Idle Wizards, in one simple sentence, is overwhelming with 9 years of content, mechanics and features tacked on top of one another, culminating in a game that has a lot to offer, but also that goes a bit too fast. The kind of game where you unlock three new mechanics at once, where the numbers seem to get a mind of their own and just start spiraling out of control, and before you know it, you’re level 100e39. Needless to say, I had a short time with this game before getting overwhelmed. It doesn’t mean that the game is bad per se, but maybe the pacing is pretty difficult for a new player.
Starting the game, I had anniversary reward pop-ups block the intro tutorial, which teaches you about the basics. You click an orb to earn Mana, which you use to buy structures that produce mana automatically (think Cookie Clicker), by buying upgrades, you unlock various gameplay mechanics, like being able to cast spells. I liked the spell system, you accumulate shards and then produce various effects like getting more mana at once, automatically clicking, and more. You can automate the spell casting as well, and this part is pretty fun.
Already there are multiple systems stacking on top of this very basic concept; you can get an offline bonus if you don’t click for a while, there are ‘void essences’ that randomly spawn and you can trap them, getting another production bonus. After a while you can summon a ‘pet’ which will help you in various ways (there are a lot of them, and they all do things slightly differently, like automatically clicking, boosting your offline bonus, etc.) and you can change class by meeting certain requirements; The classes change your spells and your gameplay in a significant way.
By getting to a certain amount of mana, you can ‘Exile’ which resets your progress to 0 and gives you ‘Mysteries’ which are used to unlock ‘Paragon Rewards’. This is one of the systems that I felt went too fast, when I stopped the game I was just exiling to higher tiers of rewards almost instantaneously so that didn’t feel like I was progressing. The rewards are new mechanics and upgrade for them, you get “attributes” which allow you to allocate stat points and improve various aspects of the games, challenges which make you restart the game with specific rules in order to unlock more rewards (love these!), trials (which are… some other kind of challenge) and more. There’s also a combat system where you fight monsters using some kind of deck of spells, where you summon, cast and use items. It’s pretty neat.
Ultimately, if the game had been a bit slower and gave me the time to understand and absorb every mechanic for a good bit before adding a new thing on the pile, I might’ve stuck with Idle Wizards. The game certainly has charm and content in spades, but it was just shoveling it into my face too quickly. I’m very specific about what I want from my idle games, so you might have a different experience if you check it out!
