Last updated on December 13th, 2025 at 02:45 pm
Startup Panic – Strategy Game Review
Startup Panic is a Strategy/Simulation game from TINYBUILD LLC, first launched in 3rd December 2020.
It’s rated 4+ and currently has 31+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes Startup Panic Stand Out
Quit your job and build an exciting startup! Survive the tech bubble, compete with rival CEOs and expand your office from bedroom programmer up to the heights of global corporate sabotage! As long as you don't get hacked… or kidnapped…
This Strategy game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, Startup Panic is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 29th April 2021
Recent improvements include:
Improved mobile-centric UI elements.
Download & Availability
Startup Panic is available through the official App Store for iOS devices.
Get Startup Panic on App Store
Requirements: Requires iPhone 5s / iPad Air / iPad Air (Cellular) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina, Cellular) / iPhone 6 / iPhone 6 Plus / iPad Air 2 / iPad Air 2 (Cellular) / iPad Mini 3 or later.
Compatible with iPhone and iPad devices.
Player Experience Highlights
Community Insight:
Literally all scenarios are designed to negatively impact you greatly if things go wrong. If things go the right way, the effects are small. When a new competitor comes in, you lose almost all users, making it difficult to compete. Motivation decreases like crazy. We have to send employees on very expensive vacation every 3 minutes or so.
Idk if its just us but whenever we play for a long period of time our screen just goes blank. We still can can go to all the screens except the office page, plz for the love of god, fix that. We hope this doesnt just happen to us. But all in all great game.
The game is fun to a point, but then becomes redundant and loses any fun factor. Likes: art (really cute), a real effort was made to authenticity of running a business, music is perfect bgm, permanence of decisions is great, multiple endings is fun. Dislikes: 1. Lack of clarity of cause and effect 2. Post-mort is useless 3. Competition is broke 4. Buttons and screen layout is not good 5. Few bugs, like the objectives text box doesnt go away when there are no active objectives, but shows an old one already completed Overall- we feel like we got our moneys worth, and we are happy to support a traditional pay-game trying to make a sim manger game, which is a difficult genre to create in, but it needs to rework to make it good. It is ok, worth a try if you like sim managers, but we cant recommend for those who are not a big fan of that genre. Here we will explain our dislikes for the developers if you would like to address in a future update 1. Lack of cause and effect is related to how a.) how the marketing side works, with connectivity and population, and b.) how to allocate for feature builds., jobs a.) the marketing side, and how buildings work, isnt explained well, and how it increases customers isn't evident when performed. For instance, if we build a tower, the connectivity goes up 20%, but what does that do? Why the population is so small? Is that user population or total population of people who can become users? And while on marketing, why can only one building be built at a time? B.) in the beginning the jobs are described in a way that it is clear to focus on technology or usability, but later on that is difficult to determine. It is frustrating to focus on the wrong thing as it can take almost half a year to try again, or can possibly be a game ender. 2. Post-mort is a great idea, but it completely useless as formatted. This is due to only providing the information based on how the focus was allocated and not on the units performed. That is to say, if we are to try again, it will be with different teammates or different stats. Knowing that we allocated 33% to technology is meaningless because the technology stats are different the second time. But if we knew that we scored a 25 in technology and that is enough, then we would know how to allocate for the other aspects of the job/feature. 3. Competition is only hard because of the broken way they are introduced. When a new competitor comes in, they immediately take about 2/3 of the market, and much of our users, throwing the entire finances of the company off. We then have to stop losses and then continue building features. But competition doesnt ever really grow their company. By late stage we can just train our staff for an entire year and not lose any market share. They should be progressing more aggressively than that, and introduced without take so much of our users. On that note, there is little customer growth in general which is just weird. By year 9, with 70% marketshare, our users grow about 10% a year even though the world is supposed to be getting more connectivity… The numbers just dont really make sense. 4. Some buttons are too small, like the yellow triangles in the vacation results dialog box to move between employees. We have to go in and out of many dialog boxes to do vacations and training, where we should be able to train multiple employees from the same dialog box. We hope this helps and is clear, we tried our best. Best of luck for this game and future developments. Ps. What is the deal with pirates, almost 1/3 of the time it seems time they kidnapped our workers… It is cute at first and just annoying later.
