I haven't played the game. I know it's free to play, but hey, my time is valuable.

What can you tell me about it? How does it play? What are the microtransaction hooks they tempt you with?

Dedicate 20 minutes to it and you'll see pretty much all the game has to offer. If you aren't into it after that, give it a pass.

The game is pretty simple and straightforward. It can get pretty crazy when you're in a large party fighting huge swarms of enemies, or get warped into fighting the Mad God with a bunch of other random players (ive only been warped to fight the Mad God once so idk how often that event occurs). The level cap is at 20, but perma-death does exist in the game and you unlock different classes by reaching certain goals which are along the lines of getting to a certain level with one or or several specific class types of classes. You earn more fame the longer you live and more quests/dungeons you do complete. You're awarded your Fame whenever your char dies and then gets placed on a leaderboard. I'm not really sure off the top of my head what Fame can be used for besides creating your own Guild.

You don't really need to spend any money to get the most out of the game, but if you want to have more than one character slot available at a time then you'll need to spend some Gold (and you use IRL money to buy Gold). My only gripe with the game is that a lot of stuff you could potentially use Gold towards cost far more than they're worth and can easily be lost if you die. There are very rare chances Purple loot can be dropped, but I've found that purely on a F2P basis that loot-hoarding isn't primarily what the game is about with 8 item slots per char and one free storage chest. Depending on how much you value your time it's worth at least a try. I've found the more time I've invested into the game the more enjoyment I've gotten out of it, but not exactly to the same way a game like the The Binding of Isaac rewards replayability.

@Rotnac Puts it quite well. Except for the loot part that is. There is something to said about the end-game as well. Once you hit the level 20, which can be fast if you know what you are doing, it is not excatly the end-game still. Infact that just barely touching the surface. Keeping the character alive and collecting good gear is completely something else. When going through more difficult dungeons and monsters it is very tricky to solo. Good cooperation is necessary. Which makes it interesting because you can have up to 85 in one instance.

As mentioned using real money doesn't give any real benefit. Other than more character slots and treasure chests. The treasure chests are stored in your private room where you can store your extra loot. I've gotten already 10h out of this and used only a tenner to get one slot and treasure chest. Don't really care for the fact either that some of the cosmetical items bought are lost when character is dead.

RotMG is pretty fun. Hitting lvl 20 can take you about 30-45 minutes once you find a "train". A train is basically a large group of players that run circles around the map using the road and killing everything in sight. There's no xp reduction if you're around people, so everything dies instantly and you level up as you run/teleport along to keep up.

I'd say the majority of the "fun" of the game comes from the constant threat of the perma-death. Without it, this game would be pretty boring in my opinion. Each character has one main attack, and one special attack so there's not really alot of room to expand your playstyle, and everyone's main attack is more or less the same shooting attack with slightly different ranges/speeds/damage. So it really comes down to the risk vs. reward of fighting huge bosses and risking your neck to try and get the epic loots or more importantly the stat potions which permanently increase one of your stats.

It gets pretty crazy when you have 40-50 people around you, fighting a big boss and your screen is just a mess of bullets and spells, though it's sometimes more a pain than anything else when you can't tell whats an enemy bullet or a friendly bullet, so sometimes you just get burst down because you can't see what's what.

But, like Ravenlight said, though I'd say give it an hour, see if you like it. Its pretty much an instant download and if you use steam you don't even have to set up an account, you just play.

Played it for about an hour and it was fun and repetitive. Not bad, glad I didn't pay any money for it. If it had native controller support then I would have stayed longer.