Shonen Idle Z from Zakos Games recently launched on Steam. It lets gamers create their very own Shonen Jump hero and take them on an adventure across a large world filled with bosses and 400 different types of enemies to defeat. The game is free-to-play but not everyone is willing to give it a thumbs up.

The object of the game is not dissimilar from the likes of Dragon Ball or Naruto Shippuden. Players will train up their character in the clicker game, buffing their stats and filling out a party to save the world. Most gamers describe it as an idle game, similar to Clicker Heroes but “without the clicking”. You get an idea of what it looks like with the trailer below.

Out of the total 59 reviews in the database at the moment, only 38 are positive. So why the disparity? Well, a lot of gamers have come from playing Shonen Idle Z when it was made available over on Kongregate. Other than the game not starting for some, the major issue that many have is that the grinding is tedious, you don’t really have to play or strategize much, and that you’ll spend most of your time waiting.

KingCoconut summed it up best, writing…

“This game is basically just a waiting game. You can’t really command your character to do much, there is one music track, and if you want to progress even a little bit at the rate of a mid speed snail, you have to pay actual money to do it. It’s like DLC, but instead of new content, you get to access content instead of having a screensaver with a character you made on it that stops you from playing any other steam games.”

Ah, so there it is.

If you don’t want to have to sit around and wait you’ll have to pay money.

This sort of tactic has been frequently used for many mobile games, and EA in particular has been criticized for using this in their Need For Speed and Dungeon Keeper games.

Kodyd194 explained that even though the character customization is really good, it’s still a bit too slow even for a clicker game…

“Shonen Idle Z seems like a decent “idle game”. It looks to have a large variety of “options” and things to idle but, as with most idle games it seems pretty grindy. Now I say that knowing full well that probably wont bother most people who enjoy idle style games.That being said I feel like this idle game may be too slow for even them.”

The concept of creating a custom hero using a wide-range of clothing options and abilities seems kind of cool, a little bit like a party-based RPG version of Dragon Ball Xenoverse. However, the wait times and microtransactions seem to be putting a lot of people off.

Zakos Games have been consistently updating Shonen Idle Z, and they recently released a new patch to fix some of the issues that gamers complained about, but whether or not they’ll even out the wait times remains to be seen.

You can learn more about this game by hitting up the Steam store page.