Cave Heroes

[h1]Not-Idle Dungeon Crawler[/h1] [i]Idle Cave Heroes[/i] is an idle-ish game that takes active play and some babysitting to advance quickly. This is another in the "RPG as idle game" genre, this time heavy on the RPG elements. You help a three-person squad of heroes (knight Conner, archer Robin, and cleric Julia) descend through an endless cave of monsters. A town you build up and items you collect will help them on the journey. The screen has four sections. At top left is the floor map. Floors are handcrafted, but some minions stand in slightly different places each run. For the first 50 levels, bosses come every 5 levels. You might also find some loot in chests on the map. Loot often includes some scrolls that boost your production for the rest of the run, as well as permanent items. Each time you enter a cave floor, your party is fully healed. You will die A LOT. Fortunately, the game is extremely forgiving. You merely re-enter the cave floor you died on, and any enemies you killed before stay dead until you prestige and make a new run. On the righthand side of this section is a small notification whose tooltip will tell you what aura the floor has. Bosses (marked with a flame) will always instantly heal any monster left standing on party wipe. Kill the boss, and any remaining minions will not be healed if you die. Below this top left section is a bar that includes several toggles. One is for game speed, usually just 1x or 2x. Another sets what the heroes target first, either enemies, chests, or bosses. One will, when unlocked, toggle if your heroes will teleport close into the next enemy when re-entering a cave after a party wipe. The bar also has a trigger to go on quests that are unlocked. These send you to a short floor to fight enemies and/or a strong boss for various permanent rewards. And it has a surrender button. This ends the fight before death and sends the squad back to the start of the cave as if you did die. Bottom left is the battle screen. Hilariously, the three stand in a line with Conner in front, followed by Robin and Julia, and the monsters mostly take them in order, and you fight one monster at a time. This screen will also give you, when unlocked, slots to fill with battle spells for quick powerups. You ABSOLUTELY will need to use these spells, and strategically, to get past most floors (especially bosses) the first few times. Top right is the town view showing you how the town is built up. You'll need to click here to use two features. One is a ritual circle that triggers the Dark Ritual, which is the game's prestige mechanic. Dark mana drops from bosses and some chests. As you prepare for the ritual, you can invest the dark mana in various perks that give bonuses. You can change your mind about the selections and even rebalance the perks before the next run. The other feature is Pets. They're a bit difficult to unlock, usually with a quest, but do useful things for you, one of which is offline fighting. Bottom right are a series of tabs. Here is where you upgrade your town by building stuff and hiring workers to generate some resources or assist/train your three heroes. Your squad has a hidden XP/leveling system, but the easiest way to upgrade them is through the tabs. One tab is for buildings, another for workers. A third tab is for equipment that you unlock along the way. These can be upgraded with resources you generate. You also find Dark Equipment that stays with you even with a prestige and can equip them here. However, you can't equip more than one of a type at the same time, and can scrap extras. The fourth tab holds Artifacts and Relics, and both are permanent. Artifacts mostly give you various bonuses. One early Artifact is a bestiary with info on your enemies. Relics give bonuses and can be upgraded with drops from enemies. The fifth tab is Achievements. Reaching these grants you more bonuses that will help you in the game. The sixth tab is Overseers. In certain floors, you defeat a demon and they will work for you. Some join you in the Workers tab and just help you generate resources. Others are more managerial and will help you automate your game. Automation from the manager Overseers turns the game back toward "idle" until you near new floors or a boss you haven't passed, or just want to pass floors faster. You can toggle these on and off both individually and collectively, useful when trying to push for a building or achievement. You can also select target numbers for better resource management. The bottom of the screen lists the resources you collect. In order: Food, wood, metal, gold, gems, workers, and dark mana. Workers generate the first five. The workers are created as housing for them are built. Dark mana is from bosses. Besides needing to trigger battle spells to power through bosses and manually triggering a Dark Ritual prestige, there are other rewards to active play. Imps fly through the screen every few minutes. Clicking on these gains instant resources. Sometimes, you gain a chest token. Redeem 20 of these for a chance at one of three chests of enemy drops and equipment. Imps also sometimes give free prayers for divine guidance (granting short-term bonuses) that you can trigger. However, all imps clicked on count toward Visions, which grant various permanent bonuses. Three of these have to be activated every few minutes to get their effects. A decent tutorial walks you through the early features. However, the initial resolution setting put the tutorial text offscreen. Fullscreen windowed worked best. Reviews complaining about hitting walls regarding bosses is certainly justified. You have to push on as far as you can, prestige, and repeat a few times. I tend to invest in perks evenly, and that usually worked well. Often, it's a matter of figuring out a good battle spell strategy to pass the boss. There's two midgame bonuses, a perk and an achievement, that make your attacks stronger the longer you are on a cave floor, making it theoretically possible to get strong enough to pass a boss if you stick around long enough. While some upgrades have maximums, you'll always have something to invest resources in to get stronger. Either you find the right strategy, get strong enough eventually, or you'll give up waiting and abandon the game. The game is free to play, with some DLC and packs offered for sale to support the developer. There is a premium currency, crystals, but these are available only as part of the packs, not some stand-alone purchase, and drop for free with regularity. Crystals are only used to unlock slots for dark equipment, double a dark mana gain on prestige, and to purchase grab bag chests full of enemy drops and equipment. [i]Idle Cave Heroes[/i] is an interesting take on the concept of an "idle RPG." It takes more active play and strategy than you'll be used to in an "idle" game, but once you've built up some strength can be left alone awhile. And hey, it's free to try.

So what can I say after leaving it running for long hours, the game just feels unfinished/abandoned however you'd like to call it. There's a bad balance between active and idle gameplay while the endgame is just really boring, I just didn't bother finish it because it would be waiting for progress without really doing anything or grind more to make it faster and not even sure which would be faster. Many systems seem to be broken, some are made in a way to make you buy things to make them a bit faster (2 day long event that you can repeat for free once a week, while there's no possible way of getting all rewards in one go, even if you buy the dlcs). So unless you got some spare money to throw on it (not that it's expensive but it's just bad marketing, forcing people into buying optional things). Would rather have a price for the game itself without those deliberate locks

It was nice for the first few hours, then you hit walls that are just stupid. It isn't incremental...you can reset several times, I rebirthed seven or eight times and still couldn't beat the same stage. It's like a steady incline and then you run into a skyscraper.