App Review: Game Dev Story [Video]

There’s something strange about tycoon style games that never makes sense to me. On paper these games are just about the most boring thing imaginable: there’s no action, the goals are arbitrary and a some of them give you little more interaction than you’d find in Progress Quest. But for whatever reason tycoon games are incredible: Theme Park, Sim Tower, Transport Tycoon; all incredible games to name but a few. Game Dev Story might not be as deep as those games mentioned, but it isn’t any less addicting.

Just like in real life: Game ctirics are jerks

In Game Dev Story you have twenty game years  to build up a video game development company from a small two person business into a six person studio, you’ll attend trade shows, hire staff, put out advertising and of course, make games. The development process is totally hands off, after picking the basics such as platform, genre and type it’s up to your staff to build the game with you stepping in at a couple of points during development to choose who’ll work on graphics or sound or if you’ll outsource. As the game is being developed you’ll see icons flash up above the heads of staff as they work on the various parts of the game, they’ll sometimes get up and talk with other colleagues or come up and talk to you about whether they can spend research points to boost various statistics of the game otherwise you can use these research points to level up your staff in one of several job types. There’s a lot of other little events that happen throughout, some are good, such as a magazine writing a good article about your game, others are bad, such as another developer beating you to market with a game of the same type. There’s a lot of depth to what can happen and this helps drive Game Dev Story’s addictive quality as you always want to try to complete just one more game before you set your phone down.

I'd be that happy at work too if I didn't wear pants

One of the big issues with most Tycoon games is the information overload, menus options are everywhere and it’s impossible to find anything that you’re looking for without spending a lot of time getting used to the interface. This is one of Game Dev Story’s strong points, everything is super easy to find and navigate through and your really never more than a couple of taps away from getting what you need. Despite the ease of the interface it has the same issue as the iPhone version of only using about half the screen, there’s also no use made of the Android’s hardware buttons to bring up and navigate the onscreen menus so you’ll be using the menu and back buttons that are drawn on the screen, this was expected on the iPhone, but on Android it feels more than a little lazy. It’s not a perfect port of the iPhone version either, the game often slows down (which can be resolved by quickly saving) and when displaying some items such as staff wages the number formatting doesn’t format with a decimal, making things look ten times more expensive than they are (I can’t confirm that the iPhone version doesn’t do this). These are both minor niggles and you’ll even become oblivious to the strange square screen size after you’ve been staring at the game for a while, enjoying the pixel art graphics and retro sounds.

There's plenty of subtle and no so subtle gaming refrences

The magic of Game Dev Story really can’t be captured in words, it doesn’t try to mimic every aspect of game development and simple things such as staff quitting or developing multiple titles at once aren’t included, nor doesn’t try for much realism, as made evident by my best selling Mini-Skirt trivia game that sold millions in the first week. The magic does come from it’s simple and addictive gameplay mixed with some great tongue in cheek humor, you’ll find yourself sat playing the game for hours wondering where the evening went and when you’ve completed it you can jump right back in and carry information across to a new game and throw countless more hours into the game. Game Dev Story isn’t a game that should be purchased lightly, please use caution!

When you’re ready, head over to the Android Market and download this game by clicking or scanning the QR Code below.

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