Rockfest

It's bad. It's boring. It's a money-grab. It's like a below-average mobile game full of poor decisions and ugly design. Where to begin? As others have stated, the tutorial is needlessly long. Every single game mechanic and UI button is tediously explained with long wordy text boxes. Here's how I would fix this up: 1. Explain only enough for the player to get started, then use little hint windows that pop up as necessary as the game progresses. E.g. "Oh no! People are getting bored! Maybe you should add some entertainment." (The shop button becomes highlighted) 2. Work on brevity in your writing. It's needlessly wordy and that adds up quickly over the course of a tutorial that involves constant reading. Here's the text you see during the tutorial when you're forced to check whether you have enough toilets: "THERE ARE A LOT OF THESE BUILDINGS FROM THE HEALTH CATEGORY, YOU DON'T NEED MORE OF THEM RIGHT NOW!" How about just, "SATISFACTORY!" Why do I need to read all that? And below that it says "AH! A PLACE OF REFUGE! IMPROVES SATISFACTION AND SANITATION. BUILD ENOUGH TOILETS THAT NO ONE GETS CAUGHT SHORT." Besides being clumsily written, it's LONG. Get rid of it. If we're not stupid, we'll find out what building toilets does when we fail to build enough of them. Here's another helpful tutorial quote: "IN THE BEGINNING YOU WON'T BE ABLE TO ALREADY BUILD OBJECTS FROM ALL CATEGORIES, SO DON'T WORRY IF A RED THUMB IS SHOWN IN SOME CATEGORIES, JUST TAKE CARE OF THESE THINGS ONCE YOU UNLOCKED THE ACCORDING BUILDINGS. ALSO THE MOOD BARS SOMETIMES NEED SOME TIME TO RECOVER EVEN THOUGH ALL THUMBS ARE GREEN, JUST BE PATIENT." As an English major, this is a tortuous read. But let's set that aside. It's unnecessary. Completely unnecessary. People are smarter than you're giving them credit for. We've played other games with similar mechanics. We aren't going to see that "sanitation" is low and be totally confused about which of the available 5 things we can possibly build could remedy this problem. We aren't going to build toilets and trashcans and then assume the game is broken when everyone doesn't instantly become happy. WE AREN'T STUPID. After the tutorial, things don't improve. The UI is ugly. The opening menu looks bland, like a knockoff mobile game. The developer needs a design guy, because everything UI related sucks to look at. In general, the game is full of poor choices. Keeping with the UI theme, there's a star with a number in the top left corner of the screen which the tutorial informs you can be clicked to view your stats. How about writing "STATS" there and eliminating more of the needless tutorial? How about letting the Esc key on my keyboard close what I have open? I seriously thought I soft locked the game because the "okay" button was obscured by another piece of the UI and I couldn't for the life of me close the shop window. I still haven't figured out how to close the game without force-closing it. How about letting me move building placement with my arrow keys, or by dragging the model around the screen? I thought you were resigned to place buildings in the center of your screen until I tried dragging it again and realized YOU HAVE TO CLICK AND DRAG ONLY THE BASE OF THE BUILDING MODEL. How about letting things finish building without me having to click a checkmark at the end? So many bad decisions. As I type this review, I can feel the tremors of the developer furiously drafting up an even longer tutorial to clarify these things. STOP. Don't make the tutorial longer, MAKE THE GAME BETTER. The music isn't great, but not as bad as I expected. It was annoying to constantly hear cringey Japanese pop in the "Rock and Metal" section. The selection is extremely poor, but at least it sounds studio produced. You can select from all 5 genres of music that exist (ha). But part of the core gameplay is adding songs to your favorites and then hiring them as the lineup for your festival and I couldn't figure out how to do this easily since I couldn't figure out how to skip songs. I took to switching back and forth between genres to try to forceplay a different song and it worked about half the time. Considering that making a music lineup is a core mechanic of playing the game, it's a little baffling that it's so difficult. The game encourages you to use Gems to build things faster and generally speed up the slow pace of the game, and of course these gems are designed to be used up after a few hours to get you used to the game being a little bit less boring so that you buy more of them. NOT using Gems would make the already slow pace unbearable, though I stopped playing before I ran out of the initial Gems provided. This is why I accused it of being a mobile-style cashgrab. In conclusion, while I like the game concept (which is why I tried it) and I think the idea of uploading your own music is cool, the game screams of poor judgement and nonexistant design chops. Maybe I'll revisit it in several months and see if things have improved. Best of luck.