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On June 4 2026, Patriots Division released Pay 2 Win: The World is Mine to the world. This title is an idle game where the player will be running their own gaming company with a single goal in mind: Make as much money as physically possible by squeezing every dime out of their consumers and employees. This game seeks to stand out from other games in the idle genre via various strategic and roguelike elements. So, is this game worth playing or should players take their complaints up to the HR department? Let’s dissect the game piece by piece and make a decision for ourselves.
Idle Yet Strategic
Pay 2 Win is primarily an idle game. While you may need to click the screen yourself for the early levels, you’ll very quickly reach a point where you don’t need to actively look at the screen and can just have the game run in the background while you use your PC. This is normal for the genre, but Pay2Win has a few tricks up its sleeve to make the game more engaging while you’re looking at the screen.
Upgrades in this game aren’t linear, unlike in other games in the genre. Instead, the player must place various units on their floor plan that all either produce money on their own or give other units various buffs. This adds an element of strategy to the game, as the player will need to select not only which units to place but also where. Each unit has nodes that can link to others to increase your productivity, making their placement very important.
This element of strategizing and deciding on what units to place on your floorplan is perfectly complemented by the other major gameplay mechanic of Pay 2 Win: Unit Packs and how you obtain them.
Instead of buying a single unit and being able to place them on the board, the player must spend star coins (Which are obtained via completing missions and leveling up) to roll for a unit in the various unit packs they’ve unlocked in their current playthrough. Once you do, the game will make you select one out of three units to add to your floorplan, like a roguelike.
The randomness of what units you will get during a playthrough makes every ascension (A common clicker mechanic where you start the game from scratch but slightly faster) exciting in a way. When I’ve played other idle clicker games in the past, I would eventually be overcome by a feeling of monotony, as with every ascension I would be doing the same thing and going through the motions. Having this sense of randomness, where I won’t know if I’ll be going for a magic build, a gambling build, or even just focusing on getting as many active buffs going as possible.
This can be a double-edged sword, of course. Going from a run where I have access to absolutely busted units like the telephone booth (which increases the production of nearby units by a massive amount permanently every few seconds) to a run where I have no units that synergize with each other can be quite painful.
I played through three runs of Pay 2 Win before writing this review, and all three of them have completely different floorplan layouts from each other. With that kind of potential variety, I am certain that most players will end up having different experiences from each other, and I crave that kind of variety in games.
Satirical Story
Aside from being an idle clicker game with a few roguelike elements, the other selling point that sets Pay 2 Win apart from other titles in the genre is its story premise and visual design, which are both designed to parody and critique the AAA game industry through a series of comedic bits.
Every once in a while, during the game (Though especially frequent during the early hours), the player will receive phone calls from their two employees, May and Annie. May is a very business and profits-focused woman who is willing to do whatever it takes to squeeze as much money as possible from gamers, while Annie is a spell-obsessed gamer who spends her time passionately talking about the art of making games while simultaneously turning her employees into actual corporate demons.
Any conversation between these two is bound to lead to multiple jokes about how the game industry treats both its workers and consumers in ways that are sure to either greatly entertain or annoy the player. Many of the jokes these two tell rely heavily on referencing events or games that gamers may be aware of, which is a style of comedy I find to be funny about half the time in this game.
While the humor in the story conversations was very hit or miss for me, I consistently enjoyed it when it came to the spritework of the various units at your disposal. While plenty of units at your disposal are normal things like a computer or fax machine, most of them are either evil things to make you feel like a corporate overlord, like unpaid interns and overworked artists, or references to real people and media, such as a project manager who looks a lot like a certain game director.
Being able to look at my floorplan and say that the only thing separating Hideo Kojima from Northernlion is a muscular gym rat made me laugh more than any of the actual story conversations. Considering how almost the entirety of the game is centered around the units on your floor plan, I am very glad that the humor here landed.
Poor Performance
While I enjoy all of the references and jokes in Pay 2 Win’s unit spritework, there are many times I wouldn’t be able to see them due to the game’s myriad of graphical issues. These issues could range from relatively harmless and ignorable things like the level-up bar turning invisible for a few minutes to outright disastrous, as one object’s sprite was switched for another, leading to massive confusion as I could no longer tell what item I had just acquired.
Graphical issues aren’t the only problems with Pay 2 Win, as I had also experienced several gameplay glitches that I can easily see ruining the experience of players. Some of these issues were random occurrences that could be seen as useful in a way, such as the game resetting all my missions to incomplete, allowing me to get their rewards a second time. Others, however, were as awful as having all my upgrades erased, requiring me to pay for them all again.
When so much of this genre’s appeal is centered around the idea of being able to walk away and trust that you’ll continue to gain money while it’s idle, having a random glitch that completely resets your progress can feel like a death sentence. Heck, at one point, I couldn’t even get the game to enter the idle state, which was especially important as I had a buff that increased my revenue by 50% while idle when that happened.
Somehow, even the story cutscenes had technical issues. As attempting to advance a text box too soon after it appeared would often send me into an infinite loop of repeating the same line over and over until I let the game sit on the same line for a few extra seconds after it finished. Hearing Annie fail in her gacha pull twenty times in a row might seem like a joke until the player realizes they’re actually stuck in a glitch.
Perhaps the worst experience I had while playing Pay 2 Win was when I decided to grind and save up for one of the buffs that permanently increases Annie’s mana cap. After waiting several hours to unlock this ability, I could only watch in horror as absolutely nothing happened. I had essentially wasted my time. It took quite a bit of mental effort to convince myself to continue my current run of the game after seeing that happen.
In the time I have spent writing this review, the game has received a patch that has fixed some graphical issues as well as increased the speed at which the player gains star coins to make the early game grind easier, but I cannot determine if all of the issues I listed above have been fixed due to the randomness of unit acquisition and because grinding for mana cap increases would still take quite a long time.
Closing Thoughts
Overall, while I enjoyed my time with Pay 2 Win, I cannot deny that my experience was greatly affected by the various technical issues that I faced during my three playthroughs of the game. The game is filled with various fun concepts that help separate it from other games in the genre, such as the roguelike method for obtaining units and the satirical comedy of them, but this might be a title that players will want to read the patch notes for before they make a full purchase.
Pay 2 Win: The World is Mine
Bottom Line
Pay 2 Win: The World is Mine is a decent idle game with a satirical edge that has some fascinating roguelike elements, but is unfortunately marred by a myriad of technical issues which may turn off many potential fans.
