No, the negative reviews actually had a point this time. It hadn't sounded like a big deal, but it really is.
Basically, the first bit of the game is fine... until you unlock exploration (combat) and retiring (prestige) and suddenly it becomes far too clear what the problem is.
So these are two separate issues basically boil down to combat being bland but giving a low % drop from enemies to give crafting materials that you need in excessively large amounts. Like some of the first items you need require 64 drops of wool from a moderately rare sheep enemy in the second zone after you defeat the first zone's boss. The problem is... the respawn time on enemies is very slow, your kill rate is slow, and you don't get to keep your items between prestiges. You have to manually craft the items, and use those items to get to the next area. It's a slow, tedious process that doesn't really look like it's ever going to have any way to actually automate it from the way the game's set up, which seems to match what people with hundreds or thousands of hours of play time have said, so yeah.
You restart and... you manually have to do a toooon of stuff, veeeery sloooowly, and the prestige itself gives very little in return while requiring you to change to a different primary school of magic each time and it doesn't count anything but your primary for your prestige exp. ...And picking a primary doesn't seem to actually do anything else past that. It literally is just an artificial restriction that says "you have to research all these different types of magic to progress, but only one per prestige counts towards your next prestige" which is awful.
Almost every system in magic research is... kind of clunky at best. The menu really is a nuisance to navigate as others have said, and given how often you have to navigate through it to perform even basic functions, that's kind of a problem. Because it means you'll often be checking like 8+ different screens to do something like build one building, and it won't actually list anywhere what the full effect of that building actually is. It's the most messy menu system that takes up the maximum amount of useless wasted space, while providing the least amount of useful information at the same time, and requiring the maximum number of moving around for simple tasks.
The creating of materials and upgrading stuff is alright, a bit on the slow side, and sort of a nuisance to do because of the previously mentioned factors, but really, the main issue is just that you have to do a bunch of manual stuff with every prestige, and doing anything manually in magic research is like pulling teeth.
Note it also is absolutely not an idle game (that's fine for me but may bother other people) nor is it a clicker, so being labelled as an idle clicker is kinda misleading. It's still an incremental game, but you may not care much for it if you really wanted to be able to idle more than a minute or two at a time, or to use an autoclicker to have something active to do. You really can't speed it up, and you can't idle either because of how it caps out on resources almost immediately.
The other reviews tried to explain this, but they really weren't clear enough on exactly how bad it is.
I can't really recommend magic research though, there are just far too many vastly better incremental games out there that do what it wants to do better than it does by orders of magnitude. Like 10x, 100x, 1,000x better games out there. Go get Orb of Creation, or Kiwi Clicker, or Farmer VS Potatoes, or Idle Wizard to name a few, probably in that order, which do the same kind of thing vastly better across the board. This just isn't it.
