Junkyard Tycoon

At a glance, Junkyard Tycoon looks like the perfect mix of gritty business sim and mechanical mayhem. Buy a busted car, dismantle it piece by piece, sell the scrap when prices spike, and build your empire from a dirt lot to a scrapyard dynasty. What’s not to love?

Plenty, as it turns out.

The game starts off with promise, and then slams the brakes. You get one car slot, a clunky UI, and the thrilling opportunity to wait. A lot. Dismantling a car takes energy. Selling its parts takes timing. And just about everything else takes patience. Even when you unlock more slots or slap a turbo on your car press speed, you’re still stuck waiting for parts to extract and markets to turn.

There’s a deep systems web here, resource chains, part crafting, warehouse upgrades, even a casino and a stock market mini-game, but most of it feels like dressing on a painfully idle core loop. It’s not that nothing happens, it’s that it takes way too long to get to the part where something interesting might happen.

Want to build a recycling factory? You’ll need nails, which means glass, which means scrap, which means… you guessed it, another car, another wait.

Junkyard Tycoon throws a hundred systems at you, but never quite nails the “fun” part. If watching progress bars while your energy recharges is your idea of a good time, have at it. Otherwise, there are cleaner rides on the app store that won’t leave you stuck on blocks.