Incremental Epic Hero

Played the Kongregate version for several months, and now we have a Steam version. I simply had to play it again. So here's my review for Incremental Epic Heroes by hapiwaku!

First, the good:
~ Story - 7/10 - Nice original setting for each little area, and even the quests have some interesting dialogue. Upgrades often have their own story too, which just means there's plenty to read while waiting for things to pick up speed, or while waiting to get levels or loot while farming.
~ Progression - 8/10 - There is really only one part in the progression where I felt lost and couldn't figure out how to progress further, but that was solved by leveling my main skills further (a specific boss has a lot of defense lol) outside of that one spot, the progression felt smooth and I always was able to figure out how to get from point A to point B with little to no confusion or assistance.
~ Performance Mode - 10/10 - This should be a feature in every idle game that has any kind of animations. Seriously. hapiwaku did right by the players with this feature, and I express my thanks for this.
~ Premium Currency/Real Money Shop - 8/10 - Some of the items in here seem extremely overpriced to me, but considering their functionality, I'm willing to look the other way, especially considering you can earn premium currency both from one time quests/milestones but also from daily quests that are infinitely repeatable. And the value per dollar spent is pretty good in my honest opinion, if you intend to put money into a free idle game.
~ Additional Features - 9/10 - I won't take up too much time with the other stuff here, like capturing monsters, or dealing with the extra currencies, because they just work. Getting a little extra loot via the Capture mechanic is a nice touch too.

And we get to the bad...
~ Lag - I had assumed this was mostly due to my browser hating Kongregate and webgames in general, but seeing this game hoarding my CPU's resources, despite being such a simple game (compared to a select few similar idle games) this is an issue that needs to be fixed sooner rather than later. Doesn't seem to be a memory leak, as the problem doesn't get progressively worse over time, it just gets bad after a few minutes and stays that way until I close the game.
~ Offline Progression - Your offline progression doesn't exist, instead you get 'Nitro' which can be activated and consumed (1 per second) to double the game speed. Considering mid game has a few different ways of getting Nitro while online, this basically means that offline progression doesn't do anything. Big swing and a miss on this point.
~ Drop Rates - The drop rates on some items are *abysmal*. As an example, one item you will need to unlock a certain upgrade can only be dropped by a boss which gains more stats every time you kill it (though you also get a tiny additive boost to drop rate for each kill) and the base drop rate is 0.25%, or 1 in 400 kills. I killed said boss 793 times before getting the first drop, which took a good 2 hours to pull off. There are ways to increase drop rates, but honestly... the best you can hope for is probably around 5% drop rate, unless you've killed thousands of that boss... and the stats would be too high for you to do anything long before reaching that point. Maybe I'm not fully optimizing my drop rates, but I gotta say that this was a real issue for a completionist like me. Oh, and this isn't a one time thing - there are half a dozen such items, and they aren't even the rarest items in the game!
~ Skill Variety (Warrior/Angel) - If you are trying to clear dungeons as quickly as possible with Warrior... you have exactly 2 skills that will help you to hasten this process. If you go with Angel... You don't have any AoE skills whatsoever. Global skill slots help with this, considerably, but I really don't understand why Angel doesn't have any AoEs. This makes some end game content (Cursed Reincarnation) take ludicrous amounts of time to complete. Here's to hoping a future patch adds more Reincarnation skills that have some AoE.

That's about it for my initial thoughts on IEH. I plan to put more time into it and then give some further feedback as more content is made available. If I feel that anything from this review needs to be changed, I'll pop in and edit it.

Thanks for reading, and have a good one!

Absolute waste of time.

At the beginning youre making good progress. Even when youre starting out working with the Slime Bank, everything is still going great. but once youre at about a 370k Slime Coin cap and start to get all skills to lvl 200 minimum, youre starting to realize that you only have a few more ways to progress, each more grindy than the other.

Up until this point I havent touched alchemy, because you need longer runs for that, so I looked into it. Only to find out that the most powerful ability of alchemy is to push for another zone with potions or to reduce the level of challenge bosses with potions. So what is the best way to progress now? Right, lowering the Slime King challenge boss and using that to quick farm for rebirth points. First you need 8k rb points on each char, then 16k, then 32k, and so on.

And once youre decently far into the game, a single RB run at 5-10 mins will net you about 2-4k points. So have fun grinding the same ♥♥♥♥ over and over and over again, so you can push for a new higher zone reached. Or you can also start capturing monsters to fulfill missions. Once again a mindless active grind.

I was wondering where this all leads to and lo and behold: It ends in the most annoying boss fight in 5-4 that even people with 100 times higher stats than me cant clear (You can check Kongegreate forums for more discussion on that).

And whats after all the grind? Reincarnation aka full reset with benefits, so a 2nd prestige layer. I looked at the perks. 20% more RB points for one of them.... THANK YOU, now i dont have to grind for 200 hours but only for ~170h, wow, great way to value my time.

I suggest you dont even start this game. The beginning is fun and youll want to reach more mechanics, but suddenly at one point it all grinds to a stop and it stacks one annoyance on top of the other until you dont wanna play anymore.

I have played a lot of idle / incremental games and this is one of the best of this kind.
I would put it up there with WAMI, NGU, ITRTG and Anti-Idle.