Melvor Idle Review (Kitty Nat)
Complex and Not That Idle
Melvor Idle is a RuneScape-inspired idle RPG whose pretty static icons and progress bars hide complex interconnected elements. It's the sort of game where some players craft mods full of cheats and tools, while others construct challenge runs with severe limitations.
When you commit to a character, you choose one of four gamemodes. Standard is for new players. Hardcore is the permadeath mode. Adventure mode is a bit harder and asks you to buy aspects of the game to unlock them. Ancient Relics asks you to clear dungeons to advance your max skill levels, plus uses the titular relics to give skill bonuses.
It calls itself an idle game, but you'll be babysitting it a lot. Most actions take only a few seconds to complete once you have everything. A lot of times, you'll run out of crafting mats in minutes or hours.
But, other times, you'll have days of alternating between gathering mats overnight and then crafting overnight. The maximum offline period is 24 hours, reasonable for a game that pretty much asks you to return to it daily for about three years. Unless, of course, you use some cheat mods, including a very useful time-skip one.
The most babysitting comes in combat. Your character auto-battles, but the only way to heal up fast during combat is through eating food. You don't get an auto-eat option until you buy it from the shop. Not only can you run out of food in combat, you can also exhaust ammo and consumables.
The penalty for death here is either permadeath if Hardmode, or the loss of whatever is in a random equipment slot. That's easily recoverable, unless you have the bad luck to lose a huge stack of consumables or a rare equipment drop.
The only other way to lose HP and die is in Thieving. If your targets catch you (a simple stat comparison), they bop you on the head and stun you briefly for an HP hit. There's a toggle to continue after a stun, and food here heals you as in combat.
Most aspects of the game have a ripple effect somewhere else, and in ways both familiar and new. You have the standards: Woodcutting for arrow shaft wood, Mining for ores to craft gear out of, Smithing to melt ore into bars and make gear, Farming for both food and potion herbs, Fishing for more food, Cooking for improved food. And, of course, combat drops many useful items.
Then you get some less-common twists. You can practice Firemaking and burn the wood you chop for ash for a couple crafts, plus your level here allows you to buy more Cooking upgrades. Mining includes mining Rune Essence, which forms the basis of the runes you need to craft to cast all your spells. Study the constellations in Astrology, and you can add bonuses to skills.
The weirdest and least logical twist comes in Agility. Most places, this is a stat that helps with dodging. Here, it is simply a simulated agility course. Completing obstacles is one way to safely gain money, and whatever obstacles are currently up grants buffs (and a few debuffs) to skills.
Using skills earns xp to level them up, of course. However, here, most skills have sub aspects that require you to earn Mastery Points in using them. Certain Mastery thresholds gains a bonus for that aspect.
You can speed up the process of mastering sub skills by spending Mastery XP and Mastery Tokens on them, but this bar has its own bonuses for the entire skill for reaching certain thresholds.
You get a Township to expand. Actually, it's a mini empire spread across several biomes. Aside from your precious gold coins, everything the Township needs it makes on its own from buildings you've built for it already. Contributing items to it via certain optional tasks helps to speed along its growth.
The only support it gives to you is, eventually, you gain Trading Posts to trade Township goods for useful items like loot chests, and a Town Hall that gives you tax money.
Stuff drops randomly, too. Mining finds gems for crafting. Using every skill can drop Mastery Tokens for that skill, with which to refill the Mastery XP bar.
And there are cute Pets to find lurking in every skill. They have a tiny chance to drop with each action in a skill and grant small bonuses for said skill. Pets also lurk in dungeons.
The Shop is full of useful items. Mostly, it has some upgrades to various skills, gear that gives bonuses to skills, and a handful of Cooking ingredients that the dev didn't figure out how or where to make it a combat drop.
The most annoying and frustrating Shop upgrade is to the Bank. This is less a financial bank and more of a ginormous vault. In other words, it's your non-equipped inventory.
Inventory management is a huge pain, especially early on. You start with a Bank slot limit of a mere 12 slots and must purchase more ... in a game that has a couple THOUSAND items, if all expansions are included.
There are some welcome QoL touches here, though. Item stacks are essentially bottomless, so you only need one slot per item. There's about a dozen Bank tabs for item sorting, and a search feature.
The biggest pain of all is that this is a completionist's wet dream. Maxing out skills is relatively easy, including mastering sub skills. Beating the final bosses is a long, long slog, but doable with the right combo of equipment and maxed skills.
But the completion log is only finished once you have beaten all monsters and bosses once, found or crafted all items, and found every pet (including the dungeon ones), as well as maxing out all skills and sub skills.
Fortunately, everything has a mouseover hint of a name or where to find it. And, of course, if you manage to beat the final boss, you've found most everything already.
You can find much help in the official wiki, one of the best I've seen for a game.
Or, you can download the various useful mods for cheats and tools. This is NOT through Steam Workshop, but is instead through an in-game mod manager. However, that enables the mods to be available on Melvor Idle's other platforms.
The first two expansions are worth purchasing, and all three can be bought individually. Throne of the Herald simply adds a few more levels and content to skills.
Atlas of Discovery is a fun one that adds the linked skills of Cartography and Archaeology. You survey a land and find points of interest, including dig sites. Then, you create dig maps and excavate various artifacts, some of which are useful to you elsewhere.
Into the Abyss is a sort of New Game+ that sends you into an Abyssal Realm version of Melvor with new items and monsters and such, but only goes to level 60 at the moment. I got frustrated with trying to pass the final boss of the base game, so never got to this third expansion.
Melvor Idle is like a complex MMO RPG, but minus the multiplayer part and with lots of progress bars and idle waiting. It's also far less expensive than the big MMOs. If you can stand its unique challenges, it's worth a look.