Dev finally lost his mind and added p2w gacha with a NEW premium currency that u cant farm, but hey you get 1 free draw per week, only need to hit that 0.28% that gives a completely game changing bonus before the pets rotate out and a new batch of bonuses comes in. FOMO Gacha with new premium currency, worst update ever

EDIT
After 2 weeks of complete radio silence from dev, he released a new update which added pity timer for Doot which is 200 pulls. So now in order to get him you can spend 500$ or wait almost 4 years as a f2p (update - pity doesnt work on free pulls)

His message on discord was basically i spent the money from gacha on adds and players who quit were replaced with new ones so im gonna keep doing it.

Also the new W5 boss is terrible, literally just a target dummy he doesnt even have attacks.
If this is the direction the game is going its just going to be absolute bare bones content and focus od monetary aspects of the game.

For months and through numerous requests by the developer after every update, I have considered how I was ultimately going to post my review for this game. For the first 9 months of playing this game, it was one of the best games I have played, and certainly the best idle game. The progression system is outstanding, the different areas in this game to progress in are many, and it feels like you are still making progress towards something or other no matter what you are doing. I was ultimately planning on this being a positive review.

Unfortunately after the most recent update, I can no longer recommend this game, and it's not just for the content in the update, but primarily because of how the developer has handled the situation since the update has been released. While the update itself was a travesty (adding a very obvious pay to win system introducing some incredibly powerful pet follower bonuses, the average person will need to spend hundreds of dollars (or wait on average several years) for a good chance at getting incredibly game altering bonuses), I was confident that the developer would quickly identify the criticisms laid out by the community and address them with a plan on how to fix the new system. Instead, he's banned numerous people making complaints, deleted criticism from posts made on the subreddit which he moderates, and hasn't issued a single statement since the update was released, which at this point has been more than 10 days ago. That silence speaks louder than words.

The developer and his mod team ban people and delete criticisms constantly. I say this as an outsider who has never been punished in any way. I can no longer stay silent on their behalf. The dev, unfortunately, has what appears to be a long history of making bad decisions when it comes to punishing people in his game, on discord, and on the subreddit. It's shameful, and ultimately the people they end up banning or punishing (just look at how he handled those who used the sailing exploit) are usually the game's biggest supporters and i'm sure many people who have spent money on the game.

The developer constantly touts "solo dev" as if that were a positive. From what I have seen, that also means he's never held accountable to anyone but himself. When he comes up with a terrible pay to win system, there's nobody in his corner to tell him it's a bad idea and to rethink the system. When he issues bans to numerous members of the community, there's nobody there to review the legitimacy of the ban, or to tell him that kneejerk bans are harmful to the game and community.

I think what's more pressing than fixing the most recent update is fixing the authoritarian system of control that's been the norm in this community. Lava should take some of the money he earned from this update and hire a community manager who should be the one handling all bans, and review all retroactive bans. They need a panel of three members of the community (NOT selected by Lava) for this to review them - I am guessing the VAST majority of bans and mutes on discord, reddit, and in game are complete and utter nonsense that no panel of three would uphold. If I am wrong, great, prove it by having a panel go through them all and release a statement on the number of bans and mutes they reversed.

If the developer continues his heavy handedness, there will be nothing but sycophants left to sing his praises, which ultimately hurts the game and the community rather than being able to accept hard truths and work to improve the game based on those truths.

I think there's still a chance for this game to be saved. I'm willing to change this to a positive review, in the end, if instead of a knee jerk reaction that I'm expecting from all the negative reviews he instead reacts with a thoughtful response that both fixes the issues with the update, in game, but also fixes some of the grave concerns I've raised about the heavy handed moderation resulting in numerous unjust bans.

I don't know why the developer has been silent for so long. I am going to guess that, when he ultimately makes a statement, it's going to be something about spending all his efforts on fixing the issues that iOS has had resulting in the update being rejected there. That's ultimately not a good excuse for being silent so long. Most of us want the game to succeed, and with such a backlash, there should have been a statement made the very day of the update, let alone by now 10 days later. I had been holding off on this review to give the dev a chance to make this statement, but it's been too long at this point, and with no promised changes, again, I cannot recommend this game as-is.

