I Don’t Get It: Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms

With my current D&D obsession and clever Google marketing I “somehow” “managed” to get “randomly” introduced to a new D&D game – Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms. It’s on Steam, it’s Free To Play, so why not try it, I thought.

The game is simple enough. It’s an automatic side scroller. You choose the formation of your group, which heroes you buy (in what order), and which to upgrade (and in what order). There isn’t much to it and early on there isn’t even really that much choice. The second champion costs 50, the third costs 1000 and the fourth costs 25,000. By the time you get to the eight it is 10 TRILLION for a new champion. I have only unlocked that champion once.

The game kills and loots for you. Once you complete the objectives of the round you go to the next area. The areas are varied and so are the enemy types – and there is a “story” to each level (and group of levels). Every 5 levels there is a boss fight. On “autopilot” the game moves you forward to each area your party is able to win. If you “lose” one, it puts you one level back and stops auto-levelling you – but continues to kill and loot. When you check back in on your group you have a lot more gold and a lot more upgrades to go. Keeping progression “efficient” means quick check ins earlier in the game. The further ahead you are the faster the gold drops.

With all the talk of “automatic” that isn’t to say that there isn’t a decent amount of strategy here. The top left corner shows your total gold and total group DPS. Each character has different types of attacks (solo, cleave, single hit spell, multi hit, etc.) and each has different buffing conditions. The Dwarf, for example, buffs everyone’s damage in the same row as him. The game makes you choose later on whether to increase that buff, or increase his personal damage.  Some get increased damage by being around multiple classes, or in the front row. Some buff others in front of them or adjacent. There is a lot of moving your party around to see what fits. Some classes heal, some buff, there is a lot of diversity here.

There are active “ultimates” for each character which you can unlock. These require active participation. Mostly they are used on boss battles (and often trivializes them). Still – there really isn’t a losing condition in this game, only a “waiting” condition in case you need to grow in power before trying again. The game is neatly organized into 5 level chunks with a boss battle, and chain those into “campaigns”. When you beat a campaign, advanced options open up to do it at a higher level. Or, you can keep the party running through the same one (to amass more gold and loot!). It is the neverending story, D&D edition.

Things do get hectic and strategics that work on one map may not work on another. The game gives you three “quickslots” to auto-arrange your team into pre-defined formations. I have done that to focus on multi target vs single target (boss) for example. Sometimes the party gets overwhelmed if you have most of your damage stacked on the single target side, since each hero only attacks on a predetermined swing timer.

Progression is simple. Every time you beat a campaign you have to start from scratch again. The good news is that you get a percentage gold growth to start with based on how much you collected in the previous campaign. This is cumulative (at the time of this writing I get +1056% gold. Instead of one gold at the beginning per kill, well, you do the math!) This makes the repetitive nature a bit less painful. As I also mentioned this is a free to play game so they do monetize it via chests. Chests can be bought with in game currency or real money.

Like most chest base games it is a game a chance. And I am going to pause here for a second and smirk a bit. There really isn’t ever a need to buy anything in this game, since the entire game is “wait and get more powerful automatically”. Sure, buying things will increase that (and items are VERY powerful) – but really the whole point of the game is to play by “not playing” so it is really confusing to sort through how this game is going to make money.

The irony is, I did buy a chest. The game is fun. I rewarded the developer with $5. I just don’t see when or how much more I will give more. It’s an easy, fun, little game. You only need to invest so little energy or time, and that corelates with how much money I should also put into it.

The good news is the gear you do get you keep along campaigns and if you get a duplicate it increases the stats / bonuses on the item you already did get. So nothing goes to waste in the game, and I suspect the game never really ends either. It is a confusing, fun little jaunt with personality and progression in spades – you just don’t have to do anything to get there which makes it confusing to me on how much fun I am having. Kind of like checking in on an old high school friend on facebook, “like” the fish they caught with their kid, check back in a month to wish them “happy birthday”, and then scroll through the feed.

There is fun here, just hard to define. It’s free, so why not check it out? Now excuse me, I think I have a few trillion in upgrades to spend to get to the next mission.

2 comments / Add your comment below

  1. Their first game, Crusaders of the Lost Idols, is smoother and more slick, imo. Maybe give that a comparison when you have the time.

    I like the lore of the Forgotten Realms, but I don’t like the pause-turn-based-attack feeling of this game. Maybe it adds an additional layer of strategy, that one needs to consider timing the attacks, but it just makes it less fun than Lost Idols to me. The pace is less broken up in Lost Idols, it just chains into one glorious flowing movement towards ever increasing ‘map’ levels until the next reset.

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