Meh – Game Dev Tycoon Review

Started with Game Dev Story, came to this thinking it would be a better version. It is and it isn’t. GDS is way shallower than this, but this game is way less approachable. Menus are not as intuitive, and overall playing feels less fun than GDS. If I hadn’t played GDS, this game might have just annoyed me too much to get the mechanics down. The various options contribute more to confusion about what works. It seems impossible to consistently generate enough research to stay on top of new options. Workers will randomly “stall out” and literally do nothing at various points in projects as precious time flies by. Failed numerous contract jobs for no apparent reasons other than RNG since my workers would randomly just sit there. Workers also feel impersonal and generally uninteresting. No real reason to pick one over the other than their basic stats, which only makes it more annoying when they don’t do their job and then get random raises just because they’ve got enough XP from putting out enough games that didn’t even do well. If I bother to start a new game, I would definitely slow the timeline. There are a lot of little things I couldn’t enjoy just because I had to keep up with the pace of developments, which is interesting but not really practical. The developers did good depicting the evolution of the industry, but the abilities to f your team never seem to be on par. Like I have access to the same 3d technology when making games for Gameboy as I do when making them for PlayStation and Xbox just because there’s no option for me to develop better 3d capabilities. Even if there was, I’d have to make a bunch of 2d games first to build up the research points. Money is way easier to get than research points, until you can’t put out games good enough to make any money because you don’t have the research to build a better engine. It’s basically like the strategy is just to pump out a bunch of mediocre games so you can amass research points. You might as well call it mobile game dev simulator. Forget about any sense of imagination of being a developer of your favorite genre or even groups of genres. You get penalized for making the same type of game twice in a row, even if it’s for a different console, and uses slightly different parameters. Apparently these guys have never played Skyrim. I can tell the developers put some work into it. It feels like a more comprehensive GDS, but I wish I could say it’s at least as fun. The graphics are ok, but honestly uninspiring. It’s also clear that they took a lot of elements directly from GDS. If you haven’t played either, go with GDS first, as it’s a lot more pure fun, though also more functionally limited. This game is more quantity over quality, and it’s unfortunate since what it lacks in quality fails to compel me to further explore its quantity.
Review by SmoovInnit on Game Dev Tycoon.