Idle Heroes
A decade-old idle gacha RPG whose real currency was never gold, it was your own heroes — and the star-fusion system that consumes them is both the smartest thing about the game and the reason its economy is so hard to defend.
6 / 10
The Wanderer reading room
Game Reviews
Idle RPGs, MMOs, browser games and mobile RPGs, taken apart properly. Every review carries a score out of 10, what the game does well, what it does badly, and the kind of player it is actually for.
Browse the reviews
Idle Loops
A free browser incremental where every attempt is a program — a fixed mana budget, an action queue you write in advance, and a loop that runs it out to the letter. Skills carry over between attempts, the interface never stops being a spreadsheet with buttons, and the game has outlived three different maintainers without ever quite finishing.
7.5 / 10
Idle Miner Tycoon
Kolibri Games' decade-old mobile idle didn't just popularise the miner-elevator-warehouse loop, it more or less invented the template every mining incremental since has copied. Ten years and a Ubisoft acquisition later, the loop still works — the monetisation menu and the interface built on top of it are where the wear shows.
6.5 / 10
Idle Planet Miner
Tech Tree Games' 2019 space-mining idle has outlasted most of its mobile peers by giving the genre's usual ore-and-upgrade loop a manager layer, a reset-friendly prestige system and weekly ranked tournaments — then undercutting some of that goodwill with a loot-box-flagged IAP menu and a persistent offline-tracking bug.
7 / 10
Idle Research
A free chemistry-themed incremental from a solo mobile developer, with real scale on Android and iOS and a stalled, near-invisible Steam release that has sat in Early Access for four years while its developer's attention has moved to an unannounced sequel.
6 / 10
Idle Startup
A free-to-play incremental about growing a one-person garage venture into a tech empire, with a genuinely honest monetisation model let down by a midgame economy that stops making sense and a content well that runs dry fast.
6 / 10
Incrempire
A clicker-and-tower-defense hybrid that hands you a kingdom, a skill tree and a cursor to slaughter with — engaging for its first couple of hours, then undercut by a skill tree that finishes long before the fighting does.
6 / 10
Leaf it Alone
A solo developer's yard-cleanup incremental turns raking leaves into a genuine tool-upgrade power fantasy — reviewed for whether a two-hour runtime and a single backyard are worth the Overwhelmingly Positive reputation, or just too little game for the price of admission.
6.5 / 10
Lootun
A five-dollar semi-idle RPG that sends three-adventurer teams into dungeons on their own while you sort, salvage and re-gear what they drag back — and a look at whether that loop still has somewhere to go once the opening classes stop being new.
7.5 / 10
Manor Lords
A gridless medieval city builder whose household-level burgage plot simulation is the best idea the genre has produced in years, sold on a trailer full of battles it mostly doesn't deliver. Two years and change into Early Access, the honest question isn't whether it's good — it's whether "still becoming" is a fair state to sell it in.
7 / 10
Master Healer Kale with useless party
A party-based incremental RPG that hands you only the healer and makes that the whole point — 200-plus skill-tree nodes built around keeping a self-sufficient, self-important party alive, wrapped in a tight four-hour campaign that starts stronger than it finishes.
7.5 / 10
Matter Dimensions
A free, long-abandoned browser incremental that bakes the escalating "nerf gauntlet" of hardcore Antimatter Dimensions mods directly into its base game — a genuinely distinct idea, shipped by one hobbyist developer, that stopped receiving content five years before this review.
4.5 / 10
Minecraft
Fifteen years past release, the hardest part of reviewing Minecraft isn't judging whether it's good — it's telling a new buyer which of its two incompatible engines to actually install, and being honest about what stopped changing while the block count kept climbing.
9 / 10
Nonstop Knight 2
Kopla Games' minimalist auto-run dungeon crawler grew a sequel's worth of heroes, guilds and elemental gear over seven years of live support, and the one thing that didn't survive the expansion is the thing its name promised.
6.5 / 10
Project: Gorgon
A decade-long Early Access project finally becomes a finished game, and it's still the only MMORPG where getting cursed into a cow is a legitimate build.
7.5 / 10
Quasimorph
A turn-based extraction roguelike where every mercenary is a disposable clone, every mission can end in a single unlucky turn, and the cosmic horror waiting beneath the corporate PMC contracts is exactly as unforgiving as the combat.
8 / 10
Raid: Shadow Legends
The most-mocked mobile game on the internet turns out to be running one of the deeper gear-optimisation systems in the genre underneath its meme reputation — the honest problem isn't that Raid is shallow, it's how much of your week the energy bar and the shard economy are willing to take.
6.5 / 10
Rusty's Retirement
An idle farming sim that gave up on being a game you look at, and became the desktop companion the whole genre now copies — charming and honest about its own smallness, if a little thin once the farm is built out.
8.5 / 10
Sephiria
A top-down action-roguelite from the studio behind Dungreed, built around a Tetris-style artifact inventory that turns loadout planning into its own puzzle game — dense, generous with content, and let down late by a damage-sponge final boss and a steep endgame DPS wall.
8 / 10
Shards of Order
A dark fantasy RPG that replaces turns and mana with a shared deck and a countdown clock — every card you play buys time against the enemy's next move, and every hero draws from the same pool of cards.
7.5 / 10
Skeleseller
A dead adventurer comes back as a skeleton shopkeep and starts hiring the living to die in his place — Xtonomous's solo-developed idle sim turns that morbid joke into a genuinely connected hire-loot-sell loop, then keeps things deliberately short instead of chasing the usual idle-game grind.
7.5 / 10
Slot & Dungeons
A pixel-art dungeon crawler where a slot machine decides what's waiting on every floor — enemies, loot and spells all drawn as reel symbols you then have to walk up to and fight, not wager on. Distinctive, generous with content, and rougher around the edges than its 1.0 label suggests.
7 / 10
Soda Dungeon
A free turn-based idle dungeon crawler that bolts Clicker Heroes-style ascension onto a tavern full of soda-fuelled adventurers, charming enough that thousands of players still recommend it a decade after it started life as a mobile game.
7 / 10
Summoners War: Sky Arena
The mobile gacha RPG that the rest of the genre was quietly built on top of is still running twelve years later, and the direct ancestry to Raid: Shadow Legends' gear system makes it the rare case where reviewing the original after the imitation actually changes the verdict.
7 / 10