Vanguard: Idle Auto Battler

Vanguard's pitch sits comfortably inside a genre Wanderer readers know well: your squad fights automatically, you invest run rewards into permanent upgrades, and every optimization promises a bigger clear next time. It's a proven hook, priced cheaply at NZ$4.31. What's unusual is how little there currently is to check that pitch against — two days after launch, exactly three reviews exist, and they don't fully agree with each other.

The idle auto-battler pitch

The store page lays out a fairly complete-sounding structure for something this cheap: recruit and develop a "multi-role hero squad" from four heroes, each with distinct active abilities to trigger at key moments, push through escalating enemy waves into segment-style boss phases, and convert run rewards into permanent upgrades spanning offense, defense and economy. It's explicitly built, in the developer's own words, for "players who enjoy auto battlers, idle and incremental progression, build optimization and scaling loops, PvE strategy with low mechanical overhead" — a clear, honest statement of what audience it's chasing, and a familiar shape for anyone who's played this genre before.

A specific complaint worth taking seriously

The most detailed review currently available, written in Polish, makes a pointed and specific claim rather than a vague complaint: "The game does not have auto-battle, despite claiming that it does. It also lacks cloud saves, which is very inconvenient." The second half of that is independently checkable, and it holds up — the store page's own feature category list has no Steam Cloud entry at all, which is a real, confirmable gap for a game explicitly designed around short, repeatable sessions where players might reasonably switch machines. The first half — a direct dispute of the game's headline mechanic — is harder to verify from a single account, but it's specific enough, and concerning enough given it targets the one feature the entire genre pitch rests on, that it's worth flagging clearly rather than assuming it's an outlier complaint.

Short by design, or short because it's early?

The other two reviews don't dispute the auto-battle claim, but they converge on a separate issue: the game is short. An English-language review sums it up in four words: "very (VERY) short semi idle game." A Japanese review is more measured but lands in the same place: "Though the length matches the price, it still feels too short. The skill tree also feels lacking. I recommend it, but..." — a real recommendation, with a real reservation attached. Steam's own achievement data can't add anything here either way, because no achievement schema exists for Vanguard at all yet, itself a small but notable gap for a genre where achievement-gated milestones are a common structural feature.

Final verdict

There's a familiar, potentially solid idle auto-battler underneath Vanguard's pitch, and at NZ$4.31 the financial risk of finding out is genuinely low. But two days and three reviews in, the evidence is thin and not entirely consistent — a specific dispute over whether the advertised auto-battle system actually works, a confirmed absence of cloud saves, and a shared sense among early players that there simply isn't much game here yet. None of that rules out this becoming a solid cheap pickup once more reviews and, ideally, a patch or two have landed. For now, it's reasonable to wait and see rather than be among the first handful of buyers settling the question.