Adventure Capitalist is an Idle-Game by Hyper Hippo Productions, which is all about making money. The game released in 2014 on PC and was ported to the Playstation 4 in 2016.
You invest into different business opportunities and let your investments work for you. At the beginning you manually initiate the money gathering activities, but soon you can invest into managers, that do the work for you. With the incoming money you can either purchase additional businesses or upgrade your current businesses, which increases your income. The Upgrades not only increase the income, but at certain stages also increase the speed of income. There are also additional time and money bonuses if you reach certain upgrade levels with all you businesses.
The catch of the game is that you can reset your progress, which allows you to start from scratch, but this time with the help of supportive Angel Investors. Those Angels permanently increase your income. It is therefore worth it from time to time to start over with additional Angel Investors, since you will quickly regain all you have lost and progress even faster. You can leave the game at any time and come back another time or day and your businesses will have earned lots of cash in the meantime. This is why they call it an Idle Game.
You will start of on Earth, but will soon also be able to start colonies and businesses on the Moon and Mars as well. Each of the planets has its own separate economy, which is independent of the others. If you reset one of your planets, it has no impact on the others.
The PC and Mobile versions actually have additional weekly Events with unique businesses, even though they are not identical on Steam and Mobile. They are all repeat versions of previous events and a big reason for longtime players to keep playing the game in order to reach the Event leaderboards. This is not the case on PS4. The Playstation version, according to the developers Hyper Hippo Productions, hasn't gotten any updates in years and they recommend switching to the Mobile version. Oh, I just love when developers neglect the superior console and PC versions to focus on the inferior mobile ports...
You theoretically can buy boosters to temporarily or permanently increase your income and speed for Gold in the shop. Some small amounts can be earned ingame or alternatively be purchased with real money. There is definitely some Pay-to-Progression potential here. On the other hand you don't really need these boosters. For one, all of the progression goals of the main game are more intrinsically motivated. Even if you reach the highest upgrades, there is no real end goal of the game except to eternally and infinitely earn money. Some might say that fits the name Adventure Capitalist well. You can also relatively easy cheat the game, since it's an offline game and you can just alternate the clock on your console or PC to gain massive amounts of Cash each time.
Something worth commending are to some extent also the visual style and soundtrack of the game. The characters reminded me a of the cartoon character of the Fallout games, which is obviously pretty appealing. That being said you are mostly looking at game menus, since this is an Idle game. The earth background, in my opinion however, looks a lot more generic than those of the Moon and the Mars. The PS4 version has also the slightly superior UI, shame that it is the least supported version... Each of the 3 colonies furthermore has its own background music and they fit quite well. The earth one in particular is quite catchy. They are obviously looping a lot, but I never found them to be distracting, which is probably an accomplishment.
Result:
I am not really a fan of Idle games, but Adventure Capitalist is a surprisingly entertaining game. On paper, it may not sound like much, but it is surprisingly enjoyable to watch your business income bars going up all the time and seeing your overall wealth increasing every second. The fact that you can't really mismanage and the only way to go is up, makes it also a rather relaxing activity. My point being is, that even if you are not interested in Idle games, Adventure Capitalist makes it a surprisingly strong case for itself. The presentation is strong for what it is and it's fun to try out. You can quit at any point without punishment and if you return later on, large amounts of cash will already be waiting for you. The only downside is, that it is an Idle Game, so there is far less going on gameplay wise than in most other games.
7/10
