Slay All Bosses: Idle

The title is doing a lot of work it can't back up. Slay All Bosses: Idle sounds like it's promising the genre's usual deal — leave it running, come back richer — but what solo developer Memoria Interactive actually built is a compact auto-battler: pick one of three heroes, watch them cut through waves of trash automatically, then step in every couple of minutes to trigger a Weapon Skill or react to a boss mechanic. That's not a criticism of the loop itself, which is perfectly pleasant in short bursts. It's a mismatch between what the name sells and what's on the disc, and it's the single most common complaint in the game's review history for a reason.

The boss gauntlet

Where the game earns its keep is in the actual fights. The roster of named monsters — Goblin Chieftain, Minotaurus, Elder Treant, Jormungandr, Kirin, a Spectral Reaper, an Abaddon waiting at the end — reads like a genuine effort to give every stop on the ladder its own identity, and the sprite and spell-animation work backs that up. Even players who came away disappointed by the overall package tend to single out the monster art as a highlight, which says something about where the studio's actual strengths lie.

The Weapon Skill system is the other idea worth crediting. Skills are tied to whatever weapon is currently equipped, but using one enough times permanently unlocks it for the character, which means switching weapons to try a different playstyle doesn't cost you progress the way it would in a lot of loadout-based RPGs. It's a small design choice that removes a specific, common source of friction, and it works.

Where it runs thin

Everything else is where the complaints concentrate, and they're consistent across a small but pointed review sample. The three heroes — a swordsman, a mage and something closer to a ninja or shinobi archetype, going by the achievement names — mostly draw from one shared skill tree rather than three meaningfully distinct builds, which several players call out directly as feeling underbaked given that character choice is supposed to be a headline feature. One reviewer who tracked their own time reports roughly nine hours to reach 100% completion and says they can't recommend the game at the end of it; more than one describes the loop as having said everything it has to say well before the credits actually roll.

Steam's global achievement data backs up a game that's short but not brutally gated: the easiest unlock sits at 94% and the hardest — full mastery of the bonus systems — at 26.4%, a smooth decline with no single wall where players collectively give up. That's a healthy completion curve for a short game, which actually reinforces the main criticism rather than undercutting it: this isn't a game people are bouncing off early, it's one they're finishing and then not returning to, because there's no meta-progression reason to run a second character once you've already seen the first one's fights.

A handful of more technical complaints round things out. Achievements are reported as inconsistent for some players — one specific note says the game requires fullscreen mode to register unlocks at all, which shouldn't still be a live issue months after a 1.0 launch. Another review describes serious GPU strain for a game with fairly modest 2D presentation, the kind of performance-versus-visual-complexity mismatch that usually points at an optimisation pass that never happened rather than anything ambitious under the hood.

Value and the idle question

At NZ$6.31 — a price that's been sitting at a 20% discount off its NZ$7.89 list since shortly after launch — Slay All Bosses: Idle is cheap enough that a single evening spent clearing the boss gauntlet isn't really a bad transaction on its own terms. The trouble is the review sample is full of players who specifically weighed the price against what they got and came away feeling shortchanged, not because the asking price is high in absolute terms, but because the game doesn't give them a reason to have spent it twice. "Not worth the five dollars" shows up more than once in almost those exact words, which is a harder thing for a five-dollar game to survive than a fifty-dollar one, precisely because there's so little room left to disappoint anyone on price alone.

The Wanderer angle is worth being honest about too: if you came to this looking for something to scratch the same itch as a persistent-world idle game — genuine offline progress, a loop that rewards checking back in over days or weeks — this isn't that game, and the title's own reviewers are the ones saying so most clearly. What's here is a tight, good-looking, forgettably short boss-rush with an idle-adjacent combat rhythm. Judge it as that rather than as what its name promises, and it's a reasonable way to spend an evening. Judge it against the "Idle" in its title, and it comes up short in exactly the way its own players keep describing.