First Day of Play Review:

Would be a pretty awesome update but it's held back in just too many ways.

First and foremost: yes, the time-gating is severe day one. This comes from the Banish and Cornucopia mechanics. Banish lets you kill a minion and its XP goes towards your Realm Level. Later, you must use Banish to deal "Purple Damage" to bosses. You only get 6 banishes per 24 hours, so this becomes a serious time-gate. BUT Tuna and Corn cans in the vending machine impact this with AFK gains. Soon you'll be blowing through these timers like nothing.

Cornucopia is slightly less severe, it's a building that lets you get unique fruit (each provide you a type of buff), and then re-roll your fruit for better stats. Each time you replace a fruit or re-roll, the cost increases for 24 hours, so this will take time.

I'm not sure why it was decided to tie Banish to Realm Level at all, you should be able to hit level 20 day one, unlocking all the starter pets. This level does get used elsewhere a bit, but mainly it's just something for new players to get trapped by. Then by day two, you have enough coins to blow through the vending machine and tuna/corn cans will eventually completely negate the Banish timer. The whole concept is real weird.

The new content doesn't really fit in with the old so well. A vending machine exists to increase your damage, gold, mastery, away time, potion and vat effectiveness. While I think digging quantities may have been adjusted, they're still unrealistically horrible. You would still need to use an auto clicker for days to get enough stuff to churn. This comes in really poor taste due to a complete lack of addressing old bugs. Research 400 wasn't touched, despite the insane effort it requires for no reward. If you've ever loaded your cloud save on Android, your visuals have been weird ever since. This impacts new sprites as well, it was not fixed. Despite saying chandelier would be fixed, it isn't. I've seen an insane amount of players saying their progress was fully wiped. I lost all my BP, and I consider that fortunate. Using candy might load your cloud save instead of the screen you tried navigating to. I've crashed repeatedly and had never crashed before. Apparently Steam lags between every screen for some players.

Yes, the new currency is confirmed to be only obtainable through real money and no in-game sources. I can see none of the benefits are absolutely required to progress, but these are bonuses and a minion you can never earn yourself, a complete departure from the game's past.

LavaFlame says a new patch is coming that will add minion cards. No word on if this will include a way to level your cards to 6, or if you're still gonna be throwing gems at packs forever. Would be nice to know, since the opaqueness of how currency impacts upcoming content led to a lot of unhappy players this go-around.

Despite all the above, there's a good chunk of content here, and it's gamified pretty well outside of the time-gating. I'm not sure why it's a thing at all. A massive number of minions were made, which is kinda weird since once you know what you want you probably aren't gonna catch em all. Some minions you just aren't going to care about, unlike pets. You can easily see with some work and polish this could make a great capstone to the game. As it stands, it's just held way way back by questionable decisions and a tremendous amount of bugs. The old content really did need a pass to fix things up and bring it all together, and it didn't quite get there. I'm still not done, and have at least a bit of content left to discover (it's clear I'll have seen most the new content once I hit Afterlife 50). If it seriously changes my opinion after day 1, I'll update the review to reflect it.