Time to make use of the gym membership in Gym Tycoon Early Access and charge for it, rather than pay for it. In this indie simulator available on Steam, you get to build your gym, manage the applicants to join and even enter competitions.
You will find yourself watching your customers working out like some sort of voyeur as they run up and down, pump some iron, then take a shower. Scratch that last one; that is voyeurism.
Life imitating art (I’m sure that lost its meaning here), this was in my review pile, only my Head of Security decided to file away my gym invite in the spam folder. As if jumping on the treadmill at full pace, I had to quickly catch up and see how it runs. Geddit?
With humble beginnings, you start with a small plot where you can place a treadmill, bench press and a dumbbell stack. Place these however you like on your new, highly polished floorboards; then you can open up to potential customers.
At first, three applicants want to join, and you get to choose if they can sign up or not. Come opening time, you’ll be able to watch them work out and increase their XP – the better the result, the more satisfaction and payment you can receive (you can increase the fees, but I didn’t see the point as never in the red once I built the gym.
As customer satisfaction improves in Gym Tycoon Early Access, so too does the rating of your gym on a five-star basis. The better the gym, the more your facilities can expand, charge and employ better equipment.
Interestingly, you can only build a toilet and shower once you get a one-star ranking, so your existing roster has to pinch it. Each ranking has a cap on how many members you can have, and the requirements – i.e. so many toilets and showers and satisfaction of your customers.
At the time of previewing, the game is capped at a two-star rating and other than the new amenities and a barbell rack, there are no other things you can build. My gym expanded pretty rapidly and was limited to 30 members with approximately 72% satisfaction.
A lot of people work out for health, some for vanity, others to hook up. Good luck. The characters in the game are pretty generic – no Kardashian booty in this, thankfully. They all have quite an innocent charm to them, and you can click on each member to see their stats. You might have your favourite customers.
For those who fall into the vanity side of gym attendance, you may be disappointed at the lack of aesthetic choice, as all the walls are green by default, and any interior flooring is the same wood grain. I liked it, though it would be nice to kit out the place in something a bit more varied.
The UI is on the simplistic side, too, but that is totally in its favour. There wasn’t a moment when I didn’t know what to do. On one occasion, I wasn’t sure how to rotate the placement of equipment, but there’s a quick help box that was precisely that: it helped, and it was quick.
You can download the demo from the Steam page now.
