The economic simulation “Big Ambitions” is a positive, big surprise for many in spring 2023 on Steam. People love the game, praising the “realistic simulation” of the rise from supermarket cashier to millionaire in reviews. Our author Schuhmann says: I would have to be paid a lot of money to play it.
What kind of game is this?
Big Ambitions Cinematic Trailer
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Celebrating Steam Reviews: “Sims meets GTA meets Retail Tycoon”
Why are people celebrating the game? On Steam, Big Ambitions has an impressive 95% positive reviews. The players are excited:
Why am I looking forward to the game? After reading the reviews I was really looking forward to the game. For almost 30 years and the first push, I’m into economic simulations:
I mean, I really like economic simulations.
Instead of clicking through menus, you really have to walk in Big Ambitions
This is the difference with Big Ambitions: Most simulations are abstract, you direct the fortunes of your employees or your world as a godlike being. In Big Ambitions, however, you really play the character, the budding business magnate, and instead of clicking on a menu, you actually have to walk from A to B. As in a survival game, it is important to ensure that you have eaten and slept enough.
The game does something known in the MMORPG field as “backtracking” for the first 50 minutes: you have to go down the same paths over and over again.
In “Big Ambitions” you start with a kind of tutorial and set up your apartment like in “The Sims”. But where The Sims allows me to buy everything from one menu, Big Ambitions seriously expects me to walk down the street and buy groceries from a store.
As soon as I’m traipsed back to my apartment, the game sends me back to the shop – I’m supposed to do my first shift there “as a salesman”.
Where it was “ultra-realistic” before, now comes the hard break: The shift looks like I click on my workplace and then a timer counts down 8 hours while nothing else happens. So exactly at the point where realism would be appropriate and where you could introduce a new gameplay element, the simulation becomes totally abstract.
I watch a timer run down. Exciting.
If you think now that the game will really start after that, the game will send you back home to sleep and the next morning again in the direction of the supermarket just down the street to buy material for your first shop there. But you don’t do that on foot anymore, you have to torment yourself in a car through the sluggish traffic of New York and look for a parking space and park correctly – otherwise a parking ticket will burden the small budget.
I don’t make any decisions, I just always walk the same route from A to B
This is my first impression: At that point, after about 20 minutes, I haven’t made an exciting decision yet, but I’ve already walked the same route from my apartment to the supermarket or other shop 4 times. The last time to buy receipts and a cash register than lug packages into my car, then chug those business paraphernalia into my shop and set them up there.
And then it goes on the same way: The game sends me to some library where I have to complete a “management course” in order to employ the first employees.
So I click on the study place and the timer starts again. However, because my character hasn’t eaten beforehand or is still tired, I manage to cram through the course, but then I faint and am transported to the hospital, where the game seriously expects me to walk all the way to my run back house.
So with all love and advance laurels. At this point I asked Steam for my 23 € back.
Big Ambitions is like setting up a cone instead of buying players
This is my conclusion: If kick-off 1 had been like “Big Ambitions” 30 years ago, I wouldn’t have put together a squad there or expanded my stadium, but I would have set up a cone for two hours in training and then massaged Thomas Müller’s left and then right calf and was then allowed to drive home from the training ground through the center of Munich and would only have stopped to buy me some frozen groceries so I wouldn’t faint on the way to bed.
You might find that totally realistic as a lifelike simulation, in real life you keep running the same distances all the time, but my love for simulations just doesn’t go that far.
I can explain the 95% positive reviews by saying that Big Ambitions actually appeals to a very specific target group (probably the same nerds who also drive buses for 3 hours in Bus Simulator) – and everyone else keeps their hands off it from the start.
Maybe I’m doing the game an injustice and it will be fantastic and open after the tutorial, but you have to have a certain fondness for backtracking and a high tolerance for frustration to get through the tutorial on your own.
As I said … omnibus nerds:
My new steering wheel for €250 was my most important gaming purchase