My overall review on this clicking grinder is an 8.5/10

Pros:
- Indepth progression system
- Thoughtful little puzzles you have to think through
- Stylish


Cons:
- No Sound of any kind
- Long gaps between the interesting tasks
- Little changes visually as you progress.

I honestly really enjoy this game! It's a nice clicker game with tons of things to do, where each "run" is not necessarily the same. Right in the beginning, you get thrown a lot of choices, like the factions, which can change radically the flow of the game. I've yet to unlock the later game stuff, but so far I really like it.

I should probably begin by saying I have a weakness for idle games. The allure of always progressing and the goal of that next unlockable is appealing to me. I can't describe properly why that's the case. I've played many idle games. Clicker heroes, adventure capitalist, soda dungeon, the cookie game, time clickers and more.

Realm Grinder is the best by an absolute mile.

Does it do anything different to the other games listed? Not really, no. You're still clicking on things to make things happen until you reach a point of allowing the game to be self sufficient and left alone until you want to update it and get bigger numbers. What Realm Grinder does differently to the other games is include a gigantic amount of depth. You're not simply trying to reach the biggest possible numbers. Instead you are trying to reach goal after goal after goal. And everytime you think you've reached the limit, the game adds even more goals.

You start off with six factions, three good and three evil. They each have their own unique playstyle and game impacting spells. One is focused on you the player clicking and rewards you for being active. Another focuses on spells and increases mana regeneration and decreases spell costs. Another rewards you for playing for long periods, including exponentionally increasing offline bonuses.

With each soft reset you unlock new perks. Eventually you unlock neutral factions, which (temporarily) are an absolutely enormous shift in power. The previous factions suddenly seem a joke in comparison. But wait, there's more. Eventually you unlock challenges, rewarding powerful passive bonuses. But to unlock these bonuses, you have to complete the challenges on the vanilla classes. But wait, there's more. Eventually you unlock Mercenaries, enabling you to choose perks from every available faction and combine them into an extremely powerful unit. The best of all 9 worlds are available, giving you the choice of whether to massively boost spell production, production bonus or a hybrid.

But wait, there's more! After enough time with mercs and enough soft resets, you unlock bonus sub factions for the vanilla classes. These sub factions increase the power of vanilla classes to ridiculous levels and make them completely viable again. But wait, there's even more. Soon enough you unlock research, allowing for passive bonuses for the faction you are playing as. But similar to challenges, you need to match a criteria to unlock them. You also only have a limited amount of options initially. Each soft reset slowly adds more and more options, each increasing in power. You only have a limited amount of options to choose from, but there is also a lot of freedom. I've neglected to talk about trophies, which play a huge role.

Trophies are gained through specific criteria. They are similar to challenges, but the rewards are available to every faction at all times, rather than the faction specific challenge rewards. These trophies incentivise you to reach goals, rather than reach numbers. For example, one of the most powerful rewards comes from a challenge that requires you to reach a mana regeneration that is higher than your maximum mana. This involves picking an appropriate faction, picking appropriate bonuses and being very careful about not buying bonuses you instinctually would normally choose. Some are quite simple, some require a lot of time and patience and some require precise actions to unlock.

There's a lot I haven't mentioned. Bloodlines. Monthly events. Excavations. A spell casting micro management system. And remember the sub factions I mentioned earlier? Remember the stupidly powerful neutral factions? Eventually you unlock a sub faction for the neutral factions (took me about 750 hours). But even then there's more to do. Now I have challenges for this sub faction. I have more research to unlock. I still have trophies to earn. And I know that way into the distance I'll unlock mercenary specific research making them relevant again.

Simply put, this is a game that has kept my attention for over 750 hours (which doesn't include the time spent in my browser before it launched on Steam) and I still come back for more. But most importantly, I enjoy it. I've had days where I've been so engrossed by new content unlocks (looking at you Dwarven Elf builds) that I've spent all my spare gaming time which I'd ordinarily use to play a regular game and instead spent it all focused on Realm Grinder.

If you enjoy idle games and are prepared to handle the complexity required, then you will absolutely adore this game. And to my Steam friends who have to put up with seeing Realm Grinder in my currently playing all the time, Sorry, not Sorry!

did everything. big waste of time. dont regret it

In light of the recent bunch of entirely useless negative reviews of this game, I will try to write an actual useful negative review. I'll try to stay light on the spoilers in the main review, but I'm pretty sure the comments will be spoileriffic if there is any discussions on the points I make.

