So I remember playing this game many, many years ago. I still have the box and the CD for the game somewhere around the house too. Perhaps nostalgia for old games i played when i was younger made me give this game a shot again, with me forgetting the jank-ness of the game, as well as how repetitive and boring it is.
Let me just take a quick second to point something out, this game came out before game dev tycoon and game dev story. This was a game from around 2007, did this game get put on steam to cash in on the success of those games? Probably. But I wanted to just clear up the misconception that people thought this was a quick game made to appeal to people enjoying the genre at the time, this is an older game then them. Still though, this game is definitely bad.
Lets begin with how you can play the game. You can play an endless mode, which has no real challenge other then not going bankrupt, and a campaign mode which lets you 'attempt' to follow a tutorial, and a few mission games, such as making a game of specific quality or earning x amount of money. From there, you can select your company logo, pick from one of three characters and name your company. After which, the game begins.
There are four 'sections' you can go in the game. The first is the office area, which has a bank, your office and your development office. The second section is the university, where you can hire programmers, artists or composers, as well as buy news article information on current game trends as well as how you and your companies currently published games came out like. The third section is the industrial park section. This section has the marketing firm area, where you can advertise your company to improve the likelihood of your games selling better, the licensing office, where you can rent a game engine for a single game development use, take on distribution deals, and, at the first of every month, participate in auctions to acquire licenses to create game tie ins. Next is the publishing house, where you can put your game and the contents of it, such as a manual or t shirt together, print out the amount of copies you want of the game, and then set up the distribution. Lastly in this section is the game store which simply shows how current games are selling. The final section is a 'home' section. Where you can add some items in your house. There is no other reason to this section.
The whole game revolves around these four sections and the game can boil down to a very simple and repeated pattern. Get money from the bank, hire some employees, pick up a game engine, find a distributor you think you can work with their demands of quality, genre and time frame. Construct the game concept, tell your employees to develop the game. Go to the printing house, set up how you want your game to be bundled, print copies, get the distributor to distribute the game, wait a month to see how sales went. Rinse, repeat ad nauseum. Thats it. Now, you may be saying that isnt necessarily bad, just boring. But it gets much much worse.
You see, the game is buggy. Very, very buggy. You can bug out dialogues in the game by clicking dialogue options multiple times, which can be annoying to try and get out of dialogues, to absolutely game breaking. You can sell so much of your stock that doesn't exist, that you break the integer limit and give yourself infinite money. But thats not all, the game is very unstable. This game will crash, like once every ten minutes. As I mentioned, this was a game from around 13 years ago, and its clear that the jank which existed when the game originally came out, only got worse with time, as there was no effort to clean up the bugs or make the game run any better. Your games will crash and there is no auto save. Saving can also crash your game, or make your game restart.
Ultimately, this game is even worse then i remember it and, frankly should not be on steam. It is clearly broken, and has been long abandoned by the original creators. A simple cash grab at the time, now destined to get the occasional dollar or two from hopeful individuals looking for a different taste at the business sim genre. Please avoid.
P.S One last thing, the game seems to take inspiration, at least in my opinion, from airline tycoon. The whole idea of playing as a character, in a cartoonesque environment dealing with cartoonesque people through dialogue in a more 'direct management' style of play. Airline Tycoon is a great game, and if you want to see what im talking about where you can see the inspiration of the game style comes from, take a look at that game.
