Raid Auctus

Introduction

Raid Auctus wears its inspiration openly: build a raid roster from twenty classic MMO archetypes — warrior, archer, wizard and the rest — level them toward a cap of 200, gear them at a blacksmith, and send them into more than 40 raid encounters that clear themselves while the game runs in the background. Developed and self-published by Cosmic Whale Studio, it released 1 April 2025 to a Mixed reception across 452 reviews, and its community tags on the store page back up the pitch precisely — Incremental, RPG, Idler and Party-Based RPG all sit within a few votes of each other at the top. This review reads all 44 of the game's English-language negative reviews, plus an 82-review positive sample, and the two sides turn out to agree on almost everything except how forgiving to be about it — a pattern this library has now seen a few times this session, and worth taking seriously as a signal rather than dismissing as one group being wrong.

A likeable idea, told through pleasant presentation

The theme lands. Reviewers who grew up on early MMOs specifically call out the nostalgia of the class roster and the blacksmith-and-honing systems, with one describing it as "playing old MMOs, just turn off your brain and grind" as a genuine compliment. The pixel art and music draw consistent praise even from reviewers giving the game a thumbs-down overall — "the art and music/SFX are super cool, though," reads one, immediately after calling the actual gameplay uninspiring. Click and combat sound design gets singled out as satisfying in its own right. None of that's faint praise: it's a real, specific strength that both sides of the review split agree on, which makes what follows more of a genuine shame than it would be for a game nobody liked the look of.

Math that breaks almost immediately

The dominant complaint across this game's negative sample, appearing in roughly half of it, is that Raid Auctus is simply too short — and the reason it's short, according to a further substantial cluster of reviewers, is that its progression math falls apart almost from the start. "The pacing of the first hour or so is nice, but it very quickly scales out of control," reads the most-upvoted negative review. A second, independent reviewer describes an experience rate "about a thousand times faster" than the game seems designed around. A third reports their experience total overflowing into a negative number after nine hours of play — a concrete numeric bug, not a subjective pacing complaint — and a positive review corroborates a related issue from the other direction, describing a display cap where accumulated experience simply locks visually at 999,999,999,999,999,999. These aren't three people describing the same vague dissatisfaction differently; they're independently pointing at the same underlying system breaking in slightly different, individually checkable ways.

The practical result, confirmed by reviewers across both the positive and negative samples, is a game that's over fast. Reports of full completion — every raid cleared, every class unlocked, often close to 100 of 100 achievements — cluster tightly between two and ten hours, with several reviewers specifically noting they expected an idle game to occupy days rather than an afternoon. "Neither palatable to eat nor bearable to discard," one puts it. A second, more measured positive review frames it plainly as a fair trade at the low price rather than a betrayal, which is a reasonable way to read it — but the length complaint and the balance complaint are clearly the same story told twice, not two separate problems.

Twenty classes, one build

A related, specific complaint concerns character variety. Several reviewers report that Raid Auctus's twenty classes don't meaningfully differentiate in practice: "Priest and Barbarian and Gunslinger upgrade the same way and deal the same DPS," one writes, and others separately describe every class converging on the same single-target-damage-plus-one-team-buff pattern with no real synergy between party members and no boss mechanics — debuffs, phases, anything — for a team composition to actually respond to. That compounds the shortness complaint rather than sitting apart from it: a raid game whose classes don't play differently from each other has less reason to explore its full roster even within the few hours the content lasts.

A fix that didn't fix it

To Cosmic Whale Studio's credit, Raid Auctus wasn't abandoned outright at launch — a May 2025 update specifically reworked the "knowledge transfer" prestige system and added a New Game Plus mode aimed directly at the length complaint. One detailed reviewer specifically revisited the game after that update to check, and reports plainly that "the developers did not address any of the core progression problems in the game." Steam's own achievement data offers some support for a more modest version of that: the New Game Plus completion achievement sits at just 18.0% — the lowest in the entire list — well below the roughly 27% who've cleared everything else, suggesting the extended mode didn't give most players who reached it much reason to actually finish it. No update has shipped since that May 2025 patch.

Value and monetisation

At NZ$7.39, with no DLC and no in-app purchases, Raid Auctus carries no monetisation complaints — but several reviewers explicitly connect the low price to the low amount of content, arguing the two roughly balance out rather than the price being an unambiguous bargain. That's a fair way to read it: cheap for what's here, but what's here is genuinely thin by this library's usual idle-RPG standard.

Final Verdict

Raid Auctus has a likeable idea and a presentation good enough that even its critics keep praising it in the middle of otherwise negative reviews. What sinks the score is how consistently, and how specifically, its own players — positive and negative alike — describe the same progression math breaking down within the first hour, turning what should be a weeks-long idle commitment into an afternoon's diversion, with a post-launch update that reworked the prestige system without fixing the underlying complaint. At its price, it's a low-risk way to spend a cheap evening with some genuine MMO nostalgia, but go in expecting a snack rather than the sustained, escalating climb this genre usually promises.