Hello,
I bough Game Dev Tycoon a week or so ago on a whim, because I liked the concept. I put about 20 hours into and enjoyed, but as I played I slowly began to feel that something was off, and I enjoyed it less and less. I realized recently what’s wrong. There are two main problems, and I think that they could be easily fixed in one small update. The first problem is the lack of information. Do different topics change what sliders should be where, or is it just the genre that influences that? The steering wheel improves gameplay, but does it count for RPGs, or just racing games? The same goes for joysticks, are they good for all consoles, or just ones that actually support them? The game never tells you, and that’s a big turnoff for me. This could be easily addressed by adding tooltips, or addressing the second problem.
The second problem is the lack of feedback. I make a game, and I use common sense while manipulating the sliders, I put together topics and genres that are historically good, but it might be a flop. That’s fine, but the problem is that the reviews give you a score, but they almost never tell you why a game was good or bad. In real life you can read a review of your game, and the reviewer might say “The art was phenomenal, but the level design was comically bad”, but in this game, they’ll tell you that it was a great combo (Which the XP screen already told me), or that my game was “Not good, not bad”. What good does that do me? Every now and again you might get one of them telling you that the focus on X did the game well, but it will still get a 5 or a 6, so that’s not terribly useful information. I feel that this could be fixed by either making slightly longer, more relevant reviews, or by giving the player some sort of data map.
Other than that I have no real complaints. Yes, the music and graphics are horrendous, but something tells me that they’re that way on purpose. The gameplay is fairly basic, but it does’t need to be all the complex, this isn’t HOI3. It’s not a bad game, but it could certainly use some improvements. For $8, I can’t really complain, but I can say I would recommend this game to a lot more people if these issues were fixed, and I’m sure others would recommend it to more people as well.