The UI is bad. It is not obvious where the button for the marketing tab is. It is the globe that later appears on the top left. Also the buttons for choosing a recruitment method whether by social media or talent agency is also not obvious. They are the two thin vertical bars that sandwich the graphic. Overall the game is fun but challenging. To win you need to take the $100k loan. Do marketing in Asia India and SE Asia. Do what the investors want. Also dont bother with training your employees. You need to constantly search for more talented employees. One last thing. We find it odd that when sending employees on vacation there is a good chance they will be kidnapped. What part of the world do the developers love in.
Old review: we don't know how our sfx and bgm setting suddenly changed to none and even when we crank it up to max, there is still no sound at all Recent review: The update fixed the sound issue but the new game menu is moved to the right screen. We wanted to hit continue since it was the only menu on the right. We unfortunately/accidentally hit new game and removed our save.
Im at a point where as the announce the leap winner, the game freezes and we cant go on.
This game is pretty fun at the beginning but the further you go along the less fun/ harder it gets. For example, we cant make it past the point when youre supposed to host the celebrity on your website, but all our technologies were 7 or over. Thats another thing the game isnt very clear with its instructions. When it says technologies theres no way for us to know if that means we need the ratings on the things Ive unlocked to be over 7, or it could mean the area where it gives a rating for gaming, social, and the other thing. Additionally, we think there should be difficulty levels. For example, easy would be keep levels above 4 for the celebrity, regular would be 7, and hard could be 10.
This game is often fun and has potential to be a great game. The employee motivation aspect can be unbearable – you have to send your employees on vacation so frequently that you almost never have a full staff to work on features. The post mortem piece is a great idea but can be unhelpful, which is frustrating because youve just spent thousands of dollars to learn that every trait needed more work and now you have to send your employees on vacation.
Great game concept, but you lose money so fast you can barely stay afloat.
This game has the potential to be great! But somehow it is unrealistic. If you pay attention to the timeline, you send your workers to vacation every month. Some workers demand for higher pay than those who have more traits than they do. And you will always fail during the hosting the celebrity on your server (despite having all of our features 9 or 10). Needs a lot of re-work but possibly addicting if fixed.
Cant even get past the pop star even with all features at almost 10.
Has potential but then sets these expectations with unreasonable consequences in a short time period which essentially makes the game unplayable. Unknowingly knocks you down before you can even get on your feet. On pc it may be easier, with quick clicks and shortcuts but this translates terribly on mobile. The consequences for not meeting these extremely high expectations are losing hours of your time that you can never get back. Fun idea, but it really is a waste of time at this point in development. Not memorable or significant in any way, really wish the odds of negative rng events were lowered.
The difficulty makes this game impossible to tolerate every time you think you get ahead or stand a chance it throws you a task thats impossible to beat like the one with that pop star chick or it just makes the competitors constantly steal your users for no reason in a random event.
We have played this on PC for a month and was happy to buy it here at 1/3 the price(screwing PC players we guess). The UI is a bit more problematic on mobile but it's also faster to start playing anymore convenient for most people. The game itself is very well designed and horribly balanced. We truly believe that they failed to apply proper weight to external testers opinions and instead balanced the game based on internal feedback from people who know how the game is structured internally. The result is very awkward game flow that punishes any deviation from the perfect path. This is FAIRLY realistic and deserves praise, but this is a game and should be fun first and foremost. Especially on mobile. There should be two immediate changes to this version(or all!): 1) add difficulty settings. 2) add option to skip tutorial on second playthrough The game is definitely worth $6 if you have any interest in social media startups or business simulations. Think of it as a much more difficult version of Game Dev Story.
We love this game since watching Raptors gameplay of it. We have it on both our iPad 6th gen and iPhone 12. It runs smoothly on both but the downside is, is that the game stops at the Leap Year awards. The screen is just just frozen at that point but the game music does still run. We tried tapping and restarting the app but nothing showed up or changed. Hope this is helpful.
Im having a really hard time getting past a few years. It would also be nice if the tutorial didnt pop up every time you started a new game. Looking forward to playing some more, though.
If we dont win the LEAF contest it just leaves us in the screen for having lost it. Great game, otherwise. Some things arent exactly explained well in the tutorial, but you cant do much if you cant get past that LEAF loss screen.
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: 3.14
- Size: 1,989.87 MB
- iOS: 10.0 or later
- Languages: EN, FR, DE, JA, KO, PT, RU, ZH, ES, TR
- Content Advisory:
- Developer: TINYBUILD LLC
Last updated: 29th April 2021 | Genre: Strategy, Simulation | Developer: TINYBUILD LLC