Vespera

Edit #2: Just a few hours after posting this review the devs have added in kills per hour and xp per hour displays within the in game damage meter This is one of the better Idlers ive come across. It's not quite melvor idle level of polish and design but given it came out of alpha testing only a few weeks ago I can see the devs here already have the bones established of what may end up being a top tier idle game. You have what is in my opinion a 7/10 idler that literally just entered early access and still manages to be a 7/10 in the genre this early on in its development. That is impressive and very rare to see. The foundation for what could be a major player in the genre is there, and as it is now, i highly recommend giving it a shot if youre into this genre. Pros: - Literally as I write this review, I've had the dev ping me in discord twice letting me know that some of the QOL and gameplay pain points ive pointed out already have fixes in place and the updates will be pushed tomorrow. - The devs are insanely active in the discord and are constantly in discussions with players about what theyre experiencing and what they think the pain points are. Im pretty sure this guy has been putting in 12+ hour days since EA launch and you can tell, hes active from the moment he wakes up until he goes to bed. - The gameplay loop is solid, the choices you are presented with are interesting and there's plenty there to make you sit back and theorycraft what the best route forward may be. - The class and subclass design is really cool, and allows for a lot of creative theorycrafting of builds. The way both talent systems are designed leaves a lot of room for adding new things and expanding upon it. - The elements system piggybacks off of this class/subclass system, giving you even further customization of your build via a unique progression system involving exchanging certain combat drops for talent points, allowing you to put points into bonuses that are thematic to a specific elemental type. - All of these talent systems can easily be respecced for a small gold cost, giving you a lot of freedom to test various things. - Its just a genuinely fun and engaging Idler that rewards theorycrafting, thinking ahead, and planning out what you are going to do. - The ability to queue actions and gather X amount of a material before going to the next thing in the queue is massive and probably my favorite part of the game. Cons (note: i may write alot here, but none of these are actually a big deal and its all solvable with relative ease and time. Dev is probably already tracking all of this): - Theres a few bugs here and there, but so far for me theyve all been minor and mostly UI related. Nothing preventing gameplay - It's a game about killing monsters, gathering items, crafting items, and gaining experience points to progress. But there is no kills per hour, items per hour, or xp per hour being displayed to the user. Since beginning to write this, i brought this up in the discord and the dev said this is already planned to be added soon. But im going to leave it in here for the sake of showing how responsive they are. - The design of the Magic Academy is such that you will be spending a LARGE percentage of your time gathering and crafting resources far below your current gathering and crafting levels because you need a TON of these materials to progress that system, and that system appears to provide access to crucial crafting resources that you will need to have in bulk at the endgame to craft endgame things. Take this with a grain of salt as im still progressing to the endgame, but so far it appears as though that without the magic academy progressed youre going to be way too starved of the materials that comes from it because the other sources of these are just way too slow to keep up with the scaling costs into the endgame. I can tell by looking ahead at the material requirements of things like endgame gems. - What this means is that your gathering and crafting levels will fall further and further behind your combat progression, which means your gear level will fall further and further behind your combat progression. This ultimately is fine, because so much of your power comes from having the highest tier of gems you can have socketed in all of your items. Meaning you can very likely skip the last 20-30 or so levels of crafted gear and skip right into endgame gearing that requires running dungeons and other end game content to acquire it as drops. But on the same hand, it also feels like this shouldnt be the case from a design standpoint. - For reference, im level 92 combat with ~80 gathering and ~75 crafting. I'm still gathering and crafting planks and bars from level 25 and 35 gathering to progress the academy. Then i will move onto what will likely be 24+ hours of gathering and crafting level 40 and 45 resources and at that point i will be easily 100+ combat while having gained only a few levels in crafting and gathering. This will continue until i hit 140 combat and reach the endgame, well see what my gathering and crafting levels are at that point but i suspect theyre going to be fairly low, probably 100-105 if i had to guess based on the pacing so far. At that point, all of my stuff comes from endgame content and i can craft the endgame gems at level 100 crafting so i may not even have a reason to keep leveling them. Well see. EDIT: about 15 minutes after posting thing, the dev pushed an update making the Magic Academy progression shared across all characters on your account.