the expansion, around the time it initially came out. I know I was far from the only one. 6 months later here comes an expansion that is clearly more padding to the early/mid game, locked behind massive grind walls that would only make sense progression wise from a fresh save. None of it was a challenge in anyway for me. Instead it was just a solid got damn week of letting this stupid game run to re-achieve completion on content that serves as nothing more than even more padding for a fairly long game. No one likes expeditions, no asked for you to put a week deep wall in that forces us to use them. This is on top of the UI changing and adding even more got damn menus to wade through. If you're gonna add on to the game, don't blatantly spit on the people who already gave you their time and money to play your game to completion. I cannot recommend it. It's needlessly padded out menu slop with no hit of challenge, plain and simple.

I honestly found this game to be far more addicting than I expected. Finding new gear and upgrading skills for your build is fun. I get sucked into the "just one more run through the dungeon" or "one more shot at this raid boss" quite a bit. Would love for this game to keep getting support so that maybe there could even be a second game. The game has good bones and it would be awesome if they took the core of this and fleshed it out even more.

I was enjoying the game until this last update came out. It completely negated over 160 hours worth of play. Making my team useless and not able to beat even the simplest of levels. As you grow your team more levels they get weaker and weaker. This update has been horrid for the game.

Don't waste your time. Inconsistent dev work, and they don't pay attention to anything anyone posts, positive or negative, or helpful. Another "Vibe-Coded" game, that is not worth your time. Play your backlog.

Great game. I really like it, but man I wish there was workshop support.

Nope! No frickin' way. No. It moves SO DAMN SLOW. You see those videos on the store page where attacks are flying off and things are happening? That's not how the game actually plays, AT ALL. Steam should actually be pulling this for bullshots. You SLOWLY walk through a dungeon, an encounter SLOWLY starts, you SLOWLY charge up some attacks, that then miss, so you SLOWLY build up the next one. No way in hell I'm sitting through these slow ass battles. Just no. "Oh well it probably takes a while to -" no shut the hell up. No. This isn't how the game goes when you boot in. If there was a 10x speed then I'd probably play it, but as is this game is just actually unbearable. Completely and totally unbearable. I never thought I'd refund an idle game, let alone after 10 minutes...but when ONE BATTLE took NINE of those ten minutes...no. No. It's an idle game.

100/10 background game to play whilst getting my soul wrung out playing fear and hunger.