A very ambitious game that doesn't quite live up to the hype it developed; which is typical of Lionhead Studios.
The Movies, in case anybody has been living in a heavily secluded clearing in the middle of the Brazilian rainforest for the last few months, is a deep, detailed management sim where you are the owner of a movie studio. It's an ambitious project, and Lionhead haven't quite pulled it off the way they should have; everything is clear and correct, but this game just isn't as fantastic as other sims like Rollercoaster Tycoon 2. It's hard to explain, but The Movies is missing a sort of X factor, the thing that will bring you back again and again.
Everything is here like you'd expect in a management sim; actors, actresses, staff, movie makers, scriptwriting, cleaning, post-production, a makeover engine, cosmetic surgery, and all those microscopic details that make the basis of a management sim; you know, happiness, ratings, prestige, and god knows what else.
So yeah, use all these tools to make blockbuster movies and a dominant film studio. Sounds simple, but The Movies is very time-consuming and you need a lot of patience to actually achieve your goal. It isn't as addictive as it sounds either; the learning curve is very off-putting at the beginning, and although it comes complete with a decent instruction manual and a buttload of tutorials, it's still complex enough to put off casual gamers who just want to laugh at movies that make no sense. The movie maker is nowhere near as deep as it should be, it consists of just placing your actors in the provided mannequins and putting one scene after a-bloody-nother.
Sure, maybe I'm being a bit harsh on The Movies, but to me, this was a bit of a disappointment. There's no doubt it has glitzy presentation; it has great, but somewhat familiar music, and the visuals are an excellent example of CGI, but underneath it all it's all a bit bland. There's not enough here to keep people going for ages, it's nowhere near as addictive as it should be. No doubt it's an achievement, and one of the best management sims for months, but it is nowhere near the killer it should have been, because the gameplay gets tedious quickly. For me, The Movies is a bit of a disappointment. And that disappointment is something I can't describe.