Archmage Idle

When I first bought this game there were a lot of negative reviews for it. As with all of the games I buy and play I ignore all of the reviews and played it for myself because humanity as a whole sucks and cannot be relied upon and the vast majority or people do not play games or enjoy the same things as I do so even if they were 100% accurate the reviews likely would not apply to me anyway. After playing I found a few of the reviews questionable or made by frustrated people of seemingly low intelligence and or patience. The claims in them were that it was impossible to advance in this game because the systems and interactions between the skills were unreasonably complicated and impossible to learn. I am by no means a smart person, but it took me maybe an hour to determine how the various systems related. The reviews that state the inventory limits are frustrating and that there are a lot of items are accurate. I did find that very frustrating, it was not until I unlocked the bazar and played with it enough to determine I had been wasting a lot of gold selling manually that I could afford enough slots in my inventory to alleviate the frustration. Despite all of that I am still enjoying the game and continuing to play daily so definitely worth the cost of free. Also I have not bought any of the in game items or boosts so they have not been needed and I am over 700 hours in.

Its nice, pick turbo mode and let it run in the background though

This is a fantastic idler. Like Melvor but better.. more intuitive and easier to understand (for me, at least).

This is very much worth the price of free.

Solid semi-active idler, I think we're going with "Melvor-like". All about optimizing by stacking multipliers to make numbers go up better. Takes around 3 weeks including offline time to 100%.

Locking so much content behind New Game+ that 99% of players will never see is a really poor choice, though. Get it integrated into the main game.
NG+ itself doesn't feel different enough to justify a second playthrough, either. Most of the astral web upgrades barely matter, and progression doesn't feel any faster since the exp curve is balanced against the increased upgrades almost exactly. Should really be about twice as fast if you actually expect people to keep playing.

Skills are well-designed, with all of them being meaningfully distinct, not just multiple bars to progress. Each has its own inputs and outputs, which interact with each other. Multipliers on level thresholds mean planning out progression is meaningful.

Issues:
Skills are badly balanced against each other. Meditation for instance has many incredibly powerful bonuses hidden, while nearly all summoning effects are almost entirely worthless. Artifacts are nearly all worthless, and many of the skills in the second half have nothing to offer except their 10-level bonuses.

A number of text descriptions are incorrect, such as the warp crystals saying their effect scales with experience, which seems to be entirely untrue.

Many items are effectively unused, such as several types of books having no use whatsoever, despite many of the others being doubled up on for alchemy recipes.

Very good within its genre. If you like Melvor you will most certainly like this one too