I want to preface this by saying this game is very fun, it has a TON to do, and I stayed up from buying it to 7am my first night playing it lol. It has very little bugs, a clean look, runs perfectly fine without issue. But over the days as the game progresses and you get more employees, it becomes insanely frustrating and tedious.
TL;DR: tedious as ♥♥♥♥ and no satisfying solutions exist.
Examples:
1. I have an HQ with 30 employees. Between them and my 50 employees all across my stores, my phone is constantly blowing up with the dumbest ♥♥♥♥ possible. "I have a new demand: stupidly expensive office chair/fridge/computer/desk etc that literally does not physically fit in the space you built... or I'm quitting!". I ignore it, because removing the chair/desk/computer etc in HQ will break any contracts with JetCargo for example. Employee gets mad and quits. Employees constantly nagging me that I'm "not happy" and their new demand is happy boss. So I then have to waste time every day doing a million things to bump the happy meter so they'll shut up and leave me alone. The issue is happiness is so fleeting (real lol) that I still get these texts constantly that they want Happy Boss. Working for an ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ is no fun irl, but this is a game and me being unhappy doesn't equal being a ♥♥♥♥ to employees I literally never even spend time around. Like, you can't talk to them or do anything except give them bonuses in game. It's a little dumb imo. Perhaps there could be a role added in HQ to handle these asinine requests? Such as employee satisfaction, if there's room they'll go add whatever dumb furniture they want, or automatically replace desks. Fees would occur of course, and it can automatically sell the old furniture if something is being replaced. Idk (also, dealing with your HQ employees themselves is an insanely annoying nightmare. Another review by Dourel explained this very well.)
2. I have a 24/7 cafe. I have people working every hour of every day, yet every single day without fail at 12:01 am I get an alert no one is working there. I have made sure their schedule bars are pulled fully to each side of the schedule, so it's like a void zone 1 minute thing that's kind of annoying.
3. We should be able to place multiple items in succession. Early game when you take on a big idea and have hundreds of items to place down (especially an HQ where everyone needs a ton of ♥♥♥♥) and you have to place everything... one. at. a. time. It's tedious and sucks what little fun there is out of decor in this game, which feels very frustrating and unoptimized. I'm going to use sims 4 as an example since it's what I have to compare it to. Like sims, you can hold alt to place things more accurately, which I like. Everything else is annoying. Why can't how an item was rotated last time it was held save? You have to rotate EVERY item nearly fully around almost every time. You cannot place more than one item. Using interior decorator mode helps marginally, but you still have to place things 1 by 1.
I also am somewhat confused by HQ as it seems they're meant to help you automate everything more efficiently/effectively, but despite having everyone assigned properly I still encounter issues with stock shortages. I also think that the fact store stock is random in how it's consumed and how all over the place needing to order stock is needs work. It's very expensive and annoying to constantly need to pay extra for urgent orders. We should be able to set delivery frequency I think from the start.
Anyway, all in all I like the game, I'm having fun with the game, but getting towards anything more than like, 2 businesses and 20 employees makes you want to rip your hair out. QOL is needed massively in so many aspects of this game. I'm finding so many threads from 2, 3 years ago with developers promising fixes that never seemed to arrive. I'm not saying game dev is easy and fixes are done in a snap of your fingers, but glaring issues people are still complaining about 3 years later seems a bit odd for a 1.0 release. I will keep playing and look forward to future updates, but all in all I can't say I recommend it really for more than early game messing around.
