Rock Tour Tycoon is an okay concept, but falls short as being broken, repetitive, and annoying.
The game is a little under three years old now, but looks like it was made in the early 2000's. Let's say, don't judge it by it's cover. The cover of this game makes the graphics look better than what they really were. The game is cartoon-styled, which is okay, but what they made out of a cartoon-oriented style looks like junk. The art, for almost everything in the game, is awful. People, icons, stars, even the text looks ugly, boring, and rushed.
The game features a small radio player to listen to while you play the game. It's filled with some ten or so awful rock songs. I wouldn't call them "indie," but very amateur, stock, "business-rock" type of music. Even the songs you can hear your band play, "power songs" sound this way.
The gameplay takes a very interesting idea, have a group of people in a band with limited skill, money, and talent, and try to manage and nurture them to become skilled in their instruments, lyrical masterminds, and rich, as well as having the most expensive, coolest instruments, sound systems, and props for your gigs. However, the way they pulled it off is rather poorly done. Skills take a long time to develop, and they, your band members, get cranky when they start practicing too long. Everything is slow, ridiculously slow. Writing a song is even worse because it just happens randomly. You assign your members to start writing new songs, and out of the blue comes a song at any random moment. This can be in a matter of five minutes, to three hours. The game just acts on its own! Also, the song names your lyricist comes up with just suck. They're such things as: "Zombie Buffet," "Shin Kicker," "Berkshire County," and "What's in My Cup?" But on my old computer, it was very easy to access the .txt file of song names in the Program Files folder and change them. However, I would not recommend going through any effort to do so, because, in all honesty, it doesn't really matter. By the time you have written, rehearsed, and recorded eight or more songs, you can release an album. You can title the album anything you want, but not the song names. Once you release an album, your band will start making money by itself. Booking gigs is easy, but you have all these options for advertising your gig, which has never come in handy once for me playing a regular gig, only when you play a "special" gig. Once your band starts gaining popularity, the map starts to zoom out. I believe, however, it zooms out before all these venues start offering you anything, leaving where you were locally before cramped full of "gig" icons, which are silver stars, and everywhere else blank.
The overall mechanics of this game are broken. No matter how hard you try, it will not save. It just won't. Only once have I ever been lucky enough to have this thing actually save for me. I've never experienced a crash during this game, though.
Overall, I would not recommend this game to anyone. It's boring, stupid, and uninteresting overall. I wish the makers of this game had done with more with such a unique concept, but they ended up just making a catastrophe. If you are still interested in buying this game, do NOT buy it from GameStop. Buy it from a store like FiveBelow, or some other cheap dollar store-like place. I got mine for $5 at FiveBelow, and I felt ripped off for that. Do NOT waste $20 at GameStop for this, I guarantee you, it is CERTAINLY NOT worth $20!