![]() ![]() As a statement of intent, it’s a solid opening, setting out Startup Panic’s stall straight away as being a cute and charming doily draped over a clenched fist that can and will repeatedly accelerate into your face if you give it half a chance (more of this metaphor later). The Microsoft Paperclip From The 90s (or a legally distinct version thereof) shows up to give you some advice and set the tone with welcome meta-humour. Soon, you’re a bedroom coder with a Big Idea and four-thousand dollars burning a hole in your pocket. READ MORE: ‘Rainbow Six Extraction’ review: a compelling alien shooter from the bones of ‘Siege’Ī brief introductory cutscene shows you dramatically quitting your job.Startup Panic, tinyBuild’s foray into the cutesy wait-em-up biz sim genre – think Game Dev Story and you’ve largely got the gist – conveys this emotional continuum of fright to shite rather well. ![]() When things are going badly, it’s the Interesting Times curse in microcosm. When things are going well, it’s boring like any other job. Still, I was keenly aware that the title could have taken its satire much further.The experience of running a business sits somewhere on a spectrum between “harrowing” and “tedious”. There’s lip service paid to corporate espionage, but why can’t I train people to directly steal my competition’s ideas? Every time I saw a funny text pop-up or a skill with a heinous description, I chuckled to myself. Nothing about the actual gameplay really screams that this is a satire.įor example, regarding staff, it would make the most sense for this game to slowly encourage people to burn out so that I could hire better people when they quit. It looks charming enough yet extremely generic considering that it’s directly inspired by the looks of the Kairosoft titles. If you took away the dialogue and the silly descriptors, Startup Panic would be a fully-played-straight management sim like any of the ones I mentioned at the beginning of this review. You’ll deal with ghosts and hackers in your office, you’ll have to pay pirates’ ransom when they kidnap your vacationing staff members, and it all gets a bit goofy…īut my biggest issue is that it doesn’t go far enough. ![]() In the meantime, you’ll slowly gain competition in the market against others who actively develop their own features. You’ll need to balance development with the time and cash it takes to train people and keep them happy, mainly as your office and staff grow in size. If their stats aren’t high enough, or the motivation is too low, the feature will more than likely suffer for it and need to be redone (for half of the original development cost) later. The crux of the game is hiring employees to develop features for your site while also working to improve their stats and upkeeping their motivation through vacations. You start in your humble bedroom, developing a brand-new social media site that slowly gains competition in the scene as it grows. The game opens with a short cutscene of your chosen player character getting burned out while working crunch hours at an unknown software development company and deciding to strike out on their own. Startup Panic is, right out of the gate, a satire. Game Dev Story went on to heavily inspire the much more well-known Game Dev Tycoon, which is the most evident influence for the title we’re looking at right now, Startup Panic. The most notable of these was Game Dev Story, a company-management simulator that put the player in charge of a startup video game developer. ![]() If you played mobile games in the early 2010s, odds are that while swiping through the App Store, you came across several games made by a company called Kairosoft. ![]()
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