The short of it:
I don't regret my purchase, but I stopped having fun pretty quickly and doubt I'll be picking this up again any time soon. I'd rather reinstall The Movies.

The long of it:
As a big fan of The Movies I wanted to like this game, but five hours in I'm only at 1923 and already have 200m in the bank, a 5 star studio, numerous 4 and 5 stars actors, directors and producers. I've won every award since 1920 except the best stunt film since I can't put stunts in my films. I own 100% of the shares in the five other studios (though there's no dividend/return making this a waste of money). The balancing and pacing is way off here. There is no difficulty curve where you have to break into the industry and fight past other established studios, you're just the best straight out of the gate.

I think the greatest sin here is the lack of character. The game is a pale reflection of The Movies and I will unapologetically compare this game to it given the obvious similarities.

There is no quirky satirical radio host to keep you company. No soundbites of any form placing you in the era. You form no connection to your stars, they're all faceless drones who'll perform whatever script you give them. A large part of The Movies was balancing training up your stars in different genres, keeping them fit and stylish, keeping their stress down without turning them into alcoholics. There's none of that here. At most you have to make sure there's enough seats in the canteen, and even then I still get half a dozen notifications saying so-and-so couldn't eat today because they were blocked which I assume means their pathfinding failed?

There's none of the funny little interactions that gave The Movies life. They have more in common with a colony of ants. They don't follow footpaths, or sit on benches, drop litter or peek into windows, all they do is talk to each other.

I appreciate that there have been attempts to iterate on the formula. Most obviously, building is more free-form. It feels like it was lifted from a game like Evil Genius or The Sims, and for some might be an improvement but it wouldn't have been my first thing to change. The lot also feels a lot smaller, even after expanding. The price to expand from starter-lot to full size was basically pennies, priced in the probably less than 10k dollars. Ultimately, this free-build loses a lot of the character and style. All the (non-film set) buildings end up looking like you made them in The Sims and forgot to put a roof on.

I actually love the ability to reshoot a scene to try and get a better take! The Movies didn't have this level of detail to the filming process and this feature is one of the few good additions to the formula. Sadly it's presented within a system where the decision to delay release by a day/month has such little weight it's a shame. You're not scrambling for cash so the wait means nothing.

The schedule system is a novel twist, but is a symptom of this game structuring each month as a day which in turn creates this uncomfortable stop-start gameplay loop flow where half the time you're waiting for your studio staff to come back and flicking between full-speed and paused. I think it's an unnecessary level of realism.

Stars having rented accommodation is also a novel addition to the formula, but one which feels unpolished/tacked-on. In The Movies you had to give your stars trailers which had differing levels of prestige. Here you have 5 different home types of varying quantities which you rent for your stars. The principle works. The interface is lacking. You can't tell who is who from the portrait that pops up when hovering over each house on the map, meaning you need to switch between the management UI to find who is grumpy about their house being too low-level then clicking through each house to find them, then cancel their lease, find a free house in the correct housing level area, assign them to that house and then rent it. Did you ever read how website navigation used to be that you shouldn't take more than three clicks to reach where you want to go? That kind of User Experience (UX) applies to most things with button driven UI, and is very noticeable here. Most of the rest of the UI is slick and not deeply nested, but here it feels like there are unnecessary steps. And it's only exacerbated by the fact I can't tell who is who!

The slow-poly art style may be a result of the limited budget but is a massive detractor for me. On the character front, moreso than the props. I'm usually someone who remembers faces more than names, but these stars have such generic features and similar faces that you'll need to get good at remembering names to have any luck at telling them apart. Of course, you don't need to tell them apart most of the time. Throw any of them at a film and it'll probably do just fine. Their important traits/qualities are shown on their thumbnail in the menus anyway.

Reducing skills down to a single trait per role (Actors need charisma, directors and producers need logic) removes any need to care about who fits best where. To compare this to The Movies, there were six different genres and an actor or director would have differing levels of proficiency in each, and could be increased by practising on a relevant set or the little amount that was gained each time they were in a film of that type. Coupled to this was an actors age and appearance which contributed to their fit for the role. There's none of that here. You can't increase an actors skill through practice. There is supposedly a system for teaching which unlocks later, but I this feels like a poor choice.

