Magic Research 2 is an idle game where you play a magician, trying to create the Philosopher’s stone. I had played the previous title a while back and much like this one, I’ve found it a bit too complicated and demanding, attention-wise. The basic mechanics are nice, but the quality of life features that you might want to make the experience go easier didn’t seem to come fast enough, so I lost interest.
Starting a new game, the tutorial walks you through picking an element (fire, earth, wind, water), then you gather mana and channel elements in order to create resources that you spend to gather mana automatically and store more resources. This is the core of what I’ve played so far, you can buy upgrades and boosts, but at some point you’re at maximum capacity for one resource or another, so you have to progress in another way to get more stuff done. You get researchers that give you elemental experience, and then you unlock transmutation.
You can create items by combining resources (and sometimes, other items or enemy drops) and then use them or sell them at the market. This game veers on the automation/efficiency side of things that I do not enjoy very much, where you can hire wizards to cast spells for you, but they cast at a certain speed (so you have to allocate more wizards or things go really slowly), or they need a certain amount of resources (so you have to make sure there isn’t a bottleneck somewhere), and you are limited, wizards-wise, while the resources, spells and things you want/need change constantly, so you have to re-jiggle everything a bit too much for my taste.
After a while you can retire, which gives you numerical resource bonuses on your next runs, alongside completing storylines, a mechanic I really enjoy, where well-defined quests that you can somewhat track give you other bonuses (often quality of life improvements, but sometimes they’re also big resource boosts) when you restart the game. There’s a fairly cool battle system where you alternate trading blows against monsters while balancing offense and defense, transmuting weapons, armors and accessories that help during fights and outside of them, you can cast spells to help you or damage enemies, and your wizards can also automate that (if you can manage them).
Ultimately, Magic Research 2 isn’t a bad incremental game if you have a lot of time and attention to give it; I just felt like the mechanics were piling up faster than I could digest and enjoy them, trying to optimize the spellcasting wasn’t super enjoyable and overall there was a bit too much to think about for me at once, for an idle game.
