Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realm Preview

I recently started playing D&D and have absolutely loved every moment of it, so when there was an opportunity to try out an official game I jumped at the chance. The original game has you exploring a myriad of dungeons with your friends with nothing but your imagination and a storyteller. Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realm takes all of those ideals and attempts to smash them together into a single click.

First off I need to state that I haven’t played any idle games, the idea of a game where I don’t actually play most of the time sounds about as fun as watching paint dry. Which is pretty much what it felt like playing through Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realm.

Idle Champions is a game in which you go around killing monsters and collecting gold in order to buy more characters and levels for said characters. This is basically the extent of the depth in this game, and calling it a game even feels generous. I would definitely say that this is not even a clicker game but more so from the idle genre. You form a party of different classes, choose their formation and that's pretty much it. The party formation in itself doesn't even really suffer from your choices as your party seems to do just fine with almost every setup. While the clicking part of the game isn’t really necessary, you don’t even have to click on the enemies to do damage to them. The game literally has you mindlessly clicking on any part of the level and you will do one damage to whichever enemy is closest to your party.

What really drove me nuts about this game was the idea that you don’t actually play it much. Instead you are meant to walk away from the game and let the game play itself. While this type of gameplay holds no interest for me, I can understand the appeal, considering the game is free-to-play. My true problem with the game is that it feels like even though its free-to-play, it is very microtransaction heavy. You don’t exactly hit a wall if you don’t buy things in the game, however the amount of gold you make during offline play is about one tenth the amount you would get from keeping the game open all night. This means that if you want to actually make progress in the game you need to leave your computer and the game running a lot. On top of the low amount of gold from offline play, the progress you make in the game definitely does not make you feel like you have accomplished anything as the game’s monsters mostly look to be a bit of a joke. While you come across your typical bandits and thieves, there are also a myriad of silly enemies like cows that kind of detract from any sense of mystical adventure.

Speaking of adventure there isn’t really a storyline in this game to speak of, considering it's a D&D game. Normally when you make a game with such a rich lore to pull from, you can at least piece together a decent storyline, however Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realm doesn’t really feel like it has much of one. The game is just a group of adventurers wandering through various levels killing monsters and grabbing gold.

Overall I was more disappointed than I thought I could be with an idle clicker game, mostly because it doesn’t really do either of those simple genres well. The clicker part of the game doesn’t even have any thought put into it, where you should be required to actually click on enemies to do damage to them. The idle part of the game doesn’t really fit its genre either as idling in the game does very little to actually allow you to advance in the game. I would definitely say that there are far better titles out there that are free to play that would be worth sinking your time into. Even if you are specifically looking for an idle clicker that is free-to-play I would still say, look elsewhere for a game from this genre. The game just feels like a stale scroller with plenty of micro-transaction options.