REVIEW: ‘Mad Games Tycoon’ Just Needs a Better Tutorial (PC)

Mad Games Tycoon is a simulation game developed by Toplitz Productions. The objective is simple: to develop and create your own gaming studio starting from your garage. The game aims to simulate the troubles, triumphs, and long process of creating video games and building them into successful companies, publishers, and more.

Mad Games Tycoon starts with the player starting their very own gaming company. The player gets to choose a skill and feature along with what country they’re from, all of which matter in the game. I am not sure exactly what these things do as they are not explained in the tutorial or the game itself, which I will get more into later. After you make your character, you need to set up your garage to be able to develop your gaming studio. There are various rooms that do various things, such as music and sound room, graphics, PR, and, of course, development.

Everything you do in your gaming studio requires a room, so space places a vital part in setting up your studio. Mad Games Tycoon allows you to do various tasks outside of just developing games to help your newly formed gaming studio. You can develop your own game engines and take contracts from other publishers to complete their games and projects, and if you want, you can eventually become your own publisher and produce your own games without hiring one. Eventually, if you do make it far enough, you can develop your own console. There is definitely plenty to do when comes to running your company and this really makes for replayability.

One of the main components of any good sim is micromanaging and there is plenty of micromanaging in Mad Games Tycoon. As I mentioned before, space is a huge additional variable that is added to the game. Being able to fit all the necessary rooms in your studio is vital to success and can lead to interesting interior design. Time is another important variable. As new consoles and engines are developed, you must adapt to new hardware, and this means having to choose whether to go back and add those finishing touches or bypass those just to make sure to get your game out in a timely manner. Multiple facets of game development need constant attention at all times. Sometimes, one part may be complete, and you end up doing nothing while you are waiting for another part to finish; this means lots of pausing and rearranging of staff, then playing again.

Mad Games Tycoon is a fun simulator and has lots of potential to be a really good sim, however, there are some glaring flaws that really bring it down. The main one is that there are literally no instructions. There is no control layout on how to navigate your studio, really, there are no explanations to anything that is in the game. As an avid sim player, I was able to get by for the most part due to knowing the basic mechanics of how sims work, but if you don’t play many sims I can see this game being really frustrating. I mentioned the skill and featured game in making a character, but I only mentioned them and didn’t dive deep because I could never really figure out what exactly those meant, along with dozens of other parts of the game.

Each staff member has five categories of skills: Game Design, Music and Sound, Programming, Graphics, and Office Work. Outside of the music and graphics room, I am not sure which skill is best for each of the possible rooms. It wasn’t until the 4th play-through that I even realized country selection helped with sales of certain game types. They have an entire production room in which gives you the ability to publish your own games and/or take contracts to publish other people’s games and I truly was never able to figure out exactly how it worked. They do have a tutorial, however, it’s minimalist and doesn’t do a good job of explaining things. Sadly, there are just too many components and variables in Mad Games Tycoon for there not to be any sort of manual or in-depth tutorial. Each room requires a minimum size and varies based on the rooms, and the only way you learn those is by trial and error.

Overall, Mad Games Tycoon is a decent simulation game with plenty of potential, but with the lack of any sort of descriptions explaining the basic features of the game, it is hard to recommend to any casual player. The game requires lots of trial and error or searching the internet for possible guides.

Mad Games Tycoon is currently available on PC through Steam.