The Magician's Research

It's a fine game, for an Idle-Clicker. The art style is appealing, male fantasy or otherwise. You can probably put an hour into it before you get the idle phase. Following the Clicker style though, the monsters scale quickly so you'll be using the soft-reset at least twice in the first 3hrs maybe. Now the reason I'm voting this down, is because they already have a full-blown Premium Shop set up that I did not care to look too deep into. There is one Mage locked behind the premium currency(pc), and you'll have to spend up to $40 to unlock her right away. There are weekly and daily log-in rewards that give some crystals(pc), but it will take over one month to get enough crystals that way. If the only macrotransactions had been a "Support the Devs" thing at $10, I'd have been fine with that, but the pricing was garbage. $10 gets you 1000 crystals, $20 gets you 2100, $50 gets you 5500 and $100 gets you 11500. The Locked Mage costs 2500 crystals to unlock. Aside of that it has Time-Savers that give you limited buffs for 100, 300, 500 or 1500 crystals. There is a pet that costs $10 that permanently boosts your HP & DMG by 50%. There is a $10 value pack for 500 crystals and a pocketful of buffs and resources. Finally, they have a VIP system which requires 50 points to gain a rank. you earn 1 point for every dollar you spend in the store. Rank 2 is unlocked at 100 extra points(150 total). Ranks 3 is 200 more(350). Rank 4 is 300 more(650). Leaving rank 5 at 400 more VIP points(1050 total). I cannot confirm these totals, as I will not even spend $1 on this game, however, 400 VIP points is still $400, I've been a whale too many times to the Freemium platform. So, if you've had problems with macrotransactions in the past, stay away from the game. If you're not one who falls into Freemium traps, feel free to go at it and support the devs if you want. 5/10

For a game called, "The Magician's Research," it lacks what it needs to be called such. There is no lore to this game, a backbone to carry game play as you journey forth to slay a myriad of these "experiments." And as seen through game play, even rarer creatures fall to some pitiful zap from your hands. This game features a vast amount (compared to other games) of playable characters, and that's very interesting to say the least. However, each character, or wizard, only carries small buffs with them rather than a whole new build to experiment with, and those buffs are negligible. Imagine a fledgling magician who just set out on his own journey using the same spells as some spider queen who had lived for thousands of years. The same goes for all of the other characters. There is no "research" coming here. No character has their own personality, it's just a picture that you can see do some sub-par animations during your playtime. Progression is *very* slow. Even if you max out skill tree and buffs for exp gain and resource gain, it's all too slow. Max out damage and defense, progression is still too slow. Have a balance of both; All the same. Progression is linear, and half of the crucial buffs don't even stick with you on soft reset. You think you'd have faster clear on your next run, but wait. You forgot you used a rare material to boost your damage and exp gain on the last run 100x. Now you don't have that and you have to defeat a good 100 monsters to get a single point of that special currency to upgrade those again. The buffs in this game are actually terribad and I stuck through thinking it'd get better. First you get your skill tree, not bad, not good. The buffs there are able to get you through content. Next is the main juice, where you simply level up resource gain or strengthen your character. Strong but a bland concept. Next you turn in stuff to some shady magician for returns with less value than stuff you turned in. There's a fairy you turn runes into for sub par resource gain that doesn't stick with you. Then there's a dragon which was covered earlier. And finally is "alchemy" where you turn in materials for a buff that only lasts on the current run you're in for 30 minutes - a few hours depending on the rarity of the resources you're willing to sacrifice. Imagine waiting a solid 8 hours to get to that point only to find out you get a temporary buff *that's weak* for a short amount of time using resources you need to kill thousands of monsters just to get. Freemium currency is even harder to come by. It seems like you get a single point once in a blue moon, and a mere 100 as a weekly bonus. It takes 2500 to unlock a new character, 1500 for a "permanent" buff that is only applied for a short amount of time *ON RESET,* and 1000 for a permanent buff that's pretty negligible. This game is no idle game, there is 0 progression while offline. It is in a sense if you leave the game open while suffering through a game of League of Legends or slaving over grinding in Black Desert Online as I did. Other than that, this game requires your full undivided attention. But this game is nowhere near polished enough to be one of your "main game"s. I do admit that this game has alright artwork and it was one of the ones that executed a simple yet effective "tutorial" if a wall of text after every 5 minutes of progression counts. Other than that, this game has no chance of garnering a large audience and only those with pitiful lives and too much time on their hands will dedicate themselves to this game.

This an idle game where you can only really progress if you keep the game running in idle. No offline idle progress, which may be this games greatest downfall. There is a decent amount of content for a game like this, but a crazy grind requiring active playtime is not the best way to do it.