Idle Looter

This game seems fun at first but falls apart after playing for a bit, primarily due to 2 mechanics that I feel are poorly designed and break the game. Prestige and Hunts

Prestige

The prestige mechanic in this game does the idle game cardinal sin of making it so each subsequent prestige takes substantially longer to unlock than the previous one. It feels absolutely awful in an idle game when you make a decision that feels like you "soft locked" yourself by permanently reducing the effectiveness of your entire save file. How prestige works is whenever you reach a certain level in the game you get the option to prestige, which allows you to absorb the stats from some of your equipped items to be permanently active on your character across prestiges. Ok, sounds great. The problem is first prestige requires you to reach level 100, second requires 200, third requires 300, and so on. These are NOT trivial increments in this game, reaching a new breakpoint of 100 levels gets exponentially more difficult as the enemies scale much faster than the player character.
What this causes is it makes the entire mechanic really unfun to interface with. For example imagine your amulet slot is one of the ones you have unlocked to be able to absorb during prestige, but there is an amulet that gives 10% magic find which is a low drop rate from an enemy that you can baaaaarely kill after waiting forever to do so and your current amulet has meaningless stats. You now feel like you must farm despite it being glacially slow because if you dont drop this amulet and prestige, you dont just mess yourself up for the next run, your ENTIRE SAVE FILE now permanently has 10% less magic find than it could have. Same thing with the ability to unlock more slots to be able to absorb, each slot you buy costs 100x the gold of the previous one, so if you are making 1 billion gold an hour and are at the point of being able to prestige, you have to decide if you want to prestige now and absorb 4 items or wait another 10 hours to be able to afford the 10 billion gold necessary to forever unlock the ability to absorb 5 items at a time. Instead of prestige feeling like a satisfying moment where you get this big boost of power, you only hit the button when you feel absolutely beaten down and like you suffered through this run for so long you cannot possibly squeak any more power out of it without getting too bored you would rather just drop the game entirely. You only prestige after you push yourself to the absolute limit of your patience otherwise EVERY SINGLE subsequent run will be slower.

Hunts

The hunt mechanic gives you a list of a few quests to pick from, which range from trivially easy to so hard that there is an item that will cancel your current hunt in case you softlock yourself. Completing a hunt gives some of the hunt currency. The major problem with this mechanic is the rewards barely scale AT ALL with the difficulty of the hunt. Would you rather earn 7 tokens for doing a hunt that takes 0.2 seconds or earn 10 tokens for one that takes 45 minutes? That is compounded with the issue where the difficulty of the hunts you are offered scales with how far you are in your current run, but the difficulty once again far far exceeds the speed at which your character improves, particularly after you have done a few prestiges so that you are OP in the early game. You need to do a LOT of these hunts, most items in the hunt shop will not only require some amount of the tokens but also have a hard requirement of total hunts completed across all prestiges to be able to access them. So if you forget to grind hunts at the beginning of a prestige, and only realize you need to do a bunch of them when you are hitting a wall in progression, good luck because now instead of being able to breeze through all the hunts back to back you will instead get stuck and have to idle for each and every one for a massive decrease in difficulty. There is no way to fix this situation because like I explained earlier you cannot just prestige willy-nilly in order to go back to doing easier hunts because prestiges are such a valuable mechanic.
The most notable item in the hunt shop is a "mark of the hunter" which is an alternate way to prestige instead of reaching the level breakpoint. However the mark of the hunter ALSO similarly scales in cost except instead of being barred by highest level of monster you have defeated it is the highest power level your character has achieved. This scales at basically the same rate as the normal prestige mechanic because once you are beating level 200 enemies you are probably roughly character power 200 etc, so it just effectively gives you double the prestiges.
Also you need to spend a bunch of hunt tokens so I sure hope you remembered to farm those early on in the run because if you hit a massive wall late in the run and realize you will not be able to ever get to the point where you can do a normal prestige, you are going to have a miserable time trying to do hunts to get a mark for the alternate prestige.

How these two mechanics finally made me quit

In my last run of the game, I knew I wanted to do a long term run to try to finally beat the big bad at level 400 of the overworld, so I farmed hunts early on in order to buy my mark of the hunter in case I ended up getting stuck at 370 or whatever and deciding I need to abandon the run using the mark. After a multiple day long grind and some lucky rng with drops I finally took down the level 400 boss. The level 401+ enemies were way too tanky and did not give any substantial upgrades so I decided now is the time to prestige. But I do not want to use my mark for this do I? Because if I use my mark I will get an incremental boost but now I will still have to grind all the way to 400 again even if it is slightly easier it will still be in the magnitude of days. So obviously I want to use my regular prestige now that I have that ability and then next time I hit a wall I can do the mark.
When I hit the regular prestige button I get a pop up box that says something along the lines of "You have a mark in your inventory, doing a regular prestige WILL NOT consume the mark." Ok great, I thought, of course my mark will not be consumed why would it be? I want to use it next run. Turns out, that dialogue box is misleading because it sounds like ""NOT CONSUMED"" means you will be saving the item, but what the game meant is you will LOSE the opportunity to EVER consume it as it is DELETED PERMANENTLY. For some reason prestige wipes your inventory of marks despite them being a finite resource that take exponentially longer to get each one. This is incredibly frustrating because as a player that was already worried about the long term health of the character, and going through an absolute slog of a grind to get an extra 1% to a stat here and there, losing an entire prestige to the void for no real reason feels terrible. There is no way to revert your save, I tried for a little bit to see if I could figure out how to edit my save or use cheat engine to fix the game for myself with no luck (I realized later this game has a leaderboard for some reason, which is probably why the data is stored in such a way that it is hard to modify. I would much prefer no leaderboard and being able to play with my toys how I want to).

