Recent reviews by amul

A fun, decently researched concept, this is one of those games that suffers greatly from the existence of an online community. The use of guides, cheat sheets, and lookup tables readily available via Steam remove the key elements of Game Dev Tycoon that are actually generating The Fun in this game.

The Fun here comes from seeing what choices you make, and what habits you prefer. I realized pretty early on, for example, that having never played Casual Games, I'm not terribly interested in designing them in GDT. I tend to stick with Action, Adventure and RPG style games, and so the data that I build up in-game is focused on my own prefences. That's what keeps this game interesting. Once you start resorting to table look-ups to maximize your choices, the game disappears and becomes a tedious exploration of a bunch of menus.

As far as the game itself goes, it suffers under a horrifically bad user interface which utterly fails to take advantage of all the screen real estate that it wastes. I'd like to see better use of graph data and historical tracking options -- though the game claims to be a "business simulation," it's very hard to recall even basic business data without exiting the decision-menu and opening up a different menu. I also sort of wish the history of my company was more visible in my office space -- maybe posters of previous games I've made, or boxes of the current games I'm shipping. As it is, the game setting is terribly static.

Excellent design and user interface, clean gameplay and an excellent genre piece. XCOM's turn based tactical play style is a refreshing change from all the clamour over Real Time experience. I wish I could see an entire genre of games like this: turn based, tactical combat, with a storyline that develops over missions and technology-unlocks.