If you’ve ever imagined yourself as the next Hollywood visionary but lack the actual talent and skill required to pen a script that could make Angels weep and your wallet bulge, then The Executive – Movie Industry Tycoon might be for you. By navigating menus you’ll put together movies, grow your studio and hopefully bank plenty of cash, or you’ll be another failed movie studio pumping out straight-to-DVD drivel.
You’ll start your big screen career in a humble fashion, a single person inside a tiny office/bedroom with far too much time on your hands and the firm belief that you will create the next Marvel Cinematic Universe, except you, in your infinite wisdom, will know when to stop milking a franchise. Of course, you won’t actually stop because look at the money it’s bringing in!
Available On: PC
Reviewed On: PC
Developed By: Aniki Games
Published By: Goblinz Publishing, Maple Whispering LimitedReview key provided by the publisher.
At first, you’ll have just your company’s CEO to write scripts and film, but as time goes on and money gradually seeps into your coffers you’ll be able to recruit more people, move into a bigger space, start scaling up movie production budgets and research new options and technology.
The process of making a movie is simple enough: first, you pick a genre, a theme and an age rating. Matching these aspects properly sets up your movie for success, like pairing horror with a werewolf theme and an R rating. Some combinations are glaringly obvious, and others require a lot more guesswork to figure out, especially regarding the age ratings. You’ll also need to pick out directors and actors to work with, weighing up their metrics for box office draw, affinity for the script and how well they match the chosen genre. Oh, and how much they get paid, obviously. The game has some fun here by throwing heaps of actors and directors at you with names that seem…familiar. If you’re even a fleeting fan of movies you’ll get a kick out of seeing them, just like how you’ll get a kick of the game’s timeline roughly following that of the real world, right down to monumental movie releases that helped shape pop culture.
With those aspects out of the way, it’s on to the sliders and optional extras. How much time and money should be put into the writing, costumes, music, editing and so on? Well, that all has to be handled via sliders where you allocate how much effort needs to go into every aspect. An engaging murder mystery favours sharp writing and editing, whereas a sci-fi action flick is probably going to benefit more from an emphasis on special effects. Again, some of it is obvious, like a musical being all about the soundtrack, while other styles of movie are more nebulous.
The premium features are a more confusing idea. As your movie is slowly put together you’ll be given the opportunity to add premium features, provided you’ve researched them, such as period costumes, fight choreography, stunt work, creature designs and much more. The game vaguely hints that as you make bigger movies and grow your studio’s overall rating the audience will expect more of these costly features, and they also have some requirements on top of that to take into consideration, such as the movie needing to achieve a minimum critic rating to take effect. Outside of these few nuggets of information, though, the premium features are something of a mystery in how they truly affect a movie’s success, and even more so in terms of how to match them. A premium writing feature that focuses on funny one-liners and quips obviously suits a comedy, but you might also assume that an adventure movie could benefit from it too.
In other words, there’s a fair amount of guessing when it comes to making movies, That’s why it’s important to assign staff to analysing your films after they come out. The reports will narrow down what you need to do, including adding visual indicators to the sliders so that you have a better idea of where to focus your time. Given enough analysing, you’ll eventually have a nearly infallible template to creating certain genres.
Occasionally the game might throw a curveball at you – a lead actor causing problems, or some accident during filming. These are resolved by picking one of the options presented to you. Really, these incidents exist a way to help stave off the increasingly formulaic way in which you make films.
While tycoon-style games are not known for their graphics, I did find myself wishing that The Executive would occasionally throw some sort of special effects into the mix. Everything takes place in menus, your office serving as nothing more than an almost static backdrop. Even when filming movies, the scene doesn’t change. Even old games like The Movies showed the filming process and tried to make it more visually engaging. The Executive doesn’t bother at all, turning the art of making movies into something that happens purely in menus, sliders and spreadsheets. Of course, in a weird way, that’s a perfect analogy for the modern Hollywood machine, where films typically seem to have been designed using checkboxes rather than lovingly crafted. Still, a touch more visual flair wouldn’t have gone amiss.
Everything you do slowly generates research points that can be spent on acquiring a bigger office, opening up new departments such as marketing or increasing your options. Perhaps self-distribution might be a smart unlock, or maybe you just want more themes to play with. Don’t sleep on the ancillaries option, though, which unlocks the ability to earn money from your back catalogue of published movies. Ultimately, though, research doesn’t add too much to the game, mostly just adding a few more optional boxes to tick.
There’s an obvious lack of depth to gameplay as well, and a lot of interesting aspects about movie-making that could have been explored just aren’t included. Stuff like debuting your movies at a film festival, merchandising and licensing are all absent, just to name a few.
To put it simply, it’s a repetitive game thanks to its very nature. It’s best played in short sessions, usually while using the fast-forward button, because if you play for too long the sliders and check-boxes become rather dull.
But it’s worth considering that the simple gameplay loop is also what makes The Executive work so well. It’s an excellent game to play to take a break from bigger, more complex stuff, something you can fire up when you have 15 or 30 minutes to spare. In this sense, I really appreciate what the game is and is trying to do. It isn’t shooting to be a realistic and in-depth recreation of actually making movies. It’s more like an abstract representation of the art form.
A lack of strong feedback is probably the game’s biggest issue, leaving you wondering how a movie failed or why another succeeded. And yet, that might be by design to help keep the game interesting. You see, in Game Dev Tycoon, which The Executive is based heavily upon, once you cracked all the formulas you could pump out endless surefire hits like a machine gun firing bullets made of pure success. The Executive isn’t as reliable because sometimes things just fail for no discernible reason. Did your movie win big at the awards? Great! But it’s not going to save the next four films from bombing despite everything seemingly being right. Occasionally, it’s because you just weren’t paying attention by releasing a film in a genre the audience isn’t interested in right now (market prediction is something worth assigning staff to) or because you put it out during a very busy month. But other times it’s simply because the game decided audiences are fickle bastards. Is this annoying or does it keep the game more interesting? That’s up to you.
I do appreciate a new endless mode being added, too. During your campaign as you get closer to the end the game will display a message asking if you’d like to swap over to endless mode so you can keek going forever. If you agree, the timeline of events and movie releases based on the real world stops and is replaced by an infinite series of generated stuff to keep up the illlusion that you’re battling against other film companies.
In Conclusion…
The Executive doesn’t really expand upon the tycoon sub-genre’s formula, but it’s still an enjoyable, simple strategy game that lets you live out your fantasy of making movies without all the boring real-world work that goes into it. Now, grab the overpriced cinema popcorn, would you? I’ve got a schlocky werewolf horror script that will hopefully fix all of my money woes.
