Lionhead Studios goes at it again by trying to tackle a creative and unique game type. "Try" is the operative word here. Their latest game, The Movies, seeks to give players the opportunity to try their hand at being a Hollywood film mogul. Starting from the dawn of the film age, you will build your studio from the ground up, train talent, and produce the best movies possible.

You start the game with an empty lot, to be filled with production facilities, like scripting facilities, casting studios, and so on. Additionally, you have to build sets to impress your ever-changing audience. You also have to keep your actors happy by updating their looks, making sure they have good salaries, and generally catering to their needs as they rise in fame.

Every actor has their own particular personalities and weaknesses. Some are more likely to be stressed out than others, while some develop addictions to either drinking or food. In every circumstance, there is a remedy... but like everything in life, solutions take time, and time can cost money. For example, if your actor has a drinking problem, and often abandons the set to run over to the bar, you'll have to toss him into rehab. That means that character is taken out of play for a little while, but it's well worth it to prevent him from leaving the set every few seconds just to get drunk. Self-image is another very important attribute for actors, so expect to have access to a cosmetic surgery building as you get closer to the current date. Most of all, as they become more famous, you will have to cater to your actors' egos. They will demand to have the biggest trailers, the best salaries, and a sizable entourage of boot-lickers in order to make them feel important.

Taking care of your actors and running a lot makes up about 90% of the game. The Movies plays out very similarly to The Sims. You have to place down movie sets across your lot, and research new ones, in order to keep your audience interested. However, the buildings and sets are generally irregularly shaped, so placing them can be like working with a jigsaw puzzle. Although your lot may seem pretty spacious in the beginning, you'll start hitting your limitations when you start building really complex set pieces like war zones, suburban streets, and beaches. No, there's no such thing as filming on-location in this game, so the players will have to figure out way to strategically plan out their lot to accommodate their needs. Most likely, this will mean sticking to a small number of themes and tearing down sets to build new ones as needs change.

Movies fall into five categories: Comedy, Sci-fi, Action, Horror, and Romance. Unfortunately, although there is a mock-awards show, there is no category for Drama, which is odd, because those are the ones that are normally the first to be nominated for real life awards shows. For that matter, musicals are never brought into the mix either. So much for Shirley Temple. You will have your in-house script writers come up with something, then assign actors, a director, extras, and a crew to the project. As times and sets become more sophisticated, the stories themselves will become more elaborate. Or, at least they're supposed to. Alternatively, if you are stuck for cash, you have to option to sell the script, but that could mean that you'd lose out on a valuable opportunity for revenue. Money brought in from films is usually pretty substantial and guarantees and income over a period of time, even if it turns out that the movie isn't very good. The, after it is spend, it stops bringing in money and is archived... where it disappears forever. Movies are rated on a number of different criteria, including how well trained your actors are (your actors' moods during filming will also effect their performances), and how well maintained the sets are.

This all sounds pretty reasonable in the beginning, but unfortunately, there appear to be a number of criteria that are completely out of the players' hands. For example, while playing, we repeatedly failed on account that our film crew was ill-trained. However, there is no way to send your crew to film school to improve their skills. The only way they can ever get better at doing movies is by making them, but they accrue very little experience from this process. We continued to fall short on this criteria even though we retained the same film crew for thirty years. One would think they'd become A LITTLE better at film making after all that time! Similarly, the script writing can be just as frustrating. Their talent seems to be limited to the type of building they work out of and what's in highest demand at the time. Their little meters determine the speed at which they work, not the quality of their products. Even with an intermediate script house, they can only produce low-grade scripts. There is no way to do something like Project Greenlight and scour the public for new talent or an original script. Nor can you search through the open market and place bids on scripts rival studios might be putting up for purchase. Even after building up their skill and sending them back to their writing desks repeatedly, we could get an improved script from them... so we had to settle for low scores due to bad writing.

Probably the greatest fault of The Movies is that there is a great deal of micromanaging to do, but not a lot of tools to help you do it. For example, if you want to shoot an action film, you can build an action set and let your actors / directors practice in them to improve their skills in a style similar to The Sims. However, after practicing until their skill bar goes up a notch, they will leave and wander around. There is no way to order them to practice until they run out of endurance, or queue up actions. Additionally, while you can purchase work-out tools like chin-up bars and free weights, there is no (from what we have seen) fitness center where you can have a personal trainer put them through their paces. Generally, actors tend to steer clear of physical activities and head straight to the bars and restaurants where they can feed their habits. Furthermore, no activity even comes close to relaxing your staff the way vices do, so it seems like the game is set up to get anyone that doesn't keep a close eye on everyone. If that weren't enough, you actually have to arrange for your actors and directors to talk to each other so that they may build up strong relationships and work better. This is supposed to happen naturally when they work together, but not nearly enough. So, you have to watch over your actors very carefully, and babysit them throughout the entire game, all while trying to film movies and decorating your lot.

