Idle Waters Review

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.

This review for Idle Waters was written on 12 June 2025, based on the current Steam version of the game which has 100 achievements at the time of writing this review. This information can be outdated, for example, when the developer adds or removes achievements or releases (new) DLC.