Wizard's Wheel 2

[h1]Around We Go Again![/h1] [i]Wizard's Wheel 2[/i] is an expanded version of its predecessor. The short version is that there are a few new heroes to hire and a couple new village buildings, but the underlying gameplay is pretty much the same. Longer version for those who haven't played the first game: The game casts you as a time wizard tasked by a dimensional wizard to purge various parallel dimensions of evil. You know, the usual stuff. You personally do not fight evil directly, but instead hire heroes to do so for you. Candidates appear at various recruitment buildings, starting with a Tavern. Heroes each have a passive and active skill. Some passive skills give a hero a bonus with certain equipment or against certain types of enemies. Others lend the entire party a boost to stats. Active skills do not use mana but simply work on a brief cooldown. These run the gamut of the typical RPG spells and skills: buff the party and debuff enemies, heal, a double strength attack, an attack against the entire enemy party. There's also more unique ones. The Druidess can transform into a random controllable beast type, while the Werewolf's beastman form is uncontrollable. The Vampire gets the classic vampiric bite that heals it. Fighting is turn-based, but can be set to auto-attack. Enemies get a chance to Ambush and jump ahead of the normal encounter initiative; your heroes have the similar Sneak Attack. Both heroes and enemies can choose to use a normal attack, their special active skill, or simply defend. Your heroes also have an inventory they can dip into for health potions, mana potions, poison and bombs. In the bottom right corner is a Wizard's Wheel. Clicking on that speeds up the fight for a few minutes. The Dimensional Wizard shows up every so often next to the Wizard's Wheel. Clicking on him gets him to drop a boon, either a free Gem, some Time Mana, some Gold, or a party refresh. Defeating certain bosses will earn you Wizard XP, with which you can unlock a series of skills to assist your heroes with, such as a resurrection spell, healing, and a fireball attack. Your heroes fight in several themed areas, with every tenth fight in an area a miniboss fight, and a final boss at the end. Killing the final boss in an area loosens the magical seal on the Castle. In Settings is an option to auto-sell loot of various rarities at the end of a run. You can also set the game to keep loot with certain bonus levels and above. Common loot never has any buffs like an extra chance to dodge or a strength against nature-themed enemies, but do have bonus levels. Rare versions of common loot will have either a prefix or suffix, or both. These indicate what special buffs the equipment has. "Of Aid" means the item buffs healing powers. "Stalwart" is a boost to defense. Legendary loot is not based on common loot, but are items with unique names and power sets. Charon's Coin lets you dodge a death blow once a run. Vivarix's Cloak boosts skill power. Bonus levels, the traditional "+1" type, affect just the basic function, such as damage for weapons and defense for armor, but not the buff enchantments. Another stat that affects power is the equipment's Quality rating. The better the rating, the closer to the ideal version, and thus the better the power of the loot. Unfortunately, unless the Quality is Perfect, it is expressed as a number, and it is easy to mistake it for the base power. You have several buildings besides the various recruitment areas to help you along the way. There's a very helpful Storage warehouse that seems to house an unlimited number of items, with the option to mass-select and sell off excess. You have your traditional weapon, armor, and potion shops, and an accessory shop. There are also shops where you can upgrade your equipment in various ways. An Alchemist can combine items into an upgraded version, or use rare Ore drops to upgrade equipment. The Enchanter will re-roll the modifiers on equipment.. A Training Grounds allows you to set two spare heroes to spar with each other, thus gaining XP even without being in the party. A Kitchen allows you to combine rare food drops into various meals for some useful buffs. These take effect for one dungeon run only, but if you have enough ingredients, you can set it to make the same meal for multiple runs in a row. Finally, the Stables allow your party to enter midway through a dungeon to finish it faster. It will take you a long while to get strong enough to fight the King in the Castle. You can take a Time Warp at the Temple of Time in the lower right of the map. This resets the game, but you keep the Time Mana you've earned along the way. You can then invest the Time Mana in statues at the Temple for bonuses to help you on future runs. This is the game's version of a prestige mechanic found in most idle games. You will also keep items marked as Eternal. These persist throughout any and every restart, and include weapons and armors. Eventually, you'll be allowed to select a favorite item and make it Eternal. Killing the King at the end of the Castle area is not the end. For starters, there are now two more areas to fight in, one of which unlocks a place to hire dragons for your party! You can also Ascend. This is essentially a New Game Plus, except you keep the Time Mana you've earned and Eternal items. Ascension takes you to a new dimension where you start over but the monsters are a little stronger, but also drop a little more gold and slightly better loot. At the Dimension Gate, where you Ascend, you can also buy a Gem containing a passive or active skill of one of the heroes you've recruited. You can then equip another hero with that skill gem to give them access to said skill. If you favor one hero for their skill set, you can give one of those skills to your other heroes, and they'll still use their normal skill, too. There's a daily Interdimensional Dungeon, or IDD. This is a gauntlet of random monsters that you can press through for as long as you can. The deeper you go, the better rewards you get, including Time Mana and some useful Eternal items such as tablets that boost your stats if you hold them in inventory. On the IDD tab is also the Pantheon, a series of strong bosses. Beating these allows you to choose from one of three boons, mostly boosts to stats. You can re-fight a Pantheon boss to choose a different boon. There's also seasonal events. For the entirety of a month, whenever you take a Time Warp or are ready to hop to a different dimension, you can enter an alt timeline. A seasonal monster will be added to the mix. It drops extra Time Mana and a seasonal currency with which you can buy some special loot. Also, the more dimensions you Ascend through, the more useful features or heroes you can unlock in the Gem Store. These include heroes that can be purchased through the seasonal events. You will also eventually be able to unlock Hero Facets. To do this, you'll take the Dimensional Gate to an Omni-Verse separate from your regular runs. You will be locked into using a particular hero, but when you complete the run, you'll have access to an upgraded version of that hero. Completing the Facets for various groups of heroes also gives you various bonuses. The downside is that it does take [i][b]HOURS[/i][/b] to level up enough to beat even the first area boss, and progression only happens when you are running the game. (It's light enough to easily run in the background.) You can have your heroes instantly return to the dungeon, though that setting is not on when you start. You'll be taking Time Warps several times before you reach the Castle, so that you can invest Time Mana in the statues at the Temple of Time. [i]Wizard's Wheel 2[/i] is a very grindy idle RPG, but it's free.

