The basic gameplay loop is that you move from left to right and automatically attack enemies while they automatically attack you as well. You have three actions you can perform; dash with your sword, raise your shield and use a potion. These three things have cooldowns so you can’t just mash them and it’s important to time them properly if you want to heal up, mitigate damage you deal and defeat your enemies. This is where the idle moniker kinda falls apart, you can automatically run the game, but you’re going to have a bad experience if you just let the game play itself, because you’ll never use these abilities and ultimately fail. You get some gold and experience for leaving the game closed, but that’s not really what an idle game is to me;
For completing stages you get loot, experience and money, which can be used for many things. Experience increases your level, which then lets you place some stat points. Still not a big fan of stat points in 2019, it’s always unclear what you should spend them on and in the case that there’s a ‘right’ way to build your character and everything else is sub-optimal, then you shouldn’t be given that freedom in the first place. You also get look that can be used to upgrade or purchase new gear and there are gear sets that give you small bonuses. The whole gear and items system is too convoluted and requires way too much investment, you’ll need items to craft other items to craft other items to craft and armor, with a generous addition of gold, so you’ll probably never craft anything really good; I know I didn’t.
Otherwise the game is full of little timers and activities that you need to spend premium currency to refresh and everything seems like a big money sink. You can rank up affection with NPCs but the items you need become really pricey fast, you also need to wait to regenerate your health between maps and this becomes a problem when the difficulty cranks up a notch. Postknight isn’t a terrible game, but it’s not really good either. I got to the second zone, figured out it was more of the same - I also had to take longer rests between fighting levels and reset my progress towards new tiers of weapons and armors - so I decided to leave it there.
Postknight is an idle game where you fight across sidescrolling 2D maps as a young Postknight - a knight that delivers mail - by killing a bunch of mosters. The game is pretty simple, although maybe not idle enough and the barrier of free-to-play limits gets pretty rough after a while, but I enjoyed the bit that I’ve played. It’s not my favorite idle game of all time, however.
