Recursive

For the price of $7, the game is kind of fun, pretty short. I have some complaints about it, mainly little things, but they're all pretty flexible. One of the first things that annoyed me early on was the coloring of the green leeches; they blend into the background when you're doing Iron Fortress. Iron Fortress felt dull, just upgrade arrows put it on 10x and wait, that's it. And comparing that to the other mechanics, it feels out of place for this type of game. I think the crafting system could benefit from a bit of a rework. Trying to match items up myself, even though you have the hints, feels tedious. Having to go through every possible combination is quite painful.
The UI at times can also be a bit hard to read sometimes, so maybe a few UI tweaks would help.
TLDR: Game is a good bit of fun for a $7 price tag, with a few tweaks to the gameplay progression and some visual issues the game would be great.

This game focuses on defeating every monster that appears in front of you. The core mechanic is simple. You hold down the left mouse button, or click, over an enemy to deal damage. Enemies do not fight back, and you continuously damage them until they die, then move on to the next target. Each wave contains several enemies and ends with a boss fight.

Bosses introduce one important change. You must defeat them within a time limit. If you fail, you will need to grind basic enemies until you gain enough experience to try again. There are no restrictions on how long you can play or which waves you choose to fight, and you are always rewarded with something, including numerous drops that range from common to rare.

Clicking on the hero opens an upgrade tree with several nodes that generally improve damage per click, critical chance, and experience gained per kill. As in many similar games, you must purchase the first upgrade before unlocking the next one in the chain. Each upgrade can be bought multiple times, and the cost increases with every purchase.

Since the hero alone will not be enough, you also gain essences from defeated bosses. Essences function as structures or characters that can be placed on marked stones around the hero, each providing unique locations and benefits. The first one is a mage tower where mages convert experience gained from killing enemies into gold, which can then be used to purchase tower upgrades.

Just like with the hero, tower upgrades can be purchased multiple times until they reach their limit, and each level costs significantly more than the last. However, the available upgrades are limited to improving the conversion rate, speeding up the conversion process, and increasing the damage dealt to enemies with each conversion. The faster the conversion rate, the faster the damage is applied. The tower also offers four additional mages who must be purchased in order, each costing considerably more coins than the previous one. Every new mage is stronger and deals extra conversion damage, although they all share the same upgrade options.

With the second essence, a defensive tower, you unlock a separate gameplay mode with its own progression system. These upgrades require iron, a material obtained by playing a tower defense stage that shares mechanics with the main hero gameplay. In this mode, you protect a central tower by holding the cursor over approaching enemies to damage them.

Whether you win or lose, you still earn a decent amount of iron, and the stage can be replayed as many times as you want. The tower features a larger upgrade tree similar to the hero. Upgrades increase damage, add archers and mages, improve critical chance, and more. They also increase the hero’s damage per second. After enough upgrades, the damage from your structures becomes strong enough to kill enemies on its own, allowing the game to run idle while you continue gaining experience that can be converted into gold.

A later essence unlocks the blacksmith, who forges equipment from the many monster drops you collect. Crafting requires the correct combination of three materials. The recipe book provides hints, but using the wrong combination wastes the materials.

Crafted gear can be equipped on the hero, while everything you create is stored in your inventory and comes with a unique perk. For example, the leather cap increases experience gain by twenty percent. Only one copy of each item can be crafted, but it can later be upgraded to a higher rarity by investing additional materials and experience.

After progressing far enough, you unlock the ability to prestige. This resets all upgrades across the hero, tower, and mage tower, but rewards you with prestige points that can be spent on powerful permanent perks. The system has three tiers. The first two tiers contain six perks each, while the third tier contains four. Unlocking higher tiers requires investing enough points in the previous one.

Some perks can be purchased twice to further increase their effectiveness. For example, double click damage can be upgraded to triple click damage. However, the one you need to get first is the boss harvest perk, which adds a chance of a boss dropping a prestige point. The chance increases with each boss, and you can grind them later and gain a bunch of prestige points.

Fun game! took me about 4 hours to complete and 7 hours to get all achievements. Could be done a bit quicker.