Upgradia

One of Upgradia's own early reviewers put it about as well as anyone could: they were looking for something that mixed RuneScape with Melvor Idle, and Upgradia does exactly that. It's a tabbed, browser-style MMORPG built around a long list of trainable skills — farming, fishing, foraging, mining, smithing, cooking, alchemy, crafting, combat, magic, defense, melee, archery — each one levelling independently, each one another route through a world map explicitly divided into level bands. It launched into Early Access two days before this review, and it already looks like a real MMO rather than a proof of concept: guilds, party dungeons, ranked PvP, a player-run economy. What it doesn't yet have is time — and a two-day-old MMO's problems are, almost by definition, still being actively fixed as this is written.

A familiar skeleton, built out properly

Upgradia's marketing calls itself a "cozy Semi-Idle MMORPG," and that's an accurate description of the balance it's aiming for: skills tick along with auto-collection and auto-cooking logs scrolling in the corner of the screen, while combat, dungeons and PvP ask for active attention. The world map backs this up with real structure — Training Plains at levels 1-20, Highland Pass around 20-33, up through Abyssal Depths, Infernal Rift, Nightmare Realm and Arcadia, capping out at the Ascended Plane around levels 90-100. That's a lot of scaffolding for a two-day-old game to already have in place, and it suggests Upgradia was built with a long content runway in mind rather than assembled in a rush to hit a launch date.

Combat is turn-based and built for both solo and group play, managing health, stamina and mana with class choices, stat points and gear layered on top — party up to five players for tougher encounters, or take on PvE and PvP separately. Four character classes exist at launch with more subclasses promised, according to one reviewer's account, and the skill list feeds directly into combat readiness rather than sitting as a separate system alongside it.

The part that will decide whether this sticks

The most interesting thing in Upgradia's small early review pool isn't a complaint about bugs — it's a live disagreement over its monetisation. Pairing a paid entry price with an in-game cash shop has already drawn a direct negative review calling out the combination. Multiple other reviewers push back specifically on that point, arguing the shop isn't pay-to-win and that its functional items — outside a cosmetic-only "deluxe" tier — can reportedly be farmed through dungeon chests instead of bought. That's a reasonable-sounding defence, but it's worth being precise about what it actually is: player testimony, not a published item list this review can verify independently. Anyone weighing whether Upgradia's economy is fair should treat that as an open question to check for themselves against the current shop contents, not a settled fact either direction.

A second, more pointed claim comes from the same corner of the review section: one detailed review states that a group of players were banned for exploiting an economy bug and not reporting it, and alleges those players are now review-bombing in retaliation. This review has no way to independently confirm bans, exploits or coordinated review activity, and reports the claim only as one player's account rather than a verified fact. It's mentioned here because it's exactly the kind of dispute that can quietly distort an aggregate review score during a game's first days, and readers checking Upgradia's Steam rating in the near future should know that context exists behind it.

Early roughness, and a developer responding to it

What isn't in dispute is that Upgradia launched with real bugs. Patch notes from its first 48 hours list fixes for quest display mismatches, inventory hand-in logic, farming reward quests pointing at removed steps, crafted arrows disappearing mid-combat, and a Settings screen that briefly stopped rendering correctly — all explicitly credited to player reports and screenshots in the patch notes themselves. One reviewer separately describes being unable to log back in through Steam at all. Taken together, that's a genuinely rocky first 48 hours, but it's also a developer visibly working through a real bug backlog in near-real time rather than going quiet after launch — the second update posted within a day of release opens by thanking players specifically for "the continued reports and screenshots."

Structurally, Upgradia also plays fair with time away from the game: progression is fully server-side, so a character keeps its state and can be checked on without the client running. The trade-off is that Upgradia is Steam-only at launch with no mobile client, which sits a little awkwardly against a skilling structure built around exactly the kind of short, frequent check-ins a phone would suit well — more than one player is likely to run into the same "remote desktop home to check my farm" workaround a reviewer describes here.

Final verdict

Two days in, Upgradia has the bones of something genuinely worth watching: a properly deep skill list, real guild and PvP structure, a level-banded world built for the long haul, and a developer patching multiple times a day in direct response to player reports. It also has everything you'd expect from something two days old — active bugs, a login issue serious enough to draw a refund complaint, and a monetisation dispute that hasn't settled yet either in the reviews or in this one.

For players who already know they want a RuneScape-and-Melvor-Idle hybrid with a real MMO wrapped around it, that's a reasonable trade to make at launch price. For anyone who'd rather let an Early Access MMO find its footing first, there's no cost to waiting a few weeks and checking back once the current disputes and the current bug list have both had time to resolve.

If a semi-idle skilling MMO with guilds and a live economy sounds appealing, Wanderer offers its own take on persistent, always-progressing fantasy adventure and is worth a look alongside it.