Idle Gainz review
3

This is a game where you get gains to build gyms. A project made by some dev and their dad. It's a little grindy because the lack of automation until mid-late game, but the core game is just waiting around until you can upgrade yourself or the gym.. that's it.

The UI is what you would expect from a web incremental game. It looks comfy but not too compact, and most of the stats are visible where you'd expect them to. The gameplay, on the other hand, is just "leave us in the background and come back every few minutes".. talking about gameplay:

It's an idle game. You're meant to wait. But in order to progress, you have to come back so often that it turns into semi-idle. This game used to be so slow that a button was added to give x100 money when clicked.. after doubling the speed of almost everything. Playtime wise, depending on how active you are, this could either take a day (without prestiging) or a whole week because of no offline progression. The currency/stats are so weird, I never knew i can have 0.001 influencers or exactly 30.41 gym members. Most of the stats are decimal, but some doesn't even need to be double to make sense.

Next up, progression. You upgrade yourself and the gym, and your stats improve your gym, and your gym improves you. This also applies to almost every stat and currency you see. You repeat this until you can get enough influence to open a new gym. When you open a new gym (prestige), you get points related to the gym you opened (the first time is a bodyweight gym). You have the option to either open a bodyweight gym or the lifting gym. Both gyms have their own upgrades, but there's still global upgrades that apply to all gyms. Each type of gym has its own new thing. Bodyweight has gangs, which is literally just raid and absorb gang members to your gym. The lifting gym has competitions that flat out boosts money gain.

This by itself is not a problem, but half of the automation upgrades are locked behind each type of gym, so if you dare switch to the other type of gym, you'd get the points for your current gym, then lose that gym's upgrades, then switch to the new gym so you can get its points. This, added by the fact that there's no real end to this game nor any gym-specific content that's not mindless button pushing, means that the game's first playthrough is all you need to experience the core gameplay.

Overall, it's a decent game for a first time player, but it's not as decent if you think about prestiging multiple times. Again, there's nothing new after prestiging, just a flat stat boost. Well, there's automation but it's so far ahead that you'd have likely stopped playing before you got one of them. And even before that, this game turns into mindless button mashing (button light up, click it i must) because there's no real need to actually read them.

I recommend you give this (family) project a try, but keep in mind that what you see is basically what you're getting for the whole game.

ps. first 3k char review

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