Recent reviews by jfs

It feels frustrating and clunky, and it feels difficult to follow the action. My movement is constantly being stopped dead by having to attack or activate items or specials. Hitboxes feel odd, why are my attacks not hitting the enemy standing right next to me? Inventory management is annoying to deal with, and to some degree it feels like some items have too much overlap. Keeping your helpers alive feels difficult, especially when they keep pulling enemies further away from me, and enemies seem to target them first even running right past me.
Also, I'm bad at fighting games in general, but this one feels clunkier than it should, at least in the initial public release.

The art, animations, sounds and music are all great, but right now that can't save the gameplay from not being enjoyable for me.

Edit after playing some more: This game is absolutely designed for multiplayer first. I feel like playing it solo you miss out on the NePoLaBo abilities synergies, making a solo run severely handicapped and likely much harder.

What a little gem. It's not a long game, but it has enough content, routes and variations that you'll want to explore everything, and the small size also makes it very manageable. Absolutely worth it all.

While the content would be good, it seems this version of the game has some bad bugs with input. In some scenes it doesn't accept input at all, in other scenes it moves characters far too fast. Even then, it seems some people have different experiences with this, but I definitely have seem this game streamed where the streamer experienced the exact same bugs as me.
Basically, the input/controls are so buggy the game is borderline impossible to play.

Game Dev Tycoon must have been made to deliver a message, with gameplay coming second. For how it treats bugfixing as extremely important for game development, it certainly hasn't had sufficient bug squashing done on itself. The real problem, however, is the lack of replayability, both due to glitches and annoying UI, and also the (in the end) way simple mechanics.

The Message
"I want to tell the history of programmable game consoles and push my views on it." That must have been the main idea behind this game, because it sure spends a lot of time on trying to tell history that has absolutely no bearing on gameplay. And the same vein, your playing has no effect on the course of history. For instance, when the PlayStation (sorry, "Playsystem") is introduced, you get bombed with a long series of popup messages telling the story of the initial cooperation of Nintendo and Sony, the break and Sony then reworking and releasing it themselves. Zero effect on gameplay, but it sure gets annoying with all those irrelevant popups the second and third time through.
Then there is the moral message of the game: "Game developers must treat their players well because the cost is small and the value of goodwill immense." I don't disagree with it, but the way Game Dev Tycoon almost shoves it in your face also gets annoying after a while.

The Mechanics
When first picking up Game Dev Tycoon, the mechanics seem interesting. You will be trying out various combinations, trying to apply real-world knowledge, and often it kind of works. But as more complexity gets added, the logic starts breaking apart. You seem to be able to apply technologies to consoles it shouldn't be possible on, make nonsensical feature combinations (hey let's make a Massive Multiplayer Online game without anything resembling multiplayer or online features!) and various complexities of modern game development just seem to be completely absent.
Since the patch that added in-game stats and analytics, a lot of the discovery and learning also seems to have gone from the game. I only purchased it after this patch so I don't know about the earlier gameplay except through some limited Let's Play viewing, but it seems it may not actually have been a good thing for the game to more or less lay its mechanics bare like that.
All in all, the mechanics feel rather shallow after the initial discovery, which only reinforces my idea that the main purpose of Game Dev Tycoon is to deliver the above history lesson and message.

The Horrors
The real horror, however, is the user interface and the glitches it has. It works mostly well enough in the initial stage, when you are a lone man in your mom's garage. Things are simple, not much can go wrong. Later you get more employees to click on and such, and things start getting bad. The single biggest issue is the use of transition animations trying to appear "slick", but with the time taken for those transitions, and the apparent inefficiency of their implementation, it slows you down. When you have published your first five games, waiting for the review scores to roll in is aggravating. Same for the expo and convention attendance numbers. And the above pop-up messages telling the history of video game consoles, they take seconds to display the text letter by letter, in typewriter style. You can speed it up, but it still takes a while, and the "close" button is unclickable during that time. Just let me continue with the game, okay?`
But the glitches. The UI glitches. If you close a pop-up message and need to open the action menu for an employee right away, sometimes the click registers on something different. In the late game, when you have two more screens for different purposes, switching between those is clunky and sometimes the menu opens when you don't want it to. Then sometimes it glitches out completely, and the generating-points simulation stops completely for a good while, possibly until something else happens and the game discovers it was supposed to be doing something. And recently something odd happened, where the UI broke completely and I had to forcibly close the game.
In short, as the game progresses, the glitches increase in number. For all the focus Game Dev Tycoon wants to put on "thou shalt release bug-free games", it's far from bug-free itself.

The Good?
So is it all bad? No, as mentioned, it's fine for one or two play-throughs. But it doesn't lend itself for much replay. If you have some interest in the themes, some hours to spare, and the game is on sale, try it out. Just don't expect much from it.