Dev is a nutcase and essentially buys sponsors/shills to cover for his terrible PR/game decisions, buttttt it's still a really fun game as long as you go full f2p or understand that your money spent is enabling the dev to release more anti-f2p systems.

Edit: editing my review because it has some visibility and because I wanted to be explicit in that Steam reviews are the ONLY public forum where you'll get an accurate representation of the game. The dev has a complete stranglehold over almost every other public forum where he'll personally mute/ban/remove users/posts from the official discord and subreddit that mention anything meta about the game or the latest update. What's happening right now and what has been happening since this game's inception is that the dev makes a controversial p2w/p2p updates to the game and proceeds to silence critics all the while using the extra money from that update to buy sponsors in order to bring in new players who are oblivious because of censorship.

It's a good idle game, lots to do, good music, good visuals. So why a negative review?

The developer decided in today's update to increase the required level to unlock your next characters. For example, I have account level 550 and my 9th character was going to unlock at level 600, and that was just raised to 1100. It will be a long time before I get 1100, but 600 was just around the corner, so that's pretty brutal to be missing out due to not having started playing a month earlier and I'd already be 600+ with 9 characters.

It's a bad update for new players that will increase the gap between new and old players. I think the real reason this was done is to slow player progress further (if it takes longer to unlock characters you'll be farming with less characters for longer slowing progress) and it will make bundle purchases look more appealing since the bundles will speed up progress even faster when progress is slowed down overall.

And would you look at that? Another new $20 pack, which would be considered one of the most OP P2W bundles yet, was dropped today's update. So the math adds up.

I get you're going to keep adding new P2W bundles you want to make money, but can you at least change back the level requirement for new characters? If not I'll highly recommend new people to avoid this game, updates are not new player friendly and heavily P2W / pay2catchup

UPDATE 3 (follower patch): Installed the game to see if things have changed. Next day, the new patch drops with 350 dollars of p2w to get some of the most broken benefits in the game with a new currency that costs real money and no way to grind in game.

He did not fix the 2.1B integer limit that I complained about over a year ago, rather he capped it at 1.05 bil which is laughable since I could easily hit 1B over a year ago before the W5 power creep.

Capping the number go up dopamine in an incremental game is a sin.

Additionally, I encountered a neat bug where random parts of the screen were opening a link to his twitch channel.

So yea, my review has not changed. Lava still being lava. I noticed he deleted a criticism thread of the new patch on Reddit already. Classic.

UPDATE 2: The developer has now banned me from the reddit for making a single post criticizing him. https://imgur.com/a/MVzXQWy and here is proof and my username https://imgur.com/qHJ8nf0

UPDATE: Shortly after this review I have been banned from the discord for criticizing the latest patch (v.156) and how it hurts F2P players and did not achieve what he promised.


Note: Here's the image linked in the reddit post. https://imgur.com/EqMq9TS
This is also what I reference below in the review.

I love this game and will probably always love it, but it feels like I am Johnny Depp dealing with Amber Heard when playing it sometimes.
I can not recommend this game to new players as the developer constantly makes the experience worse for new players and endgame. I will change my review if the situation gets better.

The Good

• Game has good systems to progress with.
  
  
• Being able to control multiple characters without actively grinding them all is cool.
  
  
• Resource management and hoarding billions of items makes you feel rich and powerful.
  
  
• Interesting and quirky monsters.
  
  
• Artwork looks great if you enjoy pixel art.
  
  
• Always a goal to strive for.
  
  
• A lot of different systems to min-max.
  
  
• Choices you make can heavily impact how well or fast you progress.
  
  
• Smooth leveling process
  
  
• Most systems have no caps. Endless character levels.
  
  
• Loot explosions from collecting your "afk gains."
  
  
• Decent jokes through the quests.
  
  
• Community is nice and helpful for the most part.

The Bad

• Every world increases the amount of gems you must spend to stay competitive. The latest world gave as much as 20x the character power for spending money on gems.
  
  
• In-game currency acquisition is consistently getting nerfed. An example would be the KIng Doot mini-boss. The boss has gone from 72 gems possible to 19 gems to now 9 gems per kill. That is a massive nerf.
  
