Cycle Idle RPG is the “ideal” idle game in my book; the progression isn’t too fast, there are a lot of side systems to work on in order to improve your main system and while everything is fairly linear, you have the impression that you can make some decisions here and there that will make you progress faster, or unlock something sooner. It’s a neat little game that I enjoyed for many days before hitting a wall that I couldn’t manage to go over - and I certainly tried!
You’ve heard about this core loop before; You defeat enemies using skills from different classes that you unlock by gaining experience. You also gain knowledge and loot from the enemies, which improve your stats and allow you to craft items. As you go through the maps and defeat various enemies with their own moves and elemental immunities, you unlock new mechanics like rebirth (where you reset your level to gain points to get stronger), a garden (where you use berries to level up plants to gain bonuses to get stronger), a card game (that gives you a currency to buy boosts to get stronger), companions (that level up as you do, giving you bonuses), and more.
Each little minigame or side activity might impact some other one, and that’s pretty fun, and luckily the game has options if you do not want to actively engage with them (the card game can be quite time consuming, for instance). It’s always pretty fun in this kind of game to have something else to unlock and most of its systems works well in that way. There’s a premium currency and you get some of it really slowly every day, alongside other consumables that you can use to double your experience gain, your knowledge gain, your crafting materials, etc. You also can upgrade the rate at which you get these consumables.
The side activities are fairly deep; the card game has a few neat mechanics so you can build your decks in various ways, the divinity system gives you a lot of directions you can take the game and with the crafting/equipment you can specialize in a number of different stats depending on what you’re doing.
At some point, however, you get to the third “island”, and there all the numbers go out of control. You need billion of knowledge from enemies where you previously needed a fraction of that, new plants take weeks to grow and crafting new items becomes a great pain because materials drop incredibly slowly. Furthermore, enemies now have a shield that you need to destroy using a new stat that you can’t increase easily, so fighting takes that much longer. I really tried to figure out if there was something I was doing wrong, I even asked on the steam forums (something I never do) because I felt like there was still something else for me to discover in this game. Sadly, after a few weeks of struggle, I decided that I definitely was stuck there, and stopped.
Which is not to say that Cycle Idle RPG isn’t enjoyable. There’s a lot of neat idle gameplay in there, and maybe you’ll figure out how to progress past that third island! I really enjoyed it, so you should check it out.