If you don't like idle clickers that have slow periods (start of the game is one of them), don't play this game. This statement is more about taste in games than quality.

If you do like idle clickers, and can handle slow periods, then this game should be enjoyable for a while, regardless of the flaws and issues this game has.

The Good :
This game has a clear progression, and there are lots of choices to be made. The background art evokes the old pixelated rpg style, which means it can be a soft trigger for nostalgia. It can be a pretty good distraction between sessions of more intensive games, or just running while you are watching a show.

The Bad :
While you do have a lot of choices, most of them are just plain wrong (for the objective of progression, which is the goal of the game), and until you become adept at evaluating them correctly, it is very easy to make the wrong choice. While this game was on kongregate, it was directly linked to a chat community, where feedback on your choices was easy to find. On steam, you have to actively look for the community, which means that a significant portion of players who find this game through steam will most likely head down a deadend path without knowing it, at least until they go looking for the community.

The information flow could be better. I mean, sure, you do get stats like "coins per seconds" and percentages on buildings, but once you get a bit into the game, you will start running into upgrades with no actual info on how weak or strong they are. First example I can think of is Druidic Vocabulary in the Druid faction (although it becomes important a bit further into the game).

There is also an issue of misleading/confusing wording. While I do understand that the game developers aren't native English speakers (I'm not either, btw), they do have a beta-tester community and a game community (which is a fairly active and vocal community on kongregate) to give them feedback on wording and clarity in the game.

My end recommendation would be :
1. Don't get this game if you don't like the specific genre
2. If you like the genre, treat this game as a distraction, not as the focus of the day. This will make the flaws less apparent and less important.

For the average gamer, I would end up on not recommending this game, but if you are really into the genre, you could definitely have fun with this game, as long as you are able to forgive a few flaws/issues.

It was pretty fun the first 2900 hours. But after that it really falls flat.

As far as clicker games go, there isn't much to fault with it. If you need to 100% games, getting all the Steam achivements is not super time consuming and can be done realtivily easily but getting to end game will take you a very long time.

---{Graphics}---
☐ You forget what reality is
☐ Beautiful
☐ Good
☐ Decent
☐ Bad
☐ Don‘t look too long at it
☑ Paint.exe

---{Gameplay}---
☑ Very good
☐ Good
☐ It‘s just gameplay
☐ Mehh
☐ Starring at walls is better
☐ Just don‘t

---{Audio}---
☑ Eargasm
☐ Very good
☐ Good
☐ Not too bad
☐ Bad
☐ Earrape

---{Audience}---
☐ Kids
☐ Teens
☐ Adults
☑ Human

---{PC Requirements}---
☑ Check if you can run paint
☐ Potato
☐ Decent
☐ Fast
☐ Rich boiiiiii
☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer

---{Difficulity}---
☐ Just press ‚A‘
☐ Easy
☑ Significant brain usage
☐ Easy to learn / Hard to master
☐ Difficult
☐ Dark Souls

---{Grind}---
☐ Nothing to grind
☐ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks
☐ Isnt necessary to progress
☐ Average grind level
☐ Too much grind
☑ You‘ll need a second live for grinding

---{Story}---
☑ Story?
☐ Text or Audio floating around
☐ Average
☐ Good
☐ Lovley
☐ It‘ll replace your life

---{Game Time}---
☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee
☐ Short
☐ Average
☐ Long
☑ To infinity and beyond

---{Price}---
☑ It’s free!
☐ Worth the price
☐ If u have some spare money left
☐ Not recommended
☐ You could also just burn your money

---{Bugs}---
☑ Never heard of
☐ Minor bugs
☐ Can get annoying
☐ ARK: Survival Evolved
☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs

Quite a nice game. Kind of drags on for the first 1683 hours, but after that, it gets SICK.

Best idle game i've played. Its slow paced, the progress will take days and weeks, but the depth and variety is really great.

It's 2018. We have games with graphical sensations, an epic storyline and the most compelling multiplayerbattles you ever encountered. Meanwhile i am clicking 27 times per second to generate money to buy more farms to generate money to buy more hell portals to generate money to receive more jewels, so i can start over at 0 gold again, but creating EVEN MORE money per click.

Don't ever start this game.