  
• The dev keeps adding more and more gem shop purchases each patch despite nerfing the rates of obtaining the currency.
  
  
• The dev has laid out the current patches to be QOL and Bug-fix focused, but ignores the most crippling bugs that plague the game.
  
  
• A lot of his "QOL" ends up being nerfs with a pretty paint coat.
  
  
• in Patch v.156 his dungeon "QOL" was some party find features such as invite others and find group. These features essentially broke trying to find a party and now no one can find a group when it was already difficult before. The dev just keeps on trucking and talks about making adding more to dungeon 1 when his other dungeons and party features are broken.
  
  
• Endgame players are constantly getting nerfed in damage and progression.
  
  
• Endgame players that discover an oversight and use it are threatened with bans because of the developers mistakes.
  
  
• Old bugs are not being fixed like mobile overflow (when your materials or money hit 2.1B you just lose them on mobile).
  
  
• The game white screens if you are performing actions that require a lot of input (people in the community have a solution for this, but the dev refuses to listen).
  
  
• The community has a lot of smart and talented programmers that have solutions for a lot of the games problems but the developer will not take the help and frustrating problems just continue to exist.
  
  
• A lot of the issues stem from the developer's ego and his refusal to listen to the people that are playing his game.
  
  
• His responses to criticism can be emotionally charged at times.
  Last month he went on a banning rampage in the discord over people that had negative criticism towards the game (as noted by the other top review).
  
  
• The latest patch was hyped up as nightmare versions of the games bosses, but turned out to be a flop because you make more in-game currency by doing the easiest bosses. The developers response to negative criticism was, "ok then dont farm nightmares dude" and "if youd like i can remove all gems and make that mroe clear."
  
  
• Normal bosses drop 1 gem each, which is a great way to farm up gems for F2P players. However the new nightmare bosses take up 30,40, and 50 keys respectively but still only give 1 gem each. This means F2P players have to give up 29,39, and 49 gems per nightmare try for a 1/1000 drop rate of a cosmetic item. (Gems are the in game store currency).
  

The Ugly

• Players and mods are banned on the discord for petty reasons.
  
  
• The dev reprimanded staff he personally hired for fixing situations he caused and in his lack of transparency with his own team decides to punish his long time staff with an immediate ban without hesitation.
  
  
• Any form of negative criticism is deemed toxic by the dev and makes you worthy of banning.
  
  
• Dev has a history of censoring people whenever he can. He will take down YouTube vids because he feels they take away from his own channel, he will make you change your name if you are an Idleon content creator the name is related to his game, and he will ban you if you mention certain people that he doesn't like.
  
  
• I was banned without warning after being a member with over 10,000 posts over a year without a reason listed. I assume I was deemed as "toxic."
  
  
• The dev banned several active and long time users over an April fool's joke spoil. Only one has been unbanned.
  
  
• The dev criticized my feedback in Discord by saying, "so do the last 1.5 years of your enjoyment mean nothing to you?" As if the game can't degrade or my feelings change over that time frame.
  
  
• The dev adds things to the game because he wants to, not because the game needs it. He will spend an entire day streaming him drawing frogs for the first dungeon, when the dungeons have bugs and the party system is broken. His stream on 5/8/2022 had him explicitly say he does things because he wants to.
  
  
• You must join the discord to be competitive. You will not be able to "exploit" his oversights without the help of the community that does the code digging. Many of his oversights are bugs that go on for months and give massive advantage to those that are adamant about staying ahead. You must be part of the discord to even know what is an exploit and what is deemed ok by the dev.
  
  
• The developer's communication is poor. He has no community manager and doesn't address the communities concern. His version of addressing concern is by adding things no one asked for and saying people wanted it.
  He has put out two game polls since the latest world release based on what the community wants, and nothing in those polls have been addressed in 2 months.
  The only thing that was addressed were an issue with players auto clicking a new feature. His solution was to just hard cap clicks and screw those that didn't exploit early.
  
  
• Cheaters are free to roam the game and can even unban themselves.

I suggest to those that get invested into their games to proceed with caution if you still want to try this game.

Game is getting more and more p2w, dev added a HUGE p2w update with a new currency, only way to get this new currency is by spending real money

Lava does it again. Don't make the same mistake as me.

