Game Tycoon 2 Review

“Man, I wish there was a game where you could, like, manage a games studio, creating your own games and conquering the market!” This would have been unthinkable ten years ago, but now Steam is awash with suspiciously similar game development simulators that, while claiming to be different, are disturbingly similar to Kairosoft's original (and best) Game Dev Story. Game Dev Tycoon and this game, Game Tycoon 2, are two such examples: this game following on from the atrociously received (holding 42/100 on Metacritic) Game Tycoon 1.5, an updated re-release of a 2003 game. This has you attempt to – what else? – run a games developer as you work your way through time, starting in 1980, developing for the humble home computer, up to the present day where you develop for smartphones, consoles, and beyond.

The basic run of the game goes like this: hire workers, obtain a publisher, announce a project pertinent to the publisher's needs, decide a genre and how difficult/graphically-intense/fast the game will be. Then you produce the game, get the games printed and pressed, send out for sale, repeat until you win or lose. It's odd, because while they've essentially taken the same basic yet addictive formula from Game Dev Story, in the act of adding more realism they've gone a bridge too far. This is a simulation game where the player is afforded too many options and too much control – if such a thing even exists – down to a micro level where you can even decide how much vacation time staff get. I appreciate their attempts at letting us play like EA by cutting back vacation time and pushing hours up, but all the minute options don't make for immersion, they're just extraneous and as such only serve to make the core gameplay headache-inducing and tedious; the game ends up feeling much more fiddly than its slimmed-down counterpart. This does not make for a good game.

The game proves early on to be a bloated facsimile of the above games. Game Tycoon 2 demands that you navigate through a series of nauseating menus to accomplish the simplest of tasks, making the game seem much bigger than it is in reality. To run your development company, you need to hire workers such as programmers and sound designers, sign contracts with publishers, start your projects, and eventually publish your games. These all occur on different parts of the map; one would have to travel to a university to hire workers and another part of your own office to begin projects. Why does this exist? Why do we need to travel? Why couldn't it have been done in one screen? Why does a management sim of this nature need a world map? Why did the developer insist on including all this fatuous bullshit to distract from how little game is in here? Game Tycoon 2 is cause for plenty of profanity if you give it a chance.

As such, this makes the pace of the sim ploddingly slow. Of course, simulation games are meant to be slow, it's in their nature: but while Football Manager is a satisfying slow burn, this is a tedious, monotonous snooze of a game. There's a key difference between something like Football Manager and this: at its core, FM is just a spreadsheet, some words and numbers on a screen, but it feels real: the players that you cultivate feel entirely genuine. You make games and release them in this title, but all the while you feel a tremendous sense of “Ah, what's the point?”. Game Tycoon 2 cannot avoid this crushing sense of wasted time, especially considering that there are games – games on the same shopfront, even – that do the same job but ten thousand times better. Oh, and did we mention that this costs £10.99 but Greenheart Games' vastly superior version is cheaper at £6.99? For the same money as Game Tycoon 2, you can get a game that's worth playing AND an array of snacks to eat at the same time. What a deal!

There are good graphics. There are bad graphics. Then there's Game Tycoon 2, whose graphics go past “bad”, “terrible”, “horrendous”, and just seem to land on “offensive” instead. This game was released in 2016 and yet the 3D graphics in the game look like they'd be more at home in an original PlayStation game, or an infomercial for a blender. They physically hurt me to look at, and because of that, the only people I reckon should play this game are people who are into kinky torture, as two minutes of this game will make you wish your eyeballs had been corkscrewed out.

By the way, while the idea of plagiarism is fresh in your heads, I'd like to highlight a bit of a naughty fib on the part of the dev team. On the Steam forums for Game Tycoon 2, a poster rightly challenges this game on its similarities to the aforementioned Game Dev Tycoon by Greenheart Games. Rather brazenly, a representative for Sunlight Games replied “Well, you should know, that Game Tycoon 1 (the first version) was released in 2003! Many years, >before< GDT was released. And now please think about your words...”. This requires some breakdown: Game Dev Tycoon was released in 2013, but its spiritual predecessor Game Dev Story was released on iOS and Android in 2010. However, the original Windows release of that game came 13 years prior in 1997, a full six years before Game Tycoon. This original release was seen in Japan only, so it's dubious to say if the original Game Tycoon plagiarised this title. Because I'm keen to preserve my own mental health, I wasn't quick to buy or play Game Tycoon myself, but watching Let's Play videos (videos where the player was in complete agony throughout) indicated that the original has only a little in common with Kairosoft's title. At all. Nor does it have very much in common with this game. In actuality, this game is heavily inspired by the original Game Dev Story, but Sunlight have been deliberately disingenuous in linking their title to a much more recent game, all while claiming they had the ideas first, which is wrong. The reason I highlight this is this: if you’re going to make a thinly veiled rip-off of good games, at least attempt to make it a good one.

It's rubbish. This game is rubbish. I found this game so nauseating that I had to psych myself into playing it more than once. I find the existence of this game so cheeky and impudent on so many levels. I wish I could be more eloquent, but this game sucks the life out of me. It's terrible. It's just terrible. Avoid this like the plague, and for god's sake, lads, hire yourself a better PR team.