Ai Tycoon

Genre: Idle Game

Players: 1

.

Review:

Ai Tycoon is an Idle Game released on mobile devices in 2024 and ported to PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch in 2025. This game has players select a type of AI technology to focus on as a startup and manage their growing tech empire.

At least… that’s the idea… In practice, you’ll just be sitting on a map watching numbers go up, and every so often you’ll have enough money to buy another location on the map and make your numbers go up faster. Sometimes, the locations you’ll buy will be owned by “competitors”, and you’ll have to choose from two dollar amounts to offer to buy up the location, each with a different percentage chance of succeeding… but if you fail, the price goes up next time you try. Oh, and “competitors” is in quotes because they never actually expand their territory or do anything that can threaten your business. At it’s core, you’re mainly focused on growth here, not competition.

At least… that’s the idea… In practice, while you’re trying to manage your business (or rather, wait until you can do something, do it, and wait some more), you will be interrupted every five seconds or so by a prompt to respond to one of a bank of issues that crop up, whether it’s a tech problem, a pigeon flying into your store, or an opponent challenging you to a dance competition. You’ll then be given a multiple-choice option of how to respond, and you’ll soon learn that the correct answer to these is pretty much always the “yes, and” positive one. Customer broke their product and demand a replacement? Give it to them. Investors ask if your product has a feature? Tell them it does! There’s no thought to any of this, you just go with whichever feels like it’s the most positive response.

It’s worth noting that whichever of these prompts you get, you’ll always have the camera wrested from wherever you’re looking and pulled to the location of either your headquarters or the headquarters of one of your competitors. This game has no qualms interrupting whatever you’re looking at every five seconds to push you into answering inane questions and then making you move the camera back. In fact, if you want to be left alone, the only way to do so is to select an expansion location to buy and then leave the screen up without selecting a response, since the game doesn’t send you these messages while you’re already in a menu.

The presentation doesn’t do anything here either. The game has extremely simple, bland 2D visuals backed by a synthesized 8-second music loop that gets old very, very quickly.

I absolutely hate Ai Tycoon. This is a game that seems to have no idea what makes for a decent Idle Game. There’s nothing productive to do while you’re waiting for enough money to buy an expansion location, and even if you want to just sit and chill while numbers go up, the game refuses to let you, constantly harassing you with pointless, inane questions. If you want an Idle Game, you have tons of better options on Nintendo Switch, do not buy this one.

tl;dr – Ai Tycoon is an Idle Game that has you managing a growing tech empire. Except that “managing” just comes in the form of waiting until you can afford your next location to expand to, and you can’t even do that in peace because you’ll be constantly harassed by inane business questions that require little thought. Ai Tycoon seems to have been created by someone who has no idea what makes Idle Games work, and there are tons of other better games in the genre on Nintendo Switch. I absolutely hate this game, do not buy it.

Grade: F

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