Relic Arena is better than I ever expected.

Credit: Double Edge Games

While the auto battler craze from a few years ago has mostly died out with only a couple of titles, such as Teamfight Tactics, surviving, a new auto battler called Relic Arena has just launched, and it is easily the best I have ever played.

As someone who loved the original Auto Chess and Dota Underlords, Relic Arena was always going to appeal to me, but I honestly did not expect to find myself as enthralled with it as I am. Since it launched a week ago I’ve put in over 26 hours of play time, and I still don’t feel like I have scratched the surface.

Like any good auto battler, Relic Arena sees you select units, position them on a battlefield and watch as they automatically fight it out against the armies made by other players. Win and you’ll damage your opponent’s overall health, with the last player standing being crowned the winner. But, where most auto battlers stop at this point, Relic Arena goes one further.

Instead of just selecting your units, making them synergise together and positioning them well, in Relic Arena you can also equip each of your units with up to four abilities. These abilities range from simple attack speed buffs through to complex spells such as the Titanic flying into the battlefield and exploding.

This is where the depth of Relic Arena arrives and seemingly never leaves. With a massive library of abilities, all of which have the potential to combo with each other in different ways, it takes a long time to just get a grasp on what they all do, let alone how they all fit together.

To make things even more complex, it’s these abilities that you buy from the shop and upgrade, with each ability having four potential upgrades, including a majorly powerful final buff if you manage to find nine of the same ability in a game.

As someone who loves complex and punishing games, Dota 2 and Escape From Tarkov are my two most played games of all time, Relic Arena certainly fits that bill. After more than a day of play time I realised I was constantly going back to the same strategies of having a mage who spammed low cooldown healing abilities, which in turn would each trigger a passive that did even more healing, and combining that with two tanks who would seemingly never die. It worked a lot of the time and was satisfying to pull off, but once I consciously made the decision to stop that tactic and try to learn other combos I realised I still had no idea what a lot of the abilities did at the higher levels and how best to combo them with others.

It’s this depth that will make you either love or hate Relic Arena. Given it is entirely free to play on Steam there is really no reason for auto battler fans not to give it a go, but if you aren’t one for having to spend a lot of time learning the game then you might find yourself bouncing off pretty quickly. But if you do stick with it, the sheer depth of what is possible means you will seemingly never run out of combos to try.

There are some other issues that may turn some players off. The art style and humour have proven divisive with players, and some of the ability descriptions could be explained a little more to show exactly what they do instead of having to delve into the deep menus to find out. But for me none of these are enough to make me stop playing.

I’m somewhat worried that Relic Arena is going to be my next major time sink as it’s essentially all I’ve thought about for the past few days. When I’m not at my PC I’m thinking about potential combos to try, and when I do get to play I quickly find that multiple hours have gone by. There may come a point where I mostly have the game figured out and it loses some of the allure it currently has, but until then I fully expect I will continue to grind my way up the MMR leaderboard as much as possible.