I always keep an eye out for good idle games. As a player, I genuinely enjoy playing them. And as a developer, I feel like its an genre that is approachable for a solo game dev. DPS Idle 2 showed up free on steam, so I picked it up not really expecting much. It turned out to be one of the more interesting idle games I’ve played from a developer perspective.
Disclaimer: this is not meant to be an attack on the developer. This is my own observations and preferences about the game. It is meant to be a form of studying and growth about my own preferences as a gamer impacting my growth as a game developer.
What is DPS Idle 2?
DPS Idle 2 is a free-to-play card-based incremental game. Reveal cards, level them up, push your damage per second higher, kill monsters, repeat. On top of that, it has elemental archetypes, a guild system, followers, items, challenges, and a few other things. More on all that later.
What the game does well
Cards as the upgrade layer
Most idle games handle progression through a flat upgrade list. You click a button, a number increases, you wait for the next threshold. Every player following that list arrives at the same place in the same order. There’s no decision being made, just resource accumulation applied to a predetermined path.
DPS Idle 2 replaces that with a card system. Cards are revealed and unlocked as you progress. Leveling them up is where the actual gameplay lives. Each card has stats. How you level those stats across your deck shapes how your damage (or resource) output develops. Two players at the same point in the game can have significantly different setups based on which stats or resources they prioritized.
Card systems in idle games aren’t new. What DPS Idle 2 does is make leveling the core decision rather than collection. You’re not hunting for rare cards or pulling from a random pool. You’re looking at the same cards as every other player and deciding which ones are most important for your build. Level a card heavily early and it shapes what works for you later. It’s a decision rather than a flat upgrade list.
Elemental archetypes and the guild loop
DPS Idle 2 has five elements, each with its own damage calculations and card synergies. The cards you level push your build toward one or more of those elements, which shapes which cards are important to invest in and how they interact with each other.
The guild system connects directly to this. Each guild ties to a specific element. When you leave a guild, the game soft resets: cards go back in the deck and you start a new run. Your card upgrades, guild progress, and any bonuses you’ve already accumulated carry over. The multiplier you gain from a guild run is based on how far you pushed your damage before leaving. The rank thresholds at levels 5, 10, and 15 unlock passive bonuses that stay active permanently, across all future runs, even when you’re not in that guild.
The result is that runs can get shorter over time, not longer. As your permanent bonuses stack up, you can push further into other guild bonuses faster. With a well-developed build, a full guild run can take seconds.
Achievement design
The achievement list is large and covers most of the game’s systems. There’s an achievement for leveling fire damage, one for ice, for leveling berries or shields, for hiring heroes. None of them give you a direct reward for completing them. Completing them requires engaging with those systems, which is where the progression actually comes from.
Instead of funneling every player down the same path, the achievement list points towards what good progress needs. You might ignore the hero system entirely if left to your own devices. An achievement that requires you to hire heroes to a certain level pushes you into it, and in doing so, you naturally pick up the progression that system provides.
For completionists like me, it works as a checklist. It keeps players spread across the game’s systems rather than tunneling down one path.
Where the design breaks down
Too many systems without enough connections
Here’s a partial list of what DPS Idle 2 asks you to manage: cards, card prestiges, elemental archetypes, guilds, followers, items, challenges, sunlight gathering, and magical orbs.
Cards connect to elements. Guilds connect to elements. Those relationships make sense and reinforce each other. Sunlight is harder to place. It’s a multiplier that scales with how much Sun damage you have. The mechanic makes sense on its own. Sun power goes up, sunlight multiplier goes up. What doesn’t make sense is why Sun is the only element that gets it. Ice doesn’t have a dedicated multiplier system. Fire and lightning don’t. Sun does, for reasons the game never really explains.
The mechanic isn’t broken or hard to understand. It just applies to one element arbitrarily, which makes it feel more like a feature added for Sun specifically rather than something that belongs to the design as a whole.
Every system is asking the player to track one more thing. Yes, they contribute to the multipliers. But it feels like there is so much to balance that don’t directly connect to other systems. It’s just another thing to grind, reset, and try to balance.
Visual and UI cohesion
The UI works. You can navigate it, find what you need, and read your numbers. But the game doesn’t feel like a unified visual product. The enemy art, the card art, and the UI elements all look like they came from different places (because they probably did).
Using asset packs is a normal call for a small team. The problem is that each pack was designed in isolation, with its own color palettes, edge style, and level of detail. In DPS Idle 2 you can see it. Nothing conflicts directly, but nothing looks like it was designed for the same game either.
The UI layer has the same issue. It feels built purely for function, without reference to the game’s art. This ends up sitting on top of everything rather than inside it.
Late-game pacing
The mid-game is where DPS Idle 2 is at its best. New systems are opening up. Progress moves fast enough to stay interesting. The late game slows way down. The gaps between upgrades get long, and eventually you’re mostly just waiting.
The game is free, so monetization has to exist somewhere. DLC packs run from a few dollars to close to a hundred. I personally don’t love microtransactions in games (much less in idle games). My own bias here is important to acknowledge upfront.
But the pacing issue stands on its own. When progression slows to a crawl at the exact point where paid options become enticing, I question whether the slowdown is a balance issue or a deliberate design choice.
What I’d change
Cut the system count, tighten the connections
The core of DPS Idle 2 is cards, elements, and guilds. Those three things connect to each other and justify each other’s existence. The problem is everything stacked on top. Followers, items, challenges, magical orbs, sunlight. Each one adds something, but none of them feel essential. You could remove most of them and the game would probably be tighter for it.
Adding systems is easy. The harder question is whether each one needs to be there at all. Before I add a system to a project, I want to know what breaks if I take it out. If the answer is “not much,” that’s usually a sign the system is filling space rather than filling a role. DPS Idle 2 has a few too many systems that fall into that category. They work, they just don’t feel necessary.
Define a visual direction before sourcing assets
If you’re building with asset packs, the visual direction decision happens before you open the asset store. You need a reference palette, a style target, and a level of detail standard. Then you find packs that fit those constraints. The alternative (finding packs you like and hoping they work together) produces exactly the kind of visual inconsistency DPS Idle 2 has.
It also helps to think about the UI as part of the art direction rather than a separate layer on top of it. The UI in DPS Idle 2 doesn’t feel like it was designed to sit alongside the game’s art. Unifying the font choices, the color palette, and the sizing conventions across both the game art and the UI brings everything closer to looking like a single designed product.
What I’d keep
The card system, the elemental archetypes, the guild prestige loop, and the achievement design. Each one does something the genre doesn’t usually do: cards give players a build identity, elements give those cards a direction, the guild loop turns prestige into a cycle rather than a reset, and the achievements push players toward systems they’d otherwise ignore.
DPS Idle 2 gives you more actual build decisions than most idle games bother with. That’s not common in the genre, and it’s the main reason I kept playing as long as I did.
Final Thoughts
DPS Idle 2 is a game I would definitely recommend to both players and developers who enjoy the genre.
I put enough hours into this game to hit 100% completion (without microtransactions, I might add). If you’re building anything in the idle or incremental space, DPS Idle 2 is worth playing through at least the mid-game with a developer eye. The card leveling system and the guild prestige loop alone are good to study.
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