Also side note, I thought the incremental/idle game community learned 10 years ago that having the most efficient way to progress being to spam clicking was an annoying mechanic, well guess what in this game that is back because the only way to make any meaningful progress at all is to download an auto clicker and leave it running for hours at a time.

Warning, this game is very addictive.

The concept is ordinary for an incremental/idle game: you kill mobs, you get gold to upgrade & loot, and you become stronger and stronger with prestige levels. No surprise.

BUT...

In Idle Looter, most upgrades (12 out of 14) are permanent, you can define your hero's role and the prestige system is unique because it absorbs your item stats! If you get an amazing item with good sockets, your next run will be even better.

HERO:
Everyone starts with the same hero, but each hero becomes different.
You can focus your Hero on an aspect of the game that you prefer:

- Want to get rich ? Equip gems on your gear that grant extra gold.

- Want to be a DPS monster ? Equip gems that grant DPS.

- Are you an active player and want to increase your click damage ? Equip gems that grant Click Damage.

- Do you like crafting gems ? Equip gems that give a percentage chance of obtaining extra gems.

- Do you like looting legendary items and getting more scrap ? Equip gems that grant Magic Find

Or perhaps you want a hybrid of several aspects ? There's no way to break his character...

SOCKET:
Some items have sockets for gems: DPS, Click Gems, Gold Gain & Magic Find.
There are 50 tiers, T1 is weak, T50 is the best. Each tier doubles the gem's power.

By combining a T1 gem and a T1 gem, you have a 50% chance of obtaining a T2 gem.
By combining a T2 gem and a T2 gem, you have a 50% chance of obtaining a T3 gem.
etc.
Note: You can slightly increase your success rate through achievements in the game.

You can obtain gems of different tiers via loot, merchants who appear every 10/15 minutes, or hunting.

PRESTIGE:
There are several ways to Prestige, some limited and others unlimited but increasingly expensive, so you need to be careful.

In many Idle/Incremental runs it's just a race to Prestige, and when it's available you click and start again.

You can play this way on Idle Looter but since the Prestige system absorbs the stats of your items (and gems), you might want to get some amazing items before Prestige ? Your next run will be even better.

PS: When you start the game, you can only absorb the stats of your sword. To unlock other slots (9 in total), you need to obtain gold and unlock these slots via an upgrade option (permanent). Perhaps you should secure a few more slots before clicking on Prestige ?

ITEMS:
There are several item groups:
- Common to Legendary: these are the same items, only the stats differ.
The Magic Find stat increases rarity, with the possibility of looting only Legendary items with 100% Magic Find.

- Unique items: An item that permanently increases a stat via a scroll (random) that you can buy from a merchant, for example, using scrap.
This upgrade allows you to further specialize your hero to your playstyle because, remember, you keep your item when you Prestige.

- Very unique (sorry, I forgot the name): One item per realm, each with a unique effect.
For example, in world 1, you can loot a weapon that grants a 10% chance of encountering a Gold Slime, which awards 3x more gold.

Want to know something cool ? By absorbing this item during Prestige, you keep this effect for your next run. And if you absorb this item a second time on your second run, you double the chance of encountering a Gold Slime. It can be incredibly powerful, especially if your hero specializes in Gold.

Oh, one last thing: when you apply a scroll to a "Very Unique" item, a special effect can occur (5% chance) to make it even better.

HUNTS:
You complete bounties (kill X mobs for example), you earn tokens that you can exchange for gems, potions, to gain prestige (a different way from the basic system) and a few other things.

If you like that, you can optimize your hero's token gain.

SCRAP:
You will loot thousands of useless items, gems, etc... which you will exchange to obtain Scraps.
Scraps are used to combine gems & buy potions, scrolls, and better gems from the merchant.
The merchant appears every 10-15 minutes.
PS: There's an option to automatically destroy unwanted items.

POWER LEVEL:
It's a bit like your Hero's overall level; you increase it through your gear and gems, prestige, and your companion. It allows you to unlock other realm.

EXPEDITIONS:
I don't know, I haven't tested it yet. I know you can get very unique items and a pet; apparently, the pet can complete hunts for you.

OFFLINE:
The game isn't very rewarding when you're offline. Your hero doesn't fight, you won't get any loot or gold. You'll just get a potion that increases your damage for X hours and maybe a little EXP.
You must open the game to increase your progress.

THE END:
I've probably forgotten some things, but that's what Idle Looter is.
A game with excellent progression, an excellent prestige system and hundreds of hours of gameplay minimum, or even thousands if you're aiming for min/max at each prestige ?

I can almost recommend this, but the game relies a lot on Bounties which requires a ton of unnecessary utterly pointless clicking to get one, move to do it, then turn it in, then get another, and move to do it.

1.5/5.0 - Bounties are a fine system, but this isn't how you do it. This game would be a 4/5 otherwise, as it is really good if you don't mind clicking needlessly to get and turn in bounties over and over and over and over again.