Idle Fishing

A game called Idle Fishing that ships a system where forgetting to check in for ten minutes costs you real progress is the kind of contradiction that writes its own headline, and a good chunk of its 191 English-language negative reviews take exactly that shot. It's a fair hit, and also not the whole story. Underneath the name is a genuinely substantial free incremental — eleven fishing zones, thirty-one buildings, a two-layer ascension-and-rebirth prestige system, and 1,215 Steam achievements, a number that puts it near the top of anything this library has measured for sheer completion-tracking depth. AO Games has kept it patched for more than two years without asking for a cent up front. The friction that shows up in the review corpus isn't neglect; it's a specific, identifiable design choice the developer made roughly eighteen months into the game's life, and the achievement data lets you measure exactly how well it landed.

The core loop, and why it holds up

Strip away the theming and Idle Fishing runs on the incremental genre's oldest, most reliable engine: a resource ticks up, you spend it on multipliers, the multipliers make the resource tick up faster, and every so often you reset the counter in exchange for a permanent bonus that makes the next run shorter. What AO Games layers on top of that skeleton is unusually generous for a free game. Crewmates hired onto the boat each carry their own stats and bonus slots that multiply income directly, rather than being flavour text on a numbers screen. Pets are collected, evolved and star-upgraded for passive bonuses and unique abilities, giving the loop a collection layer alongside the multiplication one. Eleven zones — Ocean and Swamp through, eventually, Moon and Mars — each carry their own fish pool across six rarity tiers, so the collectible list keeps growing well past the point most idle games start repeating themselves.

The achievement data backs up that there's real substance here rather than a thin shell around a spreadsheet. Three of the highest-completion achievements in the entire set — finishing the second upgrade tier, banking a second currency milestone, catching a first fish — sit at 72–76% of all owners, which is a healthy midgame retention curve for any incremental. Positive reviews echo it in plainer language: reviewers with playtimes in the tens of thousands of minutes, one past 476,000 minutes on a single Steam account, call it "constantly updated with new features" and describe logging in daily without quite being able to explain why. For a genre built on that specific, slightly embarrassing kind of compulsion, that's the review doing its job.

The excavation problem, in the game's own numbers

Update 2.2, dated 17 October 2025 in the Steam news feed, added an entirely new minigame: a tile grid dug with chisels, shovels, bombs and scanners to uncover fossils, treasure chests and timed bonuses, running as its own separate economy alongside fishing. It is the single most-argued-about addition in the review corpus, and the complaint isn't vague. Reviewers describe a hard cap on how many dig tools you can hold, refilled slowly over real time, that fills up in as little as five minutes without significant investment in the upgrades or pets that raise the ceiling — meaning a player who wants to keep pace has to open the game and burn the tool stock every few minutes, all day, rather than the "check in once and collect a haul" rhythm the rest of the game is built around. One reviewer with over 47,000 minutes played at review time put it as plainly as it can be put: "this is not an idle game anymore."

The achievement percentages measure that complaint rather than just illustrating it. Of the 1,215 total achievements, 168 belong to the excavation system specifically, and they average 4.6% completion — against a 14.7% average across everything else in the game, with the single easiest excavation achievement capping out at 10%. That's not a rough system some players bounce off; it's a system almost the entire player base has stalled on. To AO Games' credit, the patch history since shows they noticed: Update 2.4, in November 2025, added an idle auto-play mode for excavation specifically, and Update 2.5.5 in April 2026 added XP multipliers aimed at the same friction. Whether those fixes moved the completion numbers meaningfully isn't something this review can verify without a second achievement pull months apart, but the direction of the patch notes at least matches the direction of the complaint.

What the store page discloses about its own art

Steam's AI Generated Content Disclosure is a mandatory section on any store page where the developer has flagged AI tool use, and Idle Fishing's reads, in full: "GitHub Copilot for coding. 2d UI Icons. External promotional art - not inside the game." That's a narrower disclosure than the loudest reviews assume — it names UI icons specifically, not character art, fish designs or the fishing zones themselves, and it explicitly carves out the promotional art seen on the store page as separate from what ships in the build. It doesn't, however, contradict the core of the complaint: a real, non-trivial cluster of one- and two-star reviews object specifically to AI-generated interface icons on principle, several stating outright that they'd stop recommending or spending money on the game over it regardless of how good the rest of it is. That's a values-based objection this review can't adjudicate for a reader, but it can confirm the disclosure is accurate rather than an invention of the review corpus — the developer says so on their own store page.

An idle game arguing about its own name

Set the two flashpoints above aside and there's a third, gentler version of the same argument running through both the positive and negative reviews: is this actually an idle game? One widely-upvoted positive review, with nearly 5,950 minutes played, works the comparison out directly — active play nets roughly sixty hours' worth of offline gains in fifteen minutes of clicking, which makes the label "clicker" more accurate than "idler," in the same way Cookie Clicker isn't really an idle game either. That's offered as a neutral observation rather than a complaint, and plenty of the corpus treats it the same way: an idle game that rewards attention rather than punishing its absence is still, for a lot of players, exactly what they wanted. It's the excavation system specifically, not the base fishing loop, that turns the same observation into a one-star review.

Where this leaves a player

Idle Fishing earns its free-to-play recommendation honestly. It costs nothing, several of its most experienced reviewers confirm you can chase full completion without ever opening a wallet, and the achievement and patch-note history both point at a developer still actively building the game two years after release rather than one who shipped it and left. Where it falls short of a stronger score is equally concrete: the excavation system is a real, quantifiable mis-step that the game's own data shows almost nobody has made peace with, and the disclosed use of AI-generated UI icons is a dealbreaker for a specific, vocal slice of its audience on principle rather than on execution. Neither issue is hidden — one shows up in the achievement percentages, the other in the store page's own disclosure section — which is more transparency than a lot of free games in this genre offer. Go in for the boat, the crew, the pets and the eleven zones, expect to grumble about the dig grid the same way tens of thousands of other players have, and decide the AI-icon question for yourself before you commit real hours to it.