It's nothing special. Just like all the other games. Try really hard to give you more to do but becomes overly complicated and dull. Idle games can have content without being hard to manage. Added: After the developer's response I feel I should clarify. It is not too complicated to figure out the game. It's just many games these days are producing functions without explanation. Or maybe too many functions need too much explanation which drains excitement. I'm not advocating the utter stupefying of the content, rather an ease of operation. Often these functions are developed in a slow way, by game develops, over time; so long time players get used to them over many updates. Or developers bring over these things from previous games. But as an outsider it is abrasive to the natural flow of game progression. You see too much content at once and do not understand what it does or when it will be useful. It's not that you couldn't do a lot of calculating to figure it out, but in this genre you'd rather have more straight forward action. For instance, I had a few items in my inventory. After a while I found I had a storage. I didn't even realize my storage was there let alone so full until the game was warning me it might cause problems with how the game operates. There is an auto equipped function but I have no easy way to know whether or not it uses items in my inventory and my storage or just one or the other. A little while later I built every building, at once. Wow, didn't even know I could do that. Now that's a lot to try to figure out at once. What is most important, I have no idea. I can train guys I'm not using? Didn't realize that. Start training them, but I have no idea what good that is doing or how long it should take. Are they leveling a specific stat or all stats? It doesn't seem to tell me. Bought a bed slot to get more guys, another and another. Bought a couple more guys, wait, I can't use all of them at once. Weird, because the monsters can use more guys than this. I had no way of knowing. Did I waste my money or not? Again, I have no way of knowing. There is an options to not keep socketed items and it is auto selected, what does that mean, I have no idea. It seems like socketed would be good. Do I trust the preselected settings, I have no idea. Is there a way to make characters not autocast some spells, I have no idea. What does it mean that it lets mimics go? Because I selected it yet I'm still fighting mimics. It's just the theme I was seeing and for an Idle game, it seems like too much to take on when most the time the game is just going to sit and run for the sole purpose of adding a little extra heat to my CPU so it will wear out faster. That last bit was a tease. But really I appreciate the response and I am not trying to belittle the massive amount of work that went into this. I actually think if the information is considered it would be an asset in creating more broadly playable content. For what it's worth.

Probably the most underrated idle game on steam. I played pretty much all, and this one looks like some simple crap, but trust me, the depth is tremendous and this will keep you occupied for many, many months. Maybe even years.