Further complicating matters are your other staff, like researchers and writers. You can't queue up a number of different scripts to be written. So, once a job is done, your writers go wandering around aimlessly. Your researchers, once they've reached the technological threshold of the era, will do the same thing. However, they will not return to their labs to perform further research when it becomes available unless you physically pick them up and drop them in.

There are a number of curious design decisions that can very easily frustrate players. For example, there are a very limited number of applicants for jobs. We mean all the jobs, including set builders and janitors. You have wait for applicants to line up at your door, then assign jobs to them. Not only doesn't this make sense, but it's very annoying. Fresh applicants are pretty sparse, so if all your sets are falling apart because there aren't enough builders to maintain them, then you have to subtract from the non-acting jobs to fill them in - like from the janitors, writers, film crew, entourage, or scientists. This is no Hollywood that we've ever heard of. This becomes extra weird if you happen to pull in substantial revenues from your films. As it were, we were ranked as the wealthiest studio among our competitors, but even with those millions of dollars at our disposal, we couldn't hire a decent sized janitor crew to fit our needs.

Furthermore, you will be judged on some silly (arguably stupid) criteria. Specifically, we're talking about the criteria where if you use a star repeatedly across a string of movies, their novelty will wear off and critics will deduct points based on seeing the same actor or actress over and over again. Not only is this weird, but it defies all logic. If an actor is attractive or acts exceptionally well, then why does it matter how many times you see them? Doesn't fame and popularity generally mean that you'd take on more projects? This is especially difficult when you're a developing studio that only wants to work with a small number of actors. It also leads to the obvious question: if you're not meant to use the same actors repeatedly... then why are you paying them high salaries, managing their images, and catering to their needs? The game doesn't even take into account the amount of time that passes. The same criticism kept popping up even after our actress hadn't made a movie in a year. Couple this with the fact that fresh talent rarely rolls through the door, and you have some real gameplay problems here.

If your studio does very well, prominent actors from other studios will come to join you. You then have the option to add their honed skills and personal problems to your collection. The oversight here is that there is no way to see what rival studios are doing. There is an awards show every year in which all the movie studios are measured against each other, but there's no telling what they did to earn the award. Or, more specifically, what they had that you didn't. There is no way to offer an prominent actor from a rival studio more money in order to woo them away. The only clue that you are given is in the form of a radio DJ, who in addition to giving you contextual clues as to what era you are in, will also drop small historical news bits. These news bits include the beginning and end of World War II, the Great Depression, the stock market crash of 1987, among many other events taken from America's history that influence what audiences want. For example, during the Great Depression, there will be a considerably high demand for Comedies. If you are able to fulfill that demand, you stand to make a great deal of money. The radio is perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of the game, as their personalities will change according to the different decades.

The game's faults take heavy tolls, but not everything is bad. It's actually very interesting to watch your actors develop and grow old. They will get fat if they are over-eaters, and they will get grey-haired as they get older. Additionally, the "star-maker" utility allows you to custom build and actor or actress to be imported directly into the game. With the custom script building studio and post-production facility, you have the capability to write your own original movie, edit it, and export it for general viewing. The storyboarding tools take some getting used to, and generally aren't fit to handle anything longer than a minute or two, but determined and creative people will no doubt make great use out of it. Especially since audio can be either imported in or recorded in post production as the video is playing. The game is supposed to synchronize your voice with the actors' lips, but we had very little success in getting that to work. The movie making tools are fairly intuitive and detailed enough for people to assemble basic skits without having to get too technical.

For all intensive purposes, this is an average game, but the technology behind The Movies is quite impressive and one can see that a great deal of effort was put into this title. But the fact of the matter is that the ridiculously limited staff, odd judging criteria, and constant micro-managing significantly weigh this game down and starts to suck the fun away. Luckily, there's a sandbox mode where you can turn off most of the annoying things, like actors' mood shifts (unfortunately, that means they can't be happy either) and decaying buildings. Disabling some of the annoying things in sandbox solves some problems, but the next issue is that it won't let you unlock much needed bonus set pieces and buildings, which is only possible in playing the regular campaign. So, while The Movies is a decent effort, we'll have to give it a thumbs down. This is definitely not a game that has you singing "Hooray for Hollywood."