Idle Demon Summoner was released onto the Steam store with a promise of creature collecting, tactical tower defence, and endless waves of enemies to defeat. With your goal in mind to take over distant worlds, you begin marching, but the road ahead is not all sunshine and roses.
Invade
The core gameplay loop resembles a Shoot ‘Em Up (shmup) environment, as you march ever forward, taking out massive waves of enemies. Starting with your avatar and a single demon, your primary goal is to survive as long as possible before heading back to the main screen to upgrade and expand your army. There are six areas to unlock for invasion, each offering new enemies, bigger boons and endless waves of idle bullet-hell chaos.
Although there seems to be a decent number of demons to collect, you’re only able to unlock six slots to place them on the play screen. This limitation requires players to carefully select which demons to use based on their abilities, theoretically adding a strategic element to team composition. However, the strategy doesn’t always play out effectively; long-range demons often clear enemies before close-range attackers have a chance to contribute, making some demons feel less useful despite their rarity.
Your avatar attacks by clicking the screen until it unleashes a super move. These moves deal major damage and helped my team overcome some boss waves. However, since this is an idle game, it quickly became redundant, and I saved my resources for the one that triggered automatically.
Upgrade Your Army
Progress requires stat upgrades to strengthen demons and unlock abilities. Four resource types upgrade unique abilities. Green gems upgrade your demon skills. Yellow gems upgrade your player and unlock more demon slots. Red upgrades your special attack skills. Blue gems are used to upgrade your forge and unlock checkpoints on the invasion screen.
You can also upgrade your demons by summoning souls and equipping each demon. Summoning is largely down to RNG, however, duplicates will give EXP to the demons you already have. The rarer demons do have better skills and starting stats, but it feels like the “rarity” refers more to the soul type than the creatures themself.
Forge Your Path
The forge is used to change gems into other colours or create keys to open chests. This is measured in real time and runs while offline. The system works well and stops gems from being redundant after finishing an upgrade tree.
The Nitty-Gritty
I enjoyed the pixel graphics and overall aesthetics of Idle Demon Summoner. The UI was easy to navigate, and the results clearly showed which demon was letting the side down. There are some customisation options for sound and display, as well as a fast summon option.
There aren’t a lot of requirements for the modern idle game, but there is a baseline for what makes a good one. Idle Demon Summoner offers players enough control and goals to keep them grinding all the way to the endgame. Unfortunately, the Steam achievements appear to be broken, and the developers swapped out their Steam page header for an AI-generated equivalent of the pixel art, which will deter most of our readers from picking it up in the future. Myself included.
Platform: PC
Publisher: Chiro Games
Developer: Chiro Games
Played On: Steam
Code Provided By: Keymailer
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