I have been playing a lot of idle mobile games lately. Idle mobile games are games, most often a tycoon or simulator style, that will continue to play while you are offline. Usually, the offline gameplay is just resource generation. So this particular game is all about managing a theme park.
You start off with an empty park, and the tutorial takes you through the basics of playing the game. Your main objective is to build and upgrade the park, which will lead you to generate more income which can buy you new rides, upgrades, and new islands.
The new islands will reset your park so you will be starting over, but now you have a new island which let you access a new ride to add to your park. Your park also generates income faster so you can get back to where you were quicker. The faster income helps a lot with keeping this game from getting frustrating because restarting your park from scratch does not sound ideal. But with many idle games, you start over (or prestige as some games say) what you’re working to access something. And with this game doing it to access rides, I’m on board with is.
This game is very Roller Coaster Tycoon-esque with its management side. You don’t get to design the rides yourself like you can in RCT, but beyond that, it is very much like those classic tycoon games with better graphics. You can do marketing for your park, increase your parking lot size, add security, and upgrade line lengths for rides. You actually have control of a lot of upgrades and how/when you want to do them which is great.
So most idle games I have played utilize ads as a way to gain extra resources. In Idle Theme Park, you can watch ads to get money from investors, get an increase in guests via a ferry, make the rides run twice as fast to get more people on rides and increase the speed of the entrance queues. You don’t have to watch any ads to play the games, but you will be put at a disadvantage and it will take you much longer to upgrade your park and progress to new islands. You’ll definitely progress faster by watching some ads. And at least you can control whether or not you watch the ad, unlike other games that interrupt your game for ads.
Overall, I really enjoy this game. I find it very relaxing to play idle games, and a theme park theme is very much up my alley. I also think this applies the common idle game mechanics of generating resources for upgrades very well. I also don’t get bored since there is a new island to unlock, thus a new ride, and then I can see what crazy upgrades the ride can get. The one thing I wish was different is that when idle, the park only stay open for two hours. Other games are constantly open which is nice, but I understand limiting the open time cause it’s more realistic. But only two hours is definitely to bait you into playing more. You can pay $10 to increase it to 10 hours, but I’m not really interested in spending that money, to be honest.
Have you tried any idle games? Share them with me in a comment.
I like the aesthetic of the game. Creating my own crazy rides was the selling point for most theme park games, but I guess that might not translate well onto a tiny phone screen and end up rather frustrating. So I get why they went with non-customizable rides instead.