Gym Hero – Idle Fitness Tycoon

Genre: Idle Game

Players: 1

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Review:

Gym Hero is an Idle Game that has you controlling a man or woman doing push-ups to earn points that will let them purchase various upgrades to supercharge their workout. This game was released on Nintendo Switch in 2019.

In terms of presentation, this game is really lackluster – you spend the entire game looking at one person in one room doing one exercise on infinite repeat. The game is colorful, but the complete lack of variety is pretty awful, and it’s made even worse by the annoying energetic music and the extremely mobile-esque sound effects.

As for the gameplay, there’s nothing here to make things interesting for the player or distract from the banality and tedium that this genre trends towards when it fails to innovate. However, even worse than that, progression in this game is slow as molasses, and the “tapping” to progress the game has players using ZL and ZR in a way that will make your fingers ache before long. And no, that doesn’t count as exercise. I should also take this moment to point out that this game doesn’t have any touchscreen support, though given the extreme simplicity of the gameplay, I don’t see how that could improve things.

There’s two other notes I should make here before finishing up – firstly, this game’s depiction of fitness is extraordinarily unhealthy. No, you will not get healthier by “upgrading” your carbs, downing more vitamins, and doing a gazillion push-ups. If you want to lose weight and get in shape, you need to manage your calories, reduce your carb intake, and supplement that with a well-rounded exercise routine.

Secondly, this seems to be exactly the sort of game that previously made use of Nintendo’s prior method of sorting eShop recommendations – it’s a game normally priced at $2.29 that regularly dropped down to $0.22 to spur on sales numbers… until recently. Now the game’s sales only drop to $1.99 (gee, fancy that). Honestly, I’m not even sure this game is worth the $0.22 I paid for it.

Gym Hero is as good an example as you’ll find of a low-effort cash-grab Idle Game on the Nintendo Switch. There’s little variety in the presentation, little effort made to do anything interesting, and the slow progression and repetitive nature of this game make it the sort that even fans of Idle Games will find themselves bored with before long. Don’t buy it.

tl;dr – Gym Hero is an Idle Game that puts in very little effort to escape the tedium of the genre, with slow progression, a terrible lack of variety, and even its depiction of fitness is grotesquely unhealthy. Don’t get this game.

Grade: D

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