Kill the Lich Idle

Most idle negative game reviews go one of two ways: NOT RECOMMENDED (500+ hours) game is too idle, BORING! NOT RECOMMENDED (1.2 hours) game is too active, not even an idle game! Kill The Lich doesn't have much in the way of decision making, but I find its mechanics very satisfying to see play out. And it's nice to have an idle game that I can actually close for the night without losing any progression efficiency. The prestige options strike a nice balance for me where I can evaluate my options, cross-reference what I have unlocked, and do as much or as little math as I want to figure out which stat will give me the most value to upgrade for the next run. (I overvalued Observation, I think. Try going for stats that reduce the XP overclock needs to level up) I've played worse and shorter for $10, and this one's free!

At first the game was nice. Reading the story between choosing how to distribute your resources. But after a very short part of the game the story almost completly stopped. Enough to unlock to make it interesting but then you finish your first loop and from there it doesn't look like there is anything new to do. The thing goes into full auto. The decisions haven't been that meaningfull in the first place and now all you have left to do is wait. It doesn't get more idle then that. On top of that you have a very high complexity that makes it almost impossible to comprehend the consequences of your decisions. Meanwhile it doesn't seem to matter all that much anyway.

wall of texts, on-boarding, non existent, lore dump, not very readable ui, microtransactions. one of the whole core game design pillars ux is just not here.

It's an interesting style of gameplay, but it peters out after a few resets. The game becomes a background kind of game you only play at 10x speed which is unfortunate because the early resets were really interesting and the unlocks you get when resetting felt like they changed something. By the time I tapped out, I was getting attribute increases that reduced my 3 hr run by 6 minutes with no really change in the gameplay.

Like many others in the reviews I wish Steam had more than just a Thumbs Up - Thumbs Down recommendation score. I'll be honest, I usually don't leave incremental games unfinished but I think I'm done with this one after about 5-6 resets. It's a game that has promise, I can tell there's passion behind it, but it feels like I'm wasting time I could be using to play other games and that's not a feeling I want a game to leave me with.

was enjoying the long form afk playstyle a lot, game randomly bugged and deleted my save. doesn't have steam cloud, only physical backups, and backup doesn't auto-update. last physical back up i have is several hundreds of hours old with no way to fix. glad i didn't spend money on this game and you shouldn't either.

I really wish there was an "eh" recommend level. There are aspects I like. The way it handles 'offline' time is nice: It gives you a 1:1 bonus time that can be spent at a high rate of speed. The story (Though very much so not finished) is interesting and enjoyable, though I wish there was 'more of it' spread across individual nodes rather than through just a handful of them to give flavor to a task. But then the things that drove me away from it: I'm mixed on the microtransactions. 100% cool with it existing. Everything you can get in there can be earned in game for $0, as you receive a number of credits every day for free, you just have to click a button. In a free game, this is a nice way to support the dev. Again, very expressly, I have zero issue with this kind of use of microtransactions. The thing that bugged me about it though is it was never mentioned. I didn't know it existed until almost two weeks of playing when I saw it referenced on the discussion forums, meaning I was now weeks behind the curve. There's a line between 'shoving the micro transactions in the user's face' and 'This aspect is never mentioned anywhere unless you stumble upon it' when it is an actual, expected part of the game loop. And then there's the thing that killed the game for me: The Math Fails Early On. The ROI on time spent to prestige peaks as soon as you get 90 / 45 "Coins" from the prestige system. Any time spent after that (With a few edge cases for the "Legacy" stat where it's an extra 5 minutes for a few more points) is actually time spent poorly. This point started at 4 hours in, and by the time I gave up I had this down to about 65 minutes. When I had it at 65 minutes, the next point that it came -close- to this value was nearly 70 hours (4200 minutes) of time invested, and that got me... 9.5x the return, for over 10x the time sunk into it. It just.. doesn't math out. This is really what killed the game for me. There is no real feeling of progression once you hit that point. The other part is that the formulas and bonuses straight up feel obtuse. I can forgive this, because I'm not doing the math myself, but "Ok, I have 20 more points of X. I don't really have any way of clearly seeing how this will benefit me before I pick it, I just know it'll make something faster... somehow." But because you end up starting each cycle over from naught, and that benefit won't show itself until you're 30 minutes in from that restart, it really feels like you're not progressing any. So, yeah. It's cool as an idle game, but it gets painfully slow, the progression system feels -too- slow, it visually doesn't offer anything to make it a good screen saver, and the ramp / arc peaks too early then just becomes a slog.