Rocky Idle

This is just a super dumbed-down Melvor Idle with AI art. It's also supposed to be an idle game but there's these boosts that GREATLY improve your progress and you have to click a button every 10 minutes to be efficient. Half the achievements only give improvements to boosts so the dev clearly thought active play is the way this IDLE game should be played.

Review based on 2.3k+ hours on Melvor, this game is really good so far and shares the OSRS foundation which I believe is S tier for Idle games personally. If this is just the start of things to come, this game has a very promising future. Definitely worth the price of entry.

Improvements over Melvor
- Ingame Wiki
- Info ingame of loot drop rates
- Ingame achievemnt system and rewards
- Quest system and rewards
- If you need an item for anything, you can click on it and it will take you to the monster that drops it to fight it straight away

Little QOL features which really surprised me.

Drawing some inspiration from Melvor and OSRS, and putting it's own twists here and there, it's evident that the foundation for a decent idle game is there. Plenty of options and new features here like the chests, the in-game wiki, the boosts, and some other mechanics are a welcome addition and the ideas work really well. However it feels as if the dev just didn't know what to do with them, how to add meat to the game, or how to handle the balance around it. Obviously it's not expected to have surgical precision levels of balancing, but the game is just infested with all these baffling decisions and lack of basic QoL that you'd expect from an idler.

For starters, most of the time the weapons and gear that you can get from monsters far exceed what you can craft at the same baseline level. Ironically, a lvl30 staff that you can acquire from the very first mob in the water area will carry you through till mid-game. That doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing, but when you look at the crafting options for staves, you'll realize that you now need runecrafting lvl90 to get an incrementally slightly more powerful weapon, because the lvl75 staff is weaker. But also the opposite is true. The slingshot that you can farm from another mob (first mob in another area) is vastly inferior to a basic bow you can craft, or basic bow you can farm from similar leveled mob in a different area. Even though the slingshot requires its own ammo and provides no extra benefit whatsoever. There's also weapons where they make no sense existing, for example there's a high level mob that drops a wand, but the wand is completely outclassed by the lvl30 staff you get from the early game mob. This has been discussed in the steam forums and the dev has replied back with a "magic gets its power from the spells, not from the weapon", which is half-true. Yes the wand has faster attack speed (2.2s vs 2.5s), but the highest level spell still does almost half damage in comparison. Similar thing happens with the melee equivalent (claws) where I could just not find a use case for them at all.

This gets even more exacerbated once you progress to the end-game where you can farm a lvl400 mob and a lvl600 one in the same area. The lv400 one drops a quiver with a 1/5.000 chance, the lv600 drops a gem with a 1/10.000 chance. Pay attention, this is important. The quiver, you can equip the moment it drops and is a pretty big power spike, which is rewarding. The gem, you have to combine with the advanced cape, which you need to complete a quest requiring two of your skilling levels to be 108. Once you get the advanced cape and the gem, you get the viper cape which... is inferior to the quiver in all stats. Why? Just why?

With armor the problem gets worse. You sometimes will spend days (depending on rng) to grind some gear, yet you'll realize that the power you get from said gear is minimal. There's these bosses that you need special tokens to complete the fight (so you can't exactly "farm" them non-stop), and the gear drop chances are so abysmal that they have to be good. But they're not. Because you'll end up getting a drop, only to find out you get a measly "+4 accuracy" from it, which is nothing at that point of the game.

The quests equally feel tucked in with no real thought behind them and their rewards. The rewards are XP for the skilling skills most of the time which is somewhat lazy, as you're supposedly grinding XP for that same skill to be able to do the quest in the first place. Sometimes you'll need the quest to be able to procure certain items from a skill, and sometimes you get a cape and that's about it. To further demonstrate how lazy they're implemented, all quests have a certain skilling lvl requirement. You'll very often see quests that need "Blacksmithing Lvl90", but that's not entirely true, because you'll need to craft specific gear that require your Blacksmithing to be lv98 for example. Why not just put that as the requirement for the quest then?

To top it all off, there's seemingly no point to many of the skilling's crafting progression. Smithing always seems to be two steps behind in strength relative to what you'll be getting from mobs, fletching is useless as you can only craft bows and arrows and that's it, runecrafting is painfully slow and inefficient that you're better off farming runes from mobs, thieving is pointless as you get less than what you'd get from mobs and there aren't any exciting rare loot you can get, prayer seems to be more of a "get to X lvl and forget for now" since there is no mana mechanic for prayers, it's just certain threshold levels you reach to unlock them. Slayer feels tacked on, as its only use is unlocking higher level mobs and that's it. The only meaningful skills are fishing/cooking and farming since that's the only way to get meaningful amounts of bark for your potions. Additionally, you'll very often see very dumb decisions, for example you need fletching lv80 for diamond arrows, but you need smithing lvl99 for diamond bars for those arrows. And no, there's no other way to get diamond bars except doing extremely late game (lvl 115+) chests.

One last thing I've noticed which is somewhat alarming, is that if I left the game overnight to farm a mob (because you need a special currency to unlock offline farming for each individual mob for some reason), the game client would be very laggy the next day. A simple restart fixes the problem, but it's still very weird.

There's many many more design flaws in this game that I'd rather not get to as I'll get upset just typing them out (why is there no auto-slayer?) and they far exceed the positives. Ultimately I got my money's worth, but it certainly wasn't enjoyable past a certain point. I do have to mention though that it felt as if the dev hasn't played his own game, because if he did he would be bothered by all these compounding little things.