Hollywood Visionary

After pitching your glorious idea for a movie to a studio which (of course) goes on to reject it, you walk out with as much pride as you can muster and decide to make your own. By that, the game means making your own studio, hiring your own staff and doing everything from the ground up.

The starting sequence is pretty interesting, where you get a chance to customize many aspects of your movie, like genre and so on. As far as I can tell, these decisions are cosmetic, but still fun. As with a regular CoG game, you get to specify your strong stats as well as customize your name and gender.

My playthrough went pretty well. I threw points into screenplay and producing, and worked to play to those strengths. Just as things seem to be running smoothly, the game does throw a couple of scary and infuriating disasters at you, including a very damaging incident at your studio, a near bankruptcy, and criminal investigation and so on. You’ll end up feeling low for some time before the movie finally crawls and splutters to the finish line. Still, it ended on a strong note, perhaps really showing the real ups and downs of the business. After feeling down about the suffering I dragged myself through to reach the premiere, the positive reviews started rolling in and I happily collected my award.

The characters aren’t very deep here. Romance doesn’t seem to be a big part of the game, and I didn’t put in a lot of effort into romancing any characters as they didn’t appeal to me much. Eventually, I romanced my assistant, which felt more like a consolation prize for missing the other ROs.

The writing and storyline is strong, and I enjoyed this game quite a bit. I wish more went into the characters, but overall, I could still give this a recommendation.