PANOPTYCA : Idle RPG Manager Steam Charts & Stats

Panoptyca : Idle RPG Manager is a Free to Play game, so Steam, of course I received this product free. I have not been given any additional compensation for my review at the time of this writing. ============================================================ TLDR: Panoptyca : Idle RPG Manager, isn't bad for a free to play idle game. Though it undercuts the true nature of many idle games by not having offline progression, and locking features behind an IN-GAME paywall. Additionally, there are features of the game locked behind Commander Level (your account level), which even in the early game are not easy to unlock as your only path is to clear stages until you can rank enough to unlock the Bounty Board. My main gripe would be not being able to have a party outside of dungeons, and when featuring a roster of heroes of the same class that they cannot Share their class abilities which feels awful. ============================================================ Full Review: For a free to play Idle game, this game has a far more Active play focus than many of its peers. When I play the game I feel like many of the in game pay wall blocked features should be included into the base game, or have an option to purchase with in game currency. I understand the developer desire to make money, so having there be a paid option to be a short-cut wouldn't rub me the wrong way in this Free to Play model at all. Example: $7.99 USD to enable setting to obtain dismantled materials when opening Normal/Magic Grade Treasure chests. (Auto dismantling things that just clog your inventory when looting chests from heroes). There are some Pay for Power aspects in the game that increase the treasure capacity, drop rates, auto respawn time reductions and stage retry reductions. But those I feel are not a bane on the game, just be aware that a Paid player with those features will likely always outrank any free player on the ranking boards. Panoptyca's Premium Currency are its Diamonds, which unlike many idle games, this game is fairly generous with even for a Free to Play account. With the ability to claim daily, weekly and monthly rewards that are similar to the 'daily log-in bonus' most of its peers would force on players. The trade off on this is that many items in the shop require these Diamonds to purchase, and most of those items tend to be very Loot Box styled with heavy RNG elements. Gearing in Panoptyca can be a bit grindy with each piece being able to be upgraded with similar tier upgrade tokens, each piece of gear can be upgraded a few times with 100% success, continuing to upgrade beyond the safe range will quickly lower the chance at successfully upgrading a piece of gear. When you fail to upgrade, you keep the gear but lose the upgrade token. Each piece seems to cap out at a +20 upgrade value from my experience, which gives it approximately the power of a piece of gear 5~10 levels (1 or 2 gear progressions) above what the base item would perform at. As you progress your Commander Ranking, you will gain access to additional heroes, there are also limited hero slots that can be gained by paying Diamonds. This is a really interesting way to go about it, however the main limitation which I did not see shown is that each Class Ability can only be equipped by One Hero of the Correct Class for the ability. I personally feel I would rather have every hero have its full suite of Class Abilities, and then track the progression of each ability separate for each hero than to be limited in the current design of the hero skills. Not only would this allow for a player to have the same build on heroes as we find what is effective over time, but it would also allow for someone to focus on a more Roleplay style build. What if A player wanted to play as if they were a Band of Fighters, and only wanted eight knights in their roster? Additionally, tying abilities to the hero unit, rather than the account, would make it far easier to include a roster of more than eight heroes (Even if only eight could be active at any time currently). That design could also allow for additional Scenes to be put into the game for more heroes to be managed in the future if the game does continue in development.

It's a good game to leave in the background, though I wish there was offline progress. It can't be good on electricity to leave this game on all the time just to progress. Honestly, I ignored the negative reviews for this game because it's mostly just people who can't read, have zero patience for an idle game of all things, and people who don't realize that this game is free so the devs are going to monetize it somehow. Some of the things I hope for is more character sprites and classes. On top of that, I can see how mod support would make this game popular. Imagine having custom art and sprites for this game just to make the experience more personal.