Startup Company Console Edition

Genre: Management Simulation

Players: 1

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Review:

Startup Company is a Management Simulation game released on PC in 2020 and ported to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch in 2023. This game puts players in the role of a company owner launching a new website, hoping to bring it from a modest start to a massive financial success.

You may wonder how a Management Simulation about building a website would work – will you be making decisions about the layout and content? Or perhaps you’ll be focused more on creating the ideal office work environment to get the most productivity out of your staff? While technically in the most overarching sense you will be able to make some decisions about these things, what you’ll be spending most of your time in Startup Company doing is micromanaging your employees.

For every addition you want to make to your website, you must of course hire researchers to develop the ability to make these changes, but unlocking them doesn’t automatically just turn them on – you must hire developers to work on your backend, designers to work on your front-end, and project managers to work on the code to tie everything together, and with each addition you want to make, they will require different types of code to be created for them, with that code often requiring other code, and so on. So you’ll find yourself going from one employee to the next to make sure everyone is working on what you need them to be doing, and checking those requirements to see what other employees should be working on.

To be honest, I felt like this may well have been one of the most joyless experiences I’ve ever had in the Management Simulation genre. To be clear, I’m not saying this game is bad, but the sort of detail-focused, task-oriented style of managing you have to do here felt to me like a slog that provided very little of the sense of creativity I tend to look for in the genre. For someone else more interested in running a business like a well-oiled machine than they are in designing the building layout, perhaps this will be a delight, but I suspect that is a niche subsection of the genre’s fans overall.

The Nintendo Switch version of the game naturally gets gamepad controls to replace the mouse-driven controls of the PC version (sadly, no touchscreen controls), and I found these controls to be mostly decent, but at times awkward, and on a few occasions outright broken. For example, at one point, I was notified that an employee I took a great deal of time to train up had gotten a better job offer at another company, and I was given the option to match their offer or let him go. Unfortunately, the game refused to let me select the “accept” button on this popup, and as a result I was forced to dismiss the message and watch my employee leave. Extremely frustrating.

The presentation here is decent, though nothing special, using sparsely-animated 2D visuals that are detailed and colorful enough that they’re easy to parse, but aren’t particularly compelling. These are backed by a plucky soundtrack that works well enough, but is also not especially noteworthy.

In summation, I am sure there are some players out there who will find that Startup Company is exactly the sort of Management Simulation they’ve been looking for – one that doesn’t seem to care about design, placement, or anything like that, and that instead lets players micromanage their employees to constantly ensure everyone is on-task. However, that’s not what I look for in a Management Simulation, and I suspect it’s not what most other players look for either. And beyond this game just being niche, there are also some control issues here as well. As a result, while this may still be a game that will speak to a select few fans within the genre, I think most players are better off finding other games in the genre on the Nintendo Switch.

tl;dr – Startup Company is a Management Simulation game that has players managing an office launching a new website, hoping to eventually get it to become a massive success. What this mostly amounts to is a lot of micromanagement to ensure your employees are on-task and working on the projects you need them creating. This makes for a game that’s pretty niche within the genre, and it’s made even worse with awkward and at times broken controls. Some players may enjoy this game, but most fans of the genre are better off looking elsewhere.

Grade: C-

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This game has been nominated for one or more of eShopperReviews 2023 Game Awards:

Runner-Up: Most Disappointing

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