Phenomenal Game and Refreshing Sequel

Playing the first Magic Research was without a doubt one of my most cherished experiences in mobile gaming, if not gaming entirely. I’ve never been able to find a more balanced and engaging game of this genre. Its mechanical design is completely perfect and I can VERY confidently say that this sequel is an even more complex and rich update to the first. It’s quite absurd to me how there are negative reviews to this BRAND NEW release. My brother, nobody is asking for insight into the developer’s grammar… if you’re concerned with “cOgNitiVe oVeRLoaD” because of “bad English” then it’s simply clear you’re just not the target audience for this game. Go get an Audible subscription if perfect grammar is your literal only concern. This is a solo developer who genuinely had no need to invest the EXTRA time to write a story line at all on top of the insane backend structure of the mechanics. Come on!!!!!

Top-notch incremental game

Magic Research 2 is one of the most compelling incremental (idle, but more active) games I’ve ever played. It has tons of content, fun writing, lots of features, interesting systems, and compelling challenges. It’s also under constant development - multiple times I’ve thought “it’d me nice if this was more like this”, and then within a week it was already updated. A labor of love that deserves to be purchased and played. I’ve put at least 10 hours of active play time into it and still have lots to go. Thanks Matias for another classic!

Incredible game. Almost perfect, needs better automation and convenience features.

The flow of the game is amazing and addicting. I almost have nothing bad to say. The major problem for me is that the game has a dreadful micromanaging processs at the beginning of each retirement and at many of the feature unlocks. You need to manually and repetitively press the same buttons over and over again each retirement every time you unlock something to set up automation. If you forget, your run is stunted until you remember. I was originally having a blast replaying the game with the post game features, but eventually the lack of automation hurt my interest as it became too much of a chore. My first time clearing this game was probably the most fun I’ve had playing an incremental though.

Sequel to on of my favorite idlers. Needs some optimization late game.

What can I say? This is a sequel to one of my favorite games and it’s perfect in every way. I am getting tons of lag past mid game however making it somewhat hard to play. I’ve toggled all the settings the help performance and it’s still pretty bad on my iPhone 13 Pro. Not enough to take a star. I believe this will be addressed in an update soon.

Overloads you in the beginning

I really like this game, but some things just aren’t making any sense right now to me in a larger picture for what this game is supposed to be so I struggle to give it 5 stars right now. When I continue deeper into the game and don’t feel so overwhelmed by new systems I will revisit this review. The story is also pretty lackluster thus far, I wish that the text was less dialogue and descriptions and more functional. Overall I would recommend giving at least the demo a shot. Great job developing an awesome game- just need more time to play before I could give it the 5 star.

Where a 50 hour game experience feels long, this 120+ hour game flies by

This game scratches that deep seated itch to find ridiculous patterns to optimizing the workflows without being too cumbersome like Minecraft or factorial feel when playing on the go. I’m not sure how I spent 121 hours on a game like this but here we are. Definitely worth the purchase at double the price, let alone what the developer is charging here.

Wonderful semi-idle game

One of the best idle games out there. The first was an incredible experience and while I preferred that to this sequel. Magic Research 2 is still one of the greatest idle games on the App Store currently. I’ve tried a lot of them. My biggest gripe is there’s a lot more resources to juggle this time around but thankfully the info does get displayed well as long as you find which menu it’s under!

Absolutely Worth

The game adds some changes to the previous game, with more complexities and yet I feel like it still delivers. There are some UI issues that are usual with games like this. When the inventory is important, like it is in this game, it leads to complaints that it’s not as easy to navigate, but most sorting will not sort in the *exact* way that you want. That aside, the other difficulty is feeling the need to farm areas, especially in late game. I think that would be relieved with familiar search time being tweaked down a bit. Besides those two minor complaints, I’ve loved the story and the way it progresses and love this and the last game. Well done!

Each and every day new mobile games are hitting the App Store, and so each week we put together a big old list of all the best new releases...

TouchArcade Thu Oct 02 2025