For those who don't know, sometime last year the dev put out an update an update for pets where some of the pets gave insane bonuses. The best pet, has a 4 year pity timer for F2P players; I got lucky and got it around my 20th pull. I thought nothing of it and continued playing casually and started playing more often about 2 months ago. Almost all games are P2W these days so I just wanted to try it out and I bought the auto-loot for 5 USD, I hate microtransactions but this supported an indy dev who does everything. Great.

Come today, he added expanded a mechanic where you do certain tasks and get rewards, great. He also included a bundle where you get Alchemy Bubbles, Stamp Levels, and Food Levels free. All of these levels greatly improve your characters ability. Granted we already had Alchemy Bubbles and Food Levels, but it was earned in game with your work and effort. Stamp levels scale exponentially and are very hard late game to level. This just gives all of that for free just logging in. Using Runescape as an analogy, its like if you logged in daily and got +1 level in construction and allows you to go over 99. Doesn't matter how many other bundles you bought before, this just does a part of the game for you and you can just ignore it permanently. He could have easily added this as a reward to be earned, but he put it behind a bundle.

He will continue pushing his predatory P2W business model and he is constantly mocking genuine criticism from the players. I can't believe how many people are defending this in the discord. Learn from my mistakes, don't touch this cesspool.

Pros-
Game is enjoyable.

Cons-
Very predatory micro-transactions.
Developer is absolutely full of himself and can't take criticism without deleting it.

I'd been playing this game since before World 3 was out; the game was originally a fantastic F2P experience - freemium currency was easy to come by and prices for upgrades were relatively inexpensive, but there's been a massive negative shift in terms of how the game is presented and how in-game purchases are pushed.

The game is beautiful on the surface, the gameplay is interesting, the art is charming with fascinating worlds and every new world brings in new skills that make the game interesting and adds complexity. When I first heard about pet companions coming as an update, I was thrilled...until I saw the absolute huge shift towards P2W in regards to the drop chances of the most game breaking pet in the system. It's nothing more than a glorified loot box system jazzed up to look less like one. I then started to notice the massive cracks in how badly the game had become predatory in terms of in-game microtransactions - constant on-screen pushes for limited time gem packs with seemingly no way to close them without clicking on the shop, along with new limited time offers on premium equipment all to induce FOMO and get you to spend money. Predatory. Plain and simple.

Shameful to say now, I did throw money into the game previously, I was playing the game often and incorrectly thought, "Hey, the dev seems like a pretty cool dude. I'll throw some money into the game to show support. He's not currently pushing for it."...and now I feel like a massive fool. If I could go back and prevent myself from playing this game, I would. If I could go back and stop myself from handing the dev money, I absolutely would. Lava, you won't be getting another cent from me. I encourage anyone who is thinking of playing this game to avoid it, especially if you're vulnerable to making in-game purchases on a whim. I don't know if I'll continue playing at this point. It hurts to see a dev for what was a good F2P game fall so deep into the cesspool of predatory practices that have begun to plague these kinds of games.

This is the best game I would not recommend to any new players. The game has the bones to be a great idle experience but unfortunately it is helmed by a sole developer who's ego is contributing to its eventual failure. I am writing this out of frustration as I am a victim of LAVAflame's limitation as a developer. I've lost my account with no chance at a back up with no support from Lava despite emails and messages in his discord seeking it. You can look at my profile page to see how invested I was in this game until that point. Worse yet this happened to a decent amount of the player base and Lava's response was to ignore and ban any players from the official discord trying to ask for support or help in addressing this. I have devoted a large amount of time and money to playing this game only to have the door slammed in my face when asking for help in trying to recover my account. I am reiterating this as this is a game you will need to sink countless hours into it only to have it suddenly taken away from you with no word or care from the developer of the game. To add salt to the wound it seems Lava is more interested in posting his PR for bench and flexing on the people who play his game than to care about the players who are supporting his vision and buying his product.

TLDR; DO not play this game, it is something that lures you in with potential but is created and run by a man who is more interested in getting praise without any real care for his game. If you do play this game I urge you not to spend money as it has the chance to suddenly just disappear with no recourse. Lava does not care and appears unable to to address the growing problems his development style is propagating.