Idle Slayer

The start is fun. But the endgame is a chore. When you get near the engame, the progress is a crawl. And I am not talking about the part of every idle games where there is nothing more to do and you just wait for more content. I am talking about the phase just before that, where you have content to unlock. Reaching the last upgrades can easily take months with no real progress in between. There is also the equipment system that is just "did you pray to RNG": are you lucky and got a mini game? are you lucky with the minigame and it dropped an equipment? are you lucky and it's the equipment you wanted out of 3 possibilties? Are you lucky and it has the enchantments you wanted? Are you lucky and it's excellent quality? Thus you need to grind the same minigames again and again to hope for a good drop. And for the equipment not reliant on minigames, it require you to do daily or weekly tasks that are always the same (collect coins, kill enemies, ...). Some QoL are missing (how is it that there is still no "buy maximum amount that is a multiple of 50") You also have the awful mechanic of Ascension: It's the classical second reset mechanics. Except that after only a few Ascensions, the bonus get really small. At the same time, you need to redo every tasks that unlock upgrades (I love redoing the same task that I already found annoying the first time). Even worse, some upgrades requires you to ascend to be active (and I am not talking about "get more ascension ressources", I am talking about "you bought this upgrade but need to ascend to make it active and buy the upgrades after that"). The last patch even introduced a new ressources that you can only get each time you ascend. You can craft a few upgrades with this new ressources (nothing really groundbreaking, I don't think it even multiplies production by 3 in total), but you can craft (wait for it ...) a new equipment. Yeah, praise be the RNG. There are also that the 2 times the devs made a limited time event, they were very poorly balanced and way harder than it should be. At some point, I realized that the game wasn't fun anymore and was just a chore. I invite other players to think if they enjoy the game or if it's just FOMO. If it's still fun for you, good for you. But if you don't enjoy it anymore, don't fall in the same trap that I was in: just quit the game. There are better ways to spend your time, even on more enjoyable idle games.

Idle Slayer has slain it's IDLE component. Mission Accomplished! Why? The dev decided that he didn't like people idling in his allegedly idle game, so he's changed that. How? By removing the ability to disable certain things. Why does this matter? You have to use the bow to get any kind of decent quantities of souls, the idle currency. You need to jump to shoot the bow. When you jump, you may hit a box that may warp you out of the main game and into one of several other minigames. If you jump often enough, you'll hit one because they follow you. So, you can no longer set an autoclicker to help you with the onerous task of jumping and shooting constantly. Because people weren't playing his game the way he wanted you to play it. It was a fun little idle game, but my hand issues have rendered this unplayable now that it's a clicker. This should probably be renamed to Active Clicker Slayer or something along those lines, because Idle Slayer is a very misleading title.

Idle Slayer has been a fun, free to play game with unintrusive microtransactions for some time. Not anymore. At the time of this review, the last update seems to be the developer literally trolling the players. He slowed the game's speed down by over 50% making it take much longer to make progress. He made arrows (which had always pierced enemies) only pierce some enemies on some stages with no explanation or ability to upgrade around it. Additionally, the game contains many "achievements" that are 100% RNG based. Players had developed a strategy to take some of the RNG out of one such achievement. The developer completely reworked how the games internal timers work just to eliminate this strategy while simultaneously adding an upgrade that players could purchase that shares the same name as the strategy. The upgrade has nothing to do with the strategy and doesn't help you accomplish anything in particular. Its just a slap in the face of players who enjoyed the game enough to really get into the meta. tldr; I don't know why the dev is trying to sabotage what WAS a decent, enjoyable game but he has, and I am not sticking around for more of this weird, unforced self-destruction.