Idle Waters

🎣 Idle Waters Review 🌊

I play a lot of idle games and absolutely adore them! But what makes Idle Waters stand out for me is that it’s a little different from the usual. Most idle games just run quietly in the background, but this one actually gives you things to do. You’re a red panda on a fishing journey, and there’s plenty waiting for us in the water!

What I really love is that the game has quests to help sea creatures, which makes it more interesting to play. It feels like you’re working towards something rather than just leaving the game running and collecting fish. You actually have to put in a bit of effort, upgrade your gear, complete missions, and collect all the adorable fish!

There are loads of upgrades like your bag size, auto-fishing speed, fishing rod level, boat level, and auto-selling. All of them are genuinely useful and worth levelling up, which makes saving money in the game feel rewarding. There’s a whole map with different places to visit, from lakes and beautiful caves to maybe even fishing high in the sky! Each location has its own unique fish, treasures, items, and even bottle messages floating around.

There’s a total of 100 different fish to catch, including special variants like rare colour, silver, golden, rainbow, and the very pretty cosmic fish. They’re all super cute, and near the end of the game there are four extra-rare fish that might take a bit more time to find. As you play, you level up your rank—SSS is the max—and the more kinds of fish you catch, the higher your rank goes. You can also level up your fishing rod, increase your luck to find new fish, and boost fish quality so they sell for more coins. All of these can be improved by buying upgrades or helping creatures at sea who give bonus perks.

One of my favourite things is the Aquariums! You can place fish in them, and they’ll drop items for you. Each fish gives different items, which are super helpful for missions, crafting charms, or earning extra coins. You can have up to 10 aquariums, and as you play, you unlock more fish slots for each one. For earning money later in the game, I recommend filling your aquariums with fish that drop feathers or stardust—they each sell for 900 coins, which really adds up when you’ve got all the aquariums going!

That being said, the game is an idle game, and its purpose is to idle. After about 30–50 hours (depending on how quickly you complete quests and other tasks), you’ll find yourself idling more often, especially if you're trying to catch the super-rare fish or, if you're like me, chasing those achievements that require specific fish types and grades.

The whole game is just really cute, relaxing, and full of things to do. There’s even a little cat helper, if you give them a fish treat, they’ll bring you random treasures or items! Such a lovely companion to have while you’re out at sea fishing.

I really love Idle Waters and would totally recommend it if you’re into idle games but want something a bit more engaging on the side.

Enjoy your fishing journey, pandas 🐼

Tip: If you want to find more reviews like this, check out our curator page Moon's Tea House

Idle Waters is an addictive idle game that sits at the bottom of your screen. Most of the achievements are easy to unlock, but a few are grindy. There are no missable achievements, and completion takes over 100 hours.

Approximate time to 100%: 100h+
Estimated achievement difficulty: 1/10
Minimum number of playthroughs needed: 1
Is there a good guide available: You don't need a guide, but if you want to have an overview of the Fish Journal, I made this guide: https://www.missitheachievementhuntress.com/idle-waters-fishing-journal/
Multiplayer achievements: No
Missable achievements: No
Grinding Achievements: Yes, Finding every fish and then in every variation is very grindy. However, the developer is working on an update to improve this.
DLC-Only achievements: No
Speedrun achievements: No
Time-gated achievements: No
RNG-achievements: No
Does difficulty affect achievements: No difficulty
Unobtainable/glitched achievements: No

Idle Waters is an addictive idle game that sits at the bottom of your screen. There is this red panda that is fishing, and you'll try to collect all the fish for quests, but also to sell them and upgrade your rod and your boat to be able to get to new locations and find other fish and items.

I played Idle Waters quite actively during the first two days but also kept it running at night. The game is so addictive and it was so nice to unlock more areas and more upgrades. This helped me get most of the achievements quite quickly. After that, I have just been running it in the background to hope to catch the missing fish for the last few achievements.

You will unlock a lot of charms in Idle Waters, which will help tailor your playthrough toward what you are hunting for at the moment. There are charms to find more trash items, or treasures if you're looking for those. But also charms that help while the game is idling or when you're actively playing. And charms to increase the chance of finding the silver, gold, and rainbow versions of fishes.

I'm unsure what the best strategy is for finding missing versions, if you should only equip one of those charms, or all of them, to hopefully find more of the ones you're missing. And if it is better to be at the location where that specific fish is, or use the charm that allows you to catch every fish from locations you have already unlocked. It is quicker to fish in the earlier locations, so I've mostly been doing that with the charm to find them all. And sometimes switching to the area of one of the four legendaries I'm still missing, but that doesn't want to be found :P.

The developer is working on an update to make catching the missing fish a bit easier, which will cost in-game money, but you'll have plenty of that after a while. However, this update will take a few weeks. Personally, I'll just keep running the game to hopefully find those missing ones, as it is an idle game after all and it doesn't require my input that much anymore.

I give Idle Waters 4 out of 5 stars.


Do you enjoy games that don't have missable achievements? Check out this list on my website:
Missi the Achievement Huntress: Games without missable achievements

A really enjoyable idle fishing game that has a decent amount of stuff to do, upgrade and collect.