A proper Majesty successor, at last! Sure it's not exactly the same game as Majesty, but it's close enough, and that tough of freshness is probably a good thing too. Ultimately, it scratches the same itch.

They need to sort out the stuttering though (UPDATE - last session I played didn't stutter at all, but I had fiddled with refresh rates - will need to see if its been patched out, or if it was my fiddling!).

Urgh. I REALLY wanted to like this game, I was prepared to give it a lot of slack, and I enjoyed about the first 2 hours, but I realised when I couldn't face loading it up again that it needed to be uninstalled.

There are four main things that killed this for me -

1. They just haven't addressed the micro-management problem that threatens all such games. Seriously, I need to manually go and find each employee from a tab, and drop them into their location where I've actually employed them to work just for them to get on and do some work when needed? Some of this doesn't just need tweaking, it needs a complete rethink from someone with a fresh look.

2. The quality system, whereby you set how a movie should be made, is shockingly unintuitive, to the point of frustration. It takes so many stages to make a movie, and to realise at the end you have no real idea why the ratings failed is painful. It wouldn't be so bad if you could learn these, but there are so many variables, its not even clear whether your choices were bad or if your employees just screwed it up. And worse still, I've read some responses from the developer which seems very much like they feel it's already perfect, and that its our problem if nobody understands it, so I have little hope it'll improve.

3. I get the joke/angle that your early movies are shockingly badly acted/produced, and that's great, but I feel like I'd have to plough through so much micro-management and grind to make a movie that looked any good, life feels too short for the joke. It's just not enough of an incentive.

4. Mad Games Tycoon 2. I know it's not even exactly the same genre, but this game does everything so well that Movies Tycoon does so badly. As a result I spent most of my time playing this game, wishing I was playing Mad Games Tycoon 2 instead. That's not good, especially when it's not even a direct competitor.

From most of the reviews, this is the best of the several The Movies wannabe games out there this year. Which is tragic.

I'll stick to Mad Games Tycoon 2.

Really couldn't get on with this game. I can see there's a lot of love gone into it, I kinda like a lot of the original design, and I can get why some people might like it, but it just hasn't been executed in a way that makes it fun for me.

The first issue is that controls and GUI are incredibly clunky, the whole thing feels like its from 20 years ago, and I found it quite unintuitive. Just opening things and selecting the right tool quickly felt like a chore, and considering how much repair you need to do for even the most innocuous of bumps, it quickly becomes painful rather than fun.

Then there's the car itself, which just doesn't feel like you're driving a car. The lack of the view locking to the car hinders rather than helps here. There's no real feedback of driving from the first person view, despite having to do everything manually, and it feels like you're sliding around everywhere on a skateboard. Seems to me that driving the car is such a fundamental part of the game, more work should have been put into making it a good driving game first.

But the killer for me, is that I found it INCREDIBLY stressful to play, even when nothing much is happening. The scenery, the lighting, the weird horror stuff going on, the music, it'd all be great for a few seconds or minutes amongst some more relaxing stuff (see Death Stranding or The Long Dark as good comparisons of games I loved) but here its pretty much the whole time you're out of the garage, right from the start of the game, and I felt like I was going to die all the time even when the threat is low.

I tried to come back to it, but I decided I just didn't want that kind of stress in my gaming life!

I knew what this was when I started playing it - a free mobile game designed to prey on addictive progression and your desire to speed up time to do so, in a cartoon Fallout wrapper. I intended to spend a few hours on it, and not fall into any traps of paying out real money. I avoided the traps, and I honestly enjoyed the far too long almost 72 hrs I spent playing in a relatively short space of real time. Then when I hit my personal targets so I knew I could go on indefinitely, I'd seen enough, and it was a relief to uninstall it. I appreciate that this game was made, and it scratched an itch, but you must know this beast for what it is - it can entertain you, and on that basis I recommend it .... but don't let it fool you into thinking that's what it wants from you. :)