Festival Tycoon, I´ve loved tycoon games ever since I played the original Transport Tycoon back in 1994 I´ve gone out of my way to play as many tycoon games, no matter if they have tycoon in the title or not.
There have been many great games and many not-so-great games and even many extremely bad games. Festival Tycoon falls somewhere in the middle of bad and not so good but in all fairness, it was just released into early access and could be turned around before full release.
The first thing I noticed when I started up the game is that each level is just a tiny little square with some scenery on it and you have to build the festival area, so far pretty standard except for the small size. Hopefully they will release bigger and bigger maps the closer they get to full release. At the moment it feels like you are just making tiny festival dioramas. The graphics are low poly which in of itself is not bad, as there have been many exceptional games that use that aesthetic and have been very enjoyable but here it feels cheap and lazy, especially the guest and worker models. The buildings are definitely more detailed than the people even with the low poly graphics. All the guests and workers are basically just square pegs that bop around. When you start the game, you get to create your own festival company. Name it and make a logo for the company, and choose one of two game modes. Sandbox and normal mode. I chose sandbox mode but could not use my own company but get a generic company that you can´t develop, I reloaded the game and went for the normal mode since I wanted to use the company I’ve just spent 5 minutes to create. I get greeted with 3 map options: 1st a square of 48x48, 2nd a square of 64x64 and finally a square of 80x80. These maps are not randomly generated, you just have access to these 3 maps and they all feel very small but could be they are just for the early access to introduce the gameplay mechanics and the basics of the game. It feels small and restrictive.
The game plays out in 2 different phases. 1st phase is the planning phase, you plan the tent area, stages and facilities. Trying to keep everything setup nicely so the festival will run smoothly. Depending on the size of the festival you might need security and/or first aid. You´ll also need to have refreshments and food available, and activities if the festival is a long one. Find sponsors for the festival. Each sponsor has requirements and conditions which you need to meet before you can open the festival, for example a sponsor could demand that a certain band does not perform at the festival and so on. Then there are the bands as well and they also have requirements and conditions that you need to meet for a successful festival, for example they might demand a backstage RV and some will even demand the RV is only for their band and not shared with other bands and so on. You can take as long as you want with this phase and really get into the management aspect of the game here and try to make the perfect festival. Then there is the 2nd phase. The live phase, in this phase you can’t make any changes to the layout but you will have to manage your service staff. Be it the security, first-aid and janitorial staff. When this phase starts, you’ll see guests starting to arriving. The guests run around, raising tents in the tent area and then run around enjoying the festival, eating, drinking, playing, fighting and dancing. If they get rowdy you need to send security over to smooth things over.
If they get hurt, you’ll need to send the first-aid team to heal them, and so on. The guests bop around doing their stuff, with games like this they try to convey their feelings and mood regarding the surroundings and the festival in general. For me there are always rain and lighting clouds above their heads but for the life of me I can´t find what that means, everyone has these storms over their heads but still run around having fun and eating food. There is no explanation of the different icons above their heads (I assume there are more than just the rain and lightning clouds but I´ve not seen them yet).
As it stands the game is a bit barebones but it has a decent management aspect but pretty low graphics. It could be a choice to have it like this but I feel what you get right now is lazy and cheap.
In conclusion if you are crazy about festivals and management games then this might be for you though I would wait for more content to be released or even wait for the full release. For everyone else it is a skip, especially right now in early access, it might get better the more content is added, which I hope will happen. There have been way too many games in early access that do not make it out of early access. I’ll keep an eye out for more content and maybe revisit it in the future with an updated review.
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