Cozy Island Idle Reviews

[h1]Idle Fishing![/h1] [i]Cozy Island Idle[/i] is a simple idle game of fishing to stock your aquarium, a standard collect 'em all game. Your fisher sits on their beach chair and fishes for you. The idle speed is reasonable, but you can upgrade the speed a few levels. Or, you can try a fishing mini-game, a common one where you need to keep the fish within a bar for a few seconds. There's no indication the mini-game yields anything better than just idly fishing, and the novelty and fun of the mini-game wears off long before you can finish the game. Caught fish automatically go into the aquarium and start to earn coins. You can look in your aquarium to see the fish swim about. Sometimes, of course, you pull up trash. Both trash and fishies take up storage slots. Your fisher stops and returns home when the aquarium is filled. You'll have to sell off trash and fish to fill up space and send them back out. There's different rarities of fish, and different tiers of fish. Rarity impacts how frequently you can catch the fish. Tiers of fish are caught with the same tier of fishing rod. One rarity, the Dark set, can be fished up only at night. As there seems to be no day-only fishies, night fishing is the way to go here. A few hours in, the game annoys you when you have to pay for the later half of rods with diamonds. The game has NO microtransactions, but diamonds are a premium-type drop, found every so often with fish. Fortunately, you CAN upgrade the frequency of diamond drops with simple coins. It'll take a few hundred diamonds to unlock the later rods. The game requires some close babysitting. You'll slip into a cycle of fishing, then clearing out most of the aquarium, and fishing and selling off more fish, repeating until you have both all of the latest tier and enough for upgrades. Once you need diamonds to progress, then the cycle is to keep making space for more fishies and thus more chances at diamonds, with upgrades concentrating on tank capacity, fishing speed, and diamond frequency. There are also some cosmetics that are purchased with either coins or diamonds, including some hats, a couple pets, colors and items for the aquarium. WARNING: For such a small game, it's a resource hog, taking about a quarter of my CPU cycles as well as the expected hit to the GPU (to render the 3D). But not nearly enough that I can't multitask and run a few other idle games, including the dev's other 3D game, Island Idle RPG. Something older than my several-years-old hardware might struggle more. This is a cute short little game by a growing developer, worth a look.

This idle game is too short. I struggle to find a reason to give this a positive score.