When you first open this game, there's like a million buttons and menus and it's unclear what you're supposed to start by doing. That part only lasts a few minutes and doesn't matter that much, but it does give you an idea what the game is going to be like. Idle Bouncer is not super polished or nice or well designed. It's an idle game made by a programmer with a preference for coding rather than game design. And although it's easy to make an idle game, it's hard to make a good idle game. And this one did not succeed. It's okay. But it's not the kind of idle game that you know is only worth playing for fifteen minutes. It has some effort put in. It has some depth. And some interesting mechanics not seen often in other games. And it can clearly go for a long time. But the problem is that Idle Bouncer is a waste of time. I suppose all Idle Games are supposed to be time-wasters, but they're also supposed to be fun. This game isn't that fun. This game does not reward you with a fun time for actively interacting with the game. But Idle Bouncer also doesn't make a lot of progress while you're gone. So... What's the point? If you're trying to actively play the game so that progress is maximized, for the majority of the game you'll just be rhythmically clicking your mouse and occasionally popping a bubble and then buying an upgrade and then repeating. The fun part is buying upgrades but there's a bad sign that I noticed after I did this game's version of prestiging for the first time. You know, that idle game thing where you reset your game to get benefits that will increase your profit for next time? Yeah. In good idle games, prestiging is usually a very fun part. It's where you start over with new benefits and you realize just how much faster the game is now. But you don't really get that feeling in this game. Starting over is annoying because playing the game is annoying and you'll just have to continue rhythmically clicking for an hour to get back to where you were last time, even with the prestige upgrades. And waiting for random bubbles to spawn. Random! It's annoying. So I could keep saying things about this game to give you a clearer vision of why I don't love it, but the truth is that I'm not that passionate about it. It's just a not-very-fun game. It's slow. And it wants your attention even though it doesn't entertain you. It wants your attention because if you look away for too long you might miss a randomly spawning bubble that I find to be the major way you make progress in this game. But while you're paying attention to the game, very little is happening. You get a lot of time to think about how not-very-good this game is. And speaking of currency, this game has microtransactions. It's not like it's in your face or anything, but it is annoying that it exists. I don't want someone making more progress than me just because they spent money. But mostly this game just fills me with indifference. And mild annoyance. Also I wasn't sure where to put this in my review, but it annoys me far too greatly that there can only be one bubble on the screen at a time! Even if all your things are bouncing a hundred times per second, there'll only be at most one bubble on the screen! That sucks! I honestly hate that! Because of one of the only strategies in this game I discovered myself: dropping your circles low to the bottom so that they bounce faster and create more bubbles. I liked discovering strategy for myself but I think the reason I had to discover it for myself was that the developer never intended you to be able to spawn that many bubbles at all! So yes, it does annoy me a lot that there can only be one bubble on the screen at a time. It took the one spark of strategy I felt and then it smooshed it into the ground where it did not bounce back up. I don't recommend this game in its current state, although it is free with microtransactions though so I guess you can try it with little downside. But once again, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone unless perhaps they were on a quest to play every mediocre idle game ever half-baked.
