Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms is a strange idle game that has an interesting core gameplay concept - leveling heroes and moving them around on a hex grid to maximize their killing potential and survivability - bogged down in microtransactions and weird systems outside the main gameplay. I think that I completed one (1) quest before calling it quits, but it could’ve been more since that world map was so confusing. Ultimately there are some good things in ICotFR, but not enough to keep me hooked.
The game starts simple enough, you have one character that automatically attacks enemies and you can tap on them to deal damage. All levels involve killing enemies in some capacity; Some just have an enemy kill count you need to get to, others need you to collect items from slain enemies and there are the boss levels that act as damage gates that you need to overcome. You can upgrade your clicks and characters with gold, giving them new passive and active abilities and sometimes making choices along the way. Most abilities have position requirements - deal more damage if you’re at the front of the party, boost damage of surrounding characters, heal characters in the front line, etc, so there’s some strategy involved, which is nice for an idle game.
Where this loses it’s charm for me is how you lose your whole party when you start a new quest. It’s not like resetting the world state like in many idle games, where it makes sense that your party would reset, it’s just another quest and you have to restart with one character at level one, which is annoying because the fun of the game is working with your multiple characters. Worse yet, the world map is a bit of a confusing mess and I couldn’t say how many quests there were and how long they would take to beat. Why is there a world map like this in the first place? For an idle game, it should be fairly linear, with quests just following each other.
Otherwise, you get lootbox-style chests with random items that can equip your characters and you can buy more chests and other resources, they improve skills and can be merged when you get duplicates. The whole D&D stat system is also used here, although the stats aren’t as useful as they could be in that kind of game, so they feel like an afterthought. ICotFR isn’t a terrible idle game, it’s got some ideas here and there, but the structure of the game just confused and bored me, so I stopped fairly quickly.
