Since I became a player, I had the opportunity to practice many professions, sitting comfortably in my seat. Manager of amusement parks, zoos, a JV studio, a TV channel, a few cities or even a drug cartel, the exercises were as exciting as they were time consuming. However, I always take as much pleasure in discovering new titles of the genre, and this time, I was asked to manage music festivals. Of course, I jumped at the chance, hoping to create a festival like we've never seen.
The starting ground is this. Knowing that we have to deal with the existing decor, we are quickly limited...
Like many Early Access, it will take some basic English to appreciate Festival tycoon, otherwise, you risk hitting a wall very quickly. Several languages are already planned, but there does not seem to be any question of a French localization for the moment. If you have a decent level of English, you should pass the (long) tutorial without too much trouble to get to the heart of the matter.
Small disappointment, in its standard mode, we cannot from the outset build greater than this world has known, because our festival has a reputation score which is zero at the start. We will therefore have to deal with groups starting out or accepting to play in our festival under certain conditions (special dressing rooms or a small caravan to take a breather). The first lots are also quite limited in size. At most, we can fit 2 scenes, a camping area and some mandatory buildings (emergency tent, a waste compartment, the ticket office, toilets or even something to eat and withdraw money). It is also necessary to take care to place the buildings correctly and to put barriers in strategic places to avoid any crowd movement. All in all, a nice mess!
The opening of the festival is close, we set the price of sales and presales!
Once we have everything in place, we will have to move on to all the organizational and financial part. Define the sponsors, meet their requirements (booking 4 EDM music groups is one example among others) and install the various sponsors here and there in the festival so that each visitor can see who the sponsors are. For the groups, we have a system similar to that of the sponsors, we can sort by category and reputation, then place the different slots in the calendar of the festival which can last one day or several days ... Follows the sale of tickets . You can pre-sell standard and VIP tickets and increase the prices by reducing the number of places available... Nothing very original for festival-goers accustomed to this kind of custom, but we appreciate the attention to detail. Once the festival is ready, we can start it, and a "Live" part starts: we will then have to check that we have staffed enough and that we can manage the many onlookers who are lost, injured or simply drunk.
For an Early Access title, Festival tycoon is already very complete, and it is frankly appreciable. However, all is not perfect in the kingdom of feasts. Do not expect to ignore the tutorial for example, otherwise you will certainly be lost, the fault of an extremely rich interface where you will grope for quite a while before it becomes intuitive. Similarly, we can blame the fairly limited customization options. Do not expect to recreate the atmosphere of certain festivals such as Hellfest or Tomorrow Land. Here, we just put buildings and a few extremely generic decorative elements, and we have to deal with them.
We have a huge number of filters to get information about the festival
Nevertheless, the beginnings of Festival tycoon are promising, and the recently published roadmap gives hope that this will lead to an extremely rich and exciting management game. As it stands, we can have fun for a few hours if we manage to ignore the austere UI of the title. To see in a few months how all this evolves! Let's also cross our fingers so that a French localization does not take too long, so that we can use the search tool without hassle.
Available in early access since September 27, on PC only.
