I could write for hours about this game, Steam limit is 8000 characters.
TLDR: A bullet hell with great combat with the worst, most predatory monetisation I might have ever seen in a game. This review is meant for new and old players, but I can’t make a review for both that doesn’t go over the basics.

Realm of the Mad God is free, is unique gameplay wise in the MMORPG space, and revolves around fun, engaging, bullet hell combat. There’s not a lot to the game outside of the combat, a bit of lore (which doesn’t really play into the game at all), but the combat is good. The gameplay loop is meant to be going into a realm (basically a large open map), killing enemies, doing dungeons that can open when an enemy dies, and killing enough marked enemies for Oryx the Mad God to get angry and summon you to his castle, where you fight some bosses, and then, him. The goal is to get loot, kill harder enemies, get better loot, and when you die, it’s all gone, and you’ll hopefully do better and better as you go through more characters.

Except, this is not the gameplay loop at all after a certain point. I am not going to complain about the obvious things that people tend to dislike from the get go, the cash shop at spawn, loot boxes, etc. I’ll be complaining from the point of view of someone who has played the game for 1000 hours.

To set the scene, these dungeons I initially mentioned drop potions which are used to max your characters stats (as well as other loot), different classes have different stat caps, but the point is, these potions are very useful as the stats you can level with these potions are:

• Attack - Attack Damage
  
• Defense - 1 defense is 1 less damage taken.
  
• Speed - Movement Speed
  
• Dexterity - Attack Speed
  
• Vitality - Health regeneration
  
• Wisdom - Mana regeneration
  
• Mana - +5 Maximum Mana
  
• Life - +5 Maximum HP

You may think that one point in a stat from a potion isn’t that big, but the difference between a fresh level 20 max level character vs one with maxed stats is insane, the DPS from Attack and Dexterity is massive, wisdom is huge for more use of your ability on some classes; Life, Mana and Defense are huge for survivability.
I don’t have a problem with the potions themselves, I think the progression is great and definitely makes you feel more powerful as you drink more potions, my problem is with the efficiency of obtaining these.

The Developers frequently make “events”, they have three types of events, two being practically the same.
There are chest events and drop rate events, where they pick one or a few dungeons to add an extra loot chest or increase the drop rates of rare items over the course of a weekend, these are functionally the same and are fine events.
Then there are Campaigns, which are month-long projects where they basically have the aforementioned chest/loot events in a variety of dungeons over the course of a month, the goal being to gain a unique currency which will progress you through the Campaign and unlock tiered rewards for you, a lot like a battle pass. Of course, you can pay for these tiers, and it costs a lot, they initially did a Campaign as a “support us” event so they could port the game to Unity, it was marketed as a one off event, but alas, it has not been. It was so lucrative that they’ve chosen to repeat this battle pass system rather frequently.

Now to the real problem I have, during these “events” (which you’d assume would be a fun event for the community) have real money loot boxes containing the keys for the event dungeon, you can pay for a box and get one or two keys, or you can get lucky and roll 20, of course, it’s all luck and the larger amount of keys are far rarer.
Events boil down to some poor sap buying a boat load of keys for them and their guild mates to run, or run with a Discord (which I’ll get to later). The meta for running dungeons and getting loot in this game is purchasing the keys for dungeons with real money so you don’t have to waste time looking for them, or waiting for a specific event in a realm to spawn that can open said dungeon. This is massive for the late game dungeons as they generally take a while to find, and thus, are a long grind to farm.

The Discord system is formed as a result of keys existing to open dungeons, which is understandable, as it’s efficient, and allows for one poor sap to buy the dungeon keys and for everyone else to leech off it. There are servers for specific end game dungeons such as Lost Halls, Shatters etc. where you join a voice chat with a few people who are “Raid Leaders” or “RLs” for short. These RLs are unmuted and are meant to lead the group through the dungeon that some guy has paid for. Often, the RLs aren’t remotely helpful and just talk about random topics, and you’re forced to listen to them with the threat of being “suspended” if you deafen. So you’re often forced to listen to some 15 year old talk about nothing for hours a day while you farm dungeons, who also has the power to have you “suspended” from the Discord if they deem that you’ve done something wrong. If you aren’t a part of their group and happen to randomly stumble across one of their dungeon runs, then they’ll get angry at you, which is somewhat understandable I suppose. I have no idea why they expect you to listen to them for hours a day, when more often than not, the dungeon goes flawlessly as everyone there knows what they’re doing, but you still have to listen nonetheless.

Now to the newer end game: Oryx 3. I previously mentioned Oryx the Mad God in the first paragraph, there is Oryx 2, which you can fight after Oryx if someone opens the Wine Cellar with a Wine Cellar incantation, then there’s Oryx 3 after that, which is probably the hardest content in the game and requires three extremely rare drops to open, so, you guessed it, the meta is to hop on Discord to find people who have these rare items, so they can combine them together and open Oryx 3. It is great content, but practically limited to Discord as these items aren’t feasible to collect yourself, maybe you could run it with your guild, but not frequently. Also, as a side result of getting to Oryx 3 through Oryx 1 and 2, Discords clear the realms of marked enemies in order to access Oryx, and if you’re a random player, not in their group, just hanging around in the realm, then you’ll often get flamed for “crashing” their Oryx 3 run, when you’re just chilling out doing some Snake Pits.

The three items you need to open Oryx 3 are all dropped rarely in other end game dungeons that are run almost entirely through Discord, so you can see the relation between buying keys and opening Oryx 3. Once again, buying keys is the meta. The content in this game is great, but it’s craftily monetised in order to milk the most money possible out of the active player base.

I’m approaching the character limit, but other notable problems are the pet system in which you can get a pet that follows you with 3 abilities, ideally, the first two are heal and magic heal, which restores your HP and Mana, they introduced an “in/out of combat” system to nerf them so they’re LESS pay to win, but that just reduces the rate at which they heal, so it’s still crazy.

My 100 heal pet that took over 1000 hours to obtain heals me for 90 health every second. The reason it takes so long to obtain is you have to level it via feeding it, items have different feed powers and it costs fame or real money to feed it, fame is earned on character death, and feeding it via fame is so absurdly costly that it takes a ridiculous amount of time. And that isn’t even going over the fusing system, my pet is Divine, and there’s 4 tiers to fuse through before that, you need 2 Legendaries to fuse to a Divine, 2 Rares for a Legendary etc. You’re either investing 1000 hours or a few thousand dollars for a top tier pet that makes the game significantly easier.

I’m at character limit, this game sucks.