Refence

About

Refence is a single player casual strategy game. It was developed by muurou and was released on March 4, 2025. It received mostly positive reviews from players.

This is the DEMO version of the game. ⩶⩶⩶⩶⩶⩶⩶⩶⩶⩶⩶ To access the full version on Android, get it from Steam or Google Play. There is also a demo on Google Play. To discuss about the game, join in the Discord. ⩶⩶⩶⩶⩶⩶⩶⩶⩶⩶⩶ Refence is a roguelike based idle defense game, where you defend the wall with your heroes. Choose your heroes to fight against enemies. Build your castle to unlock …

Genres & Tags

Play Modes

Single-Player

Skip User Reviews

75%

Audience ScoreBased on 68 reviews

music2 positive mentions

grinding6 negative mentions

Enjoyable pace and solid progression, making it a fun game to play over time.
Offers a good mix of idle and active gameplay, with many unlockable skills and features.
The developers are responsive to feedback and have made significant improvements through updates.

The prestige mechanic can feel frustrating, requiring players to regrind for previously unlocked skills.
Progression can be slow and grindy, with some players finding it tedious and lacking depth.
Random difficulty spikes and hero balance issues can lead to frustrating gameplay experiences.

gameplay
8 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
38%
24%
38%
The gameplay is primarily idle-focused, revolving around unlocking skills in a skill tree to enhance quality of life features, such as speeding up gameplay and automating character actions. While the mix of idle and active gameplay offers some potential, many players find the experience repetitive, with limited new strategies or builds as upgrades mainly provide incremental percentage boosts. Additionally, some mechanics, like manual swiping, can lead to discomfort, detracting from the overall enjoyment.
- “The entire game is you unlocking skills in the skill tree to add quality of life to idling - speeding up gameplay, adding additional waves, more passive currency gain, auto-choosing character skills and wave rewards, literally setting priorities on auto-picks, etc. Again, make no mistake: this is an idle game.”
- “Good mix of idle and active gameplay types, plus I really like the idea of a roguelike idle.”
- “The gameplay loop could've been cool if you had to do anything more than stare at your characters shooting projectiles and clicking upgrade on everything...”
- “The entire game is you unlocking skills in the skill tree to add quality of life to idling - speeding up gameplay, adding additional waves, more passive currency gain, auto-choose character skills and wave rewards, literally setting priorities on auto-picks, etc. Again, make no mistake: this is an idle game.”
- “You'll soon have unlocked all of the heroes; their personal ranks only add the odd new talent for tower defense here and there, and most remaining upgrades come in the form of +x%, which don't open new gameplay or builds either.”
- “Unfortunately, the manual swiping mechanic requires constant mouse movement to the point where it is giving me repetitive strain injury (RSI).”
grinding
6 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
100%
Players find the grinding aspect of the game to be excessive and frustrating, particularly when it comes to re-unlocking skills after prestige, which feels redundant after significant initial effort. The progression system is criticized for requiring extensive manual grinding or daily logins for currency generation, which detracts from the experience, especially in a game that aims to transition from clicker to idler gameplay. While some appreciate the consistent progression, many feel that the grindy elements and mobile game mechanics hinder overall enjoyment.
- “If I already grinded 3 million of material X to unlock my skills in the first 20 hours of play, why would I want to spend 20 minutes grinding 2,000 of that same material at a massively reduced rate upon prestige to re-unlock that same skill?”
- “Too much RNG with choosing heroes, painfully slow progression, with huge grindy locks before you can kind of pick your heroes a little bit.”
- “Progression requires either a lot of manual grinding upfront or researching a specific tech (wishing well) and logging into the game once per day for a week or so to generate currency for you before automation can be meaningfully unlocked, which is a weird choice for an 'idler' game.”
music
2 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
100%
50%
The music in the game is highly praised, with many users noting that the soundtrack is energetic and enjoyable, often described as a "banger." However, some feel that while the music stands out, the overall gameplay experience is average.
- “The soundtrack is a banger, but besides that, the game is pretty mid.”
- “Fun game so far - the soundtrack goes hard.”
- “The soundtrack is a banger, but besides that, the game is pretty mediocre.”