Monsters Idle RPG

[h1]Pokemon Meets Forager Meets Idler![/h1] [i]Idle Monsters RPG[/i] is an idle monster collectathon game, mostly [i]Pokemon[/i] with a dash of [i]Forager.[/i] Just like the Pokemon franchise, you select one of three monsters as your starting fighter. And, similar to Pokemon, if you defeat a monster with a box corresponding to its rarity (common, rare, epic, legendary), you capture it and can use it as a fighter. Your starter monster will "evolve" as it levels up. Mine carried me through about half the game, then, when I felt stuck, I decided to switch to one of my captured legendaries and that carried me through the rest of the game. Finding monsters to fight is an annoying random roll in dungeons with multiple monsters, making it a pain at times to capture that one last monster. One small mercy here is that, once you defeat a monster and reload the screen, it becomes available to fight again without the roll. That allows you to capture a monster you defeated but didn't have the box for, or to choose a monster to grind on for levels or essence. Monsters are of four elements: Fire, Water, Plant, and Earth. Monsters have two attacks: a basic attack and one powered by their elemental essence. Alas, both are generic. No Stun attacks or debuffs or any variation whatsoever. I haven't even noticed any rock-paper-scissors elemental strength/weaknesses. The elemental essence attacks are powered only by a consumable elemental rune that you craft and feral monsters don't carry, but they do carry elemental essences with which to craft said runes. You'll still have to craft the runes to progress in the game, as they are needed to open up the rest of the land. Healing in this game is accomplished through either a simple potion or lotus flowers. The flowers allow auto-recovery in battle, and can also be used in inventory. But they must be of the same element as your fighter. Auto-recovery seems tied to max HP, but manual use of them stays at the same base limit. At first, you have to buy seeds in a market and plots in the farm and manually plant them. You'll soon be able to afford an automation to plant seeds in your inventory. Lotus flowers have three tiers. You have to manually combine a bunch of flowers to make the next tier. The tooltip fails to mention the coin cost. But, gather enough and you can buy an automation for that higher tier that doesn't seem to drain coins. You start with one small piece of land. Purchasing nearby islands, a la [i]Forager,[/i] takes various resources. Early islands have some resource buildings and crafting stations as well as places to fight and level up. First there's wood, then a mountain with both stone and iron. Mining stone also is the only way to find Rune Essence. This and the elemental essence drops off monsters are combined to make the runes for your elemental attacks. A later mountain has gold. You will need both raw gold and coins. Coins aren't dropped by monsters, but are gained through selling items as well as through minting them. Minting coins takes the intermediate step of smelting bars. All resources can be automated. The max automation is bought in town, and can be racheted down at the resource site if needed, which comes most useful if trying to mint coins. Resource management is a bit of a pain because most resources have storage limits, which, of course, can be upgraded, and will indeed need expanding to reach the rest of the land. Coin storage is one of those limits, and looks very grindy to reach the final limit, BUT I found that selling the higher tier of flowers from inventory ignores this limit. Maybe the limit is just for minting. This is a decent combination of idle game and RPG, with the RPG grind eased much by the idle part. A great QoL feature here is the ability to minimize the fight window to a small window on the world map, allowing you to do other things in the game. The quest sequence here just prompts you along the game. But the window hangs out in a corner of the world map and at times blocks one portion of the map. This is a decent early game by its developer and worth a look. I grabbed this game as part of a cheap bundle on sale, all games related to the dev. From the list, it seems the dev has gone from solo dev to working with a few friends and is making even bigger and better idle games.