Overcrowded: Tycoon

This game has a lot going for it. The pace is nice. The main park feels pretty good. Lots of ways to optimize park flow and income by placing rides and mascots strategically around and then using food and redirection with other objects. Where things start going downhill is the level of monetization and heavy lean on ads to further gameplay. Without the ad content, this game slows to a crawl. There are also ride spaces locked behind a paywall and that’s just no good. You have these holes in your park that you can’t do anything about unless you spend money. Additionally, the 2-day events look like they have a live leaderboard, but comparing my game on my phone to another game on another phone the leaderboards don’t match. So either they’re lumping different players together or the leaderboard is just arbitrary computer generated players with a slow, but steady increasing score. There’s no way I’m the only person getting as many points as I got. Takes the competitive fun out of that mode. And the fact that after the event completion it just starts over again is not helping perpetuate the grind of that event. Also, the 2-day park and the main park don’t earn income correctly when the app backgrounds. It’ll just resume the game and your income hasn’t changed (main park will sometimes work correctly). You need to force-quit the app for it to register you’ve been gone.

This game is amazing, and I mean that in the “Not annoying advertisements popping way.” Mobile developers if you are reading this, take notes on this game’s execution of bringing in advertisement income. In the manner that it is presented, I actually don’t mind and enjoy watching ads. They aren’t forced down my screen, or pop up every 15 seconds, but is purely a choice! And more often times than not I choose it because I want the reward. That being said, I’m not annoyed 2-3 clicks in to playing and it actually keeps me coming back for more. Longevity should be the goal of your player base, not how many players you target with ads in the first few seconds. I’m sure a lot of others feel the same way. What a relief it is to play a game for once because it’s fun and not a hassle. The gaming industry is being destroyed by such greedy concepts and I barely keep mobile games on my phone anymore because of it. But this has earned its stay for over a good few days, and that’s actually a record in my book. Good job devs and keep up the good work and updates, you have a fan here, simply out of the good execution of your product.

I really enjoy this design of a rather ‘simple’ tycoon game and do not have much to critique of this team’s execution of the project. As for many, I honestly would like to see this game grow and develop more as it definitely does have a high playability. All that being said, I only have one criticism to make: AI Pathfinding AI pathfinding within this game is mediocre at best, it certainly suffices, but is merely satisfactory to run the game. Often, I find myself having to arrange shops and services differently just because crowds usually get stuck in spaces narrower than 2 grids - even fans does not prevent backups, and instead just causes a loss of customers and income. Other times I find visitors on the edges of the maps randomly, and while searching for an explanation I became more confused when I saw visitors slowly accelerated to random places of paths with No Service Fans in sight. Rarely, when a visitor is hungry (etc.) they will ignore food stalls that are within their reach, never replenishing their fullness. When visitors become excited, such as seeing a food stall, they often run into other objects causing them to get stuck again. Overall, I still really enjoy the game and still find it worthy of five stars mostly due to the confidence I have that these mentioned issues will be fixed in the near future.