Idle Champions review
+ Universal App
FREE! Buy now!

Idle Champions review

Our Review by Campbell Bird on May 28th, 2018
Rating: starstarstarhalfstarblankstar :: PASSIVE PILLAGING
Share This:

This idle game has a few more things in it than others, but none of it really changes the experience.

Developer: Codename Entertainment

Price: Free
Version: 1.0.0
App Reviewed on: iPad Air 2

Graphics/Sound Rating: starstarstarhalfstarblankstar
User Interface Rating: starstarhalfstarblankstarblankstar
Gameplay Rating: starstarstarhalfstarblankstar
Replay Value Rating: starstarstarhalfstarblankstar

Overall Rating: starstarstarhalfstarblankstar

Idle Champions is a game for people who want to feel like they're going on a grand journey, but don't really want to invest much attention in doing so. The rpg-turned-idle game is based on the Forgotten Realms campaign setting from Dungeons & Dragons, and largely has you spending vast amounts of gold that your adventurers gather for you as they auto-attack waves upon waves of enemies. The game isn't that deep, and it's not supposed to be, but there is some satisfaction to be had from Idle Champions's thin slices of rpg complexity, even if it doesn't change things up as much as you might think.

Tap and slash

As its name suggests, Idle Champions isn't a terribly interactive game. Every campaign you go out on starts you with a single champion as they fight low level enemies and gather gold. This all happens without any input from you. The hero attacks, enemies die, and gold gathers for you, which you can then spend to upgrade your existing heroes or unlock new party members.

This isn't to say that Idle Champions is a completely passive experience, though. If you want to have a more active role in your heroes' adventure, you can tap on enemies to help kill them faster, choose when to move onto the next step of your quest, and even decide how certain heroes should specialize to make sure you have the most effective fighting force possible. That said, you can also totally not do any of this stuff, and Idle Champions will keep rolling on, even if you close the app and return to it later.

Forgotten lore

Up to this point, Idle Champions might just sound like another run-of-the-mill idle game, but that's where you'd be wrong. In addition to mindlessly tapping and hacking away at enemies Idle Champions has a surprising amount of story and progression in it that extends well beyond the offerings of other free-to-play clickers.

Every quest has dialogue and backstories for why you're doing what you're doing, you can create actual synergies between heroes, and there are active abilities you can unleash to turn the tide of a battle when your heroes seem just on the cusp of being strong enough to win. The only problem with all of this stuff is that it's all pretty trivial. You can do just fine in Idle Champions without thinking about or engaging with any of these added systems because you can always just let the game idle long enough for you to over level your heroes and steamroll everything in your way.

Buggy battles

In a way, it's a good thing that Idle Champions doesn't force you to engage with any sort of real depth. If it did, it's possible that the game's bevy of technical problems would hamper the experience more than it already does.

Things like loading hangs on resuming play from a suspended session, auto-advance not always kicking in, and complete menus that fail to load when opening, can make Idle Champions feel like a pretty rough experience. The only saving grace of all of this is that your heroes are doing all the heavy lifting automatically at all times, so you're never really missing out on gold gain if things aren't working properly.

The bottom line

Idle Champions may have some additional layers to it that other idle games don't, but the end result is largely the same. Although it seems like it has more of a core to it, that stuff is easy to overlook and ignore, and doing so doesn't really change the experience at all. If you want a few more ways to tweak and fiddle with an idle game, Idle Champions is probably your best bet, but don't expect much more than that.

Share This: