Melvor Idle Review (dumpr)
Easily one of the top three games in its genre. It's refreshing as hell to see an idler with a traditional "buy the game, get the game" business model.
Melvor Idle asks for $9.99 in exchange for one of the most polished iterations yet of the bar-fills-up-number-gets-bigger formula, and it's microtransaction free.
(Also note that I bought this game on Steam and gained free access to the mobile version, with cross-save compatibility. We've got a really outstanding little idler, here.)
Melvor's a little less like Cookie Clicker, NGU Idle, or many of its peers in that there's no "the number" that the entire game revolves around increasing. There's no prestige / ascension system that I've seen, and a lot of the game's meat is actually centered around progressing in its auto-battle type combat system.
You fish and cook fish so you can heal during fights.
You chop wood, make charcoal, fletch arrows, mine ores and smith bars, all so you can craft equipment to take into fights.
You craft magic runes and partake in a little bit of the dark arts to gain the wizard equivalent to ammo, so you get to cast spells during fights.
You can train thieving to bypass some of these other, aforementioned skills and get a handful of their progression rewards in less time—so you can get into the fighting sooner.
Yeah, so it's fun. I like it.
My only issue with the game is that you have a limited item inventory, and your maximum possible inventory space seems to be a good deal smaller than the amount of unique, obtainable items.
Your inventory starts out tiny, and you're able to expand it with upgrades, but it never feels like you can expand it enough to keep up with the flow of new, shiny items you don't want to sell.
When you've got limited space to deal with a bunch of different armor and weapon sets, and then you're also sitting on like a million billion different kinds of crops, and every crop has its own type of seed, and there are all of these ores and metal bars, and gems, and you also have food, and there's two different qualities of cooked food...
Inventory management slows down the game and kind of draws attention from the rest of it, is what I'm saying. I'd love if there was a late-game upgrade that just removed the limit altogether and let me have unlimited space, but I guess it remains to be seen if that'll ever happen.
This one flaw aside, the game's a standout little gem—no 10/10, unfortunately, but for the idle genre, it's pretty damn close. It's my go-to if I want to watch a number get bigger.