Realm Grinder

General review: 4.5/5. Compared to other incremental games: 3.8/5. Compared to other IOS incrementals: 5/5. This idle game has a very similar gameplay style to the game Cookie Clicker. Although that premise that sound a bit boring if you've played enough games in that sub-genre, this one is very unique. First of all, it gives the player the choice between 2 alignments (good and evil), both of which contain 3 factions that offer unique gameplay options. Do you want to play offline a bunch? Make an alliance with the Undead faction. Do you want to use a bunch of abilities? Make an alliance with the Angels. Want your clicks to actually matter? Ally with the Elves. Even though these factions sound incredibly geared towards one specific purpose, this is just a basic overview of what they can do. When it comes to incrementals, there are usually prestige loops, and Realm Grinder is no exception. There are 2 'layers' of prestige on here. Abdication and Reincarnation. Abdication is just your standard 'reset to increase your production boost' prestige. Even though this does sound very basic, you'll often end up abdicating with a production boost 1000x or higher, since the gems (prestige currency) is based on a summative calculation (1T coins, 2T coins, 3T coins, 6T coons, 10T coins, ect). Anyway, the second prestige loop is much more interesting: Reincarnations. Whenever you acquire a certain number of gems, you are allowed to perform a reincarnation. As you probably would have guessed, you will lose all of your gems whenever you reincarnate, and you will get extra bonuses in return. Without spoiling much, you get really cool stuff at Reincarnations 3, 7, 16, 40, 45 and 60. This isn't just a 'oh, you get a new building and your production has increased', but it totally changes the way you play in both minor and major ways instead. Now, you are probably wondering about the micro transactions and ads in this game. Let me tell you that they are almost nonexistent. Yes, while there are some 'walls' in this game, they serve more as a way to make the player realize how far they have come when they can just blitz through it after a prestige. Also, the only things that you can really buy with micro transactions are rubies (which only serve to boost some minor parts of your production) and a couple of production boosts. In fact, these in-app purchases serve more to support the developer rather than to exploit the player. You are only brought to the store ONCE at the beginning, but the game never 'reminds' you of the shop ever again. As for the ads, there are no intrusive ones. The only ads that you get are opt-in by 'scrying'. When you press that button, you get a 30-second video after which you can either increase your production or a couple of other things. The way that the game is set-up really feeds nicely into this design, since there are often points where you aren't doing anything productive, so you might as well turn on an ad to boost your production by a bit. If you are interested in idle games, I would really recommend to give this game a try. However, here are a couple of things that I don't really like about the game. This is mainly aimed at people that have played a bit as well, and will contain a lot of spoilers (however, you might not even know what I am taking about in the first place). * Factiom coins are too hard to come by, especially if you're not playing as Elf/Goblin pre-research. And after you get the research up, it's either 'get 1-2 factions coins per click' or 'get 10000+ faction coins per click'. There doesn't seem to be a middle road. * Clicking on each building after abdicating is really annoying. At the very least, make us be able to start with an amount of buildings based on our expected production/s from one farm based on our current amount of gems. Alternatively, a 'buy all' buildings button wouldn't be a bad idea as well. * Some challenges take too long. While I, don't remember any of the specific ones, I do remember one that wanted me to cast a spell 2 hours in a row. That isn't a challenge, that is just "we're going to take 2 hours from you for no reason at all". * While I enjoy the concept of ascension, it does ruin almost all of the production upgrades. I know that ascension is necessary to prevent bugs with large numbers, but they easily could have taken a logarithm of the actual number, truncated the number to only a few decimal places or treat every digit separately instead of using a 'long' datatype. However, these are only minor gripes with the game. They don't affect the core gameplay too much, and it's more of a good sign that these small things are the only things bothering me.