Startup Company by Hovgaard Games and 2Awesome Studio SL is a pretty accurate software company building simulator. Check our Startup Company review!
Your company’s success depends on your ability to run and manage a website. You must develop and improve features while increasing hosting capacity and run marketing campaigns.
https://www.hovgaard.com/
https://www.ps4blog.net/tag/2awesome-studio/
In Startup Company from Hovgaard Games and 2Awesome Studio, you’ll be the CEO of your own software company and will have to rise from a small enterprise to a huge corporation. You can begin either in Carrer Mode, which is definitively recommended if you’re new to the experience since it also acts as a tutorial. If you’re more experienced, then you can dive into the Sandbox mode directly, allowing you to build your enterprise at your own pace.
When you begin the Career Mode, you’ll be customizing your company parameters by entering some information into the different fields. The company creation form isn’t very well ported to a PlayStation controller, and it feels like it was designed mainly for the keyboard and mouse, which was a shame and required some struggling to enter the otherwise basic data.
The main objective of this simulator is to build a website section by section with your employees, then hire a marketing team to promote it to the world and make some sales. As your website is getting popular, you’ll need more specialized developers to enhance new features and IT people to manage the server infrastructure. As a web developer myself, I can confirm that this game was pretty accurate with the roles needed for scaling your company.
I already mentioned how you have to hire more specialized workers as you progress, and many of those workers will have to build components using modules built by other developers. This added a neat efficiency balance because you’ll likely reach a point where a developer becomes idle because another one hasn’t finished building the sub-components. This also means that you’ll have to micro-manage every worker until you can hire managers that will do it for you – along with caring about their needs and their motivation. Honestly, the game felt quite overwhelming since you have so much to manage.
Speaking of managing your employees, it also means that you’ll often have to compose with limited office space offering a total of a few workspaces. As I progressed, it also meant that I needed to hire new talents, but sometimes I needed to fire employees to make space for the new talents I needed to continue or because I needed to reduce my costs.
The game is mostly objective-based, and achieving the objectives for each milestone will be your main source of income early on. Objectives might be based on your employees, building a new website component, or even renting a new office space to fit your new employees.
As for the presentation, I liked the art style of the game, and the multiple menus were well done. I did mention that the game controls felt like they could have used more work to feel more at home on the PlayStation console, but once you get used to it, it is manageable.
On the trophies side, this game offers a full list containing a Platinum trophy. The list includes 12 Bronze trophies, 11 Silver trophies, and one Gold trophy. They are unlocked for progressing through the game, succeeding with your business, and achieving ambitious milestones. Do not expect a quick trophy run because the game will take you at least 15 hours to reach its “conclusion,” but unlocking every trophy will actually require dozens of extra hours.
Startup Company is a very complete – and sometimes overwhelming- business simulator in which you’ll build your web company from the ground up into a huge business. I liked the art style and how accurate the game is, and if you’re an administrator or someone working in web development, you’ll feel at home with this one. Given how specific this game is, however, I don’t think this experience would be for every gamer out there. Startup Company is out as a Cross-Buy title, so your $12.99 purchase will allow you to download the PS4 and PS5 versions of the game at no extra cost.
Disclaimer
This Startup Company review is based on a PlayStation 5 copy provided by 2Awesome Studio SL.