Gone are actors' genre specific proficiencies. In fact, you only start the game with two genres and have to research new ones. There seems to be no sign of audience preference or market saturation. They appear to have borrowed a trick or two from Game Dev Tycoon in that you have to trail-and-error refine your script's balance of traits like Lore, Dialogue, Intimacy, Gore, among others. Given you can churn out 2 or more films a month once you get going and there's a handy red/green system for telling you how past films fared you should be able to work out what the best levels are pretty quickly through the process of elimination and trail-and-error.

I do quite like the inclusion of Themes as a method of adding complexity, and this could have been quite interesting if it mattered more what your sets were styled as, but there seems to be no negative impact for using mismatched sets. These too are locked behind research (which makes a little more logical sense than needing to "research the action genre").

The absence of pre-made/curated sets is also felt deeply. The Movies had a wide variety of interesting and thematically different sets, which in turn had dozens of different scenes which could be played on those. There's none of that here, just set dressing different sized squares (small, medium, large) in low-poly furniture of varying themes. Maybe there's more variety hiding in the later decades, but I value my time too much to slog through and see.

I can't comment on the "editor" side of things here, using the scene editor to make little films. The actual editor looked pretty well featured from the tutorial.

But I play these kind of games as Tycoon/Management sims and in that vein all the mechanics that made The Movies good are missing. Skilling up stars and script writers, making sure they don't run off set and stall the filming process, sending them to rehab since you turned them into an alcoholic through stress and building relationships with other stars so they had better on-screen chemistry. There feels like there is very little you can do of consequence here. Not once did I see a star storming off in a huff because I didn't manage their needs correctly. I never felt like I should be paying attention to what was happening on a set.

I can't recommend this.

I have been thinking long and hard about if I am going to recommend this game. The game is very much in early access. The devs have worked really hard to get it to where it is today. They are passionate about their project, and they are very vocal with their community on Steam and Discord. So I do not want to do anything to dissuade that.

However, this game is not ready to be released. They say everything we are saying is missing is coming soon. But I am not reviewing this soon, I am reviewing this today, the day after release.

On day 1, The Movies had more animations to choose from for movies. It had better video making. It did a lot of things better. Because it released before a lot of us had good connection with the internet and wouldn't be able to receive patches. So it had to work out the gate. This game is not The Movies, but it is clear where they get some inspiration. Of all the similar games to come out in recent years, or the ones we know of in development, this one is the closest.

So we are missing animations. We are missing our toons doing stuff with each other. Romance movies with no kissing or hugging? Murder mystery movies with no dead bodies, or poses like pondering, or examining the body? If you use a different set other than pirate theme, you are dinged in the final score. But the pirate is clearly the captain's quarters. I don't want an entire movie in my bedroom. The options of how to fill all of the sets are very lacking as well. Mythology has no pieces. Some sets have like 5. Some have 15-20.

Once you learn the mechanics, the game is very easy, even on the hardest mode. You should be a millionaire by 1924. Long before 1930 I was making a billion each movie. In my game, it is currently 1944, and I have over 600 billion in the bank. Instead of kicking out 5+ movies every year, I started focusing only on blockbusters and knock out 1 or 2 with very high scores. I don't make as much money doing this, but do I really need more?

All in all, today, June 7, 2024, No, I cannot recommend this game. I will change my review if they fulfill their promises of adding more to the game. If it was in early access, I would say buy it and hope for the best. But it is not.

Edit to add: I have gone from the 20's to the 40's. I was tired of it by the 30's. I don't go in to change scenes. I don't care about the detail, because the details just are not there. I am going to try to push my way through, but honestly, at this point, it will be hard.

Honestly, it's really, really lacking. The foundation is decent but it's super underbaked; it needed another 6-8 months in the oven minimum before it saw the light of day. All this did was show me how well The Movies holds up even compared to this.

I won't refund it because I'm curious to see if it goes anywhere, but as is, it's not worth the money and the dev needs to add a TON more before I can call it complete.