There have been attempts at making movie tycoon games before this, most famously with The Movies, but rarely has there been one with such a great attention to detail and a staggering amount of control. Enter Hollywood Animal, a project that I hope will be seen among the great independent games of the modern day. Featuring incredible artwork, an in-depth management system of actors, producers, directors, and outside forces alike, and a great amount of player control, it feels like a tycoon game beyond what has come before.

The most staggering aspect comes down to just how clean and navigable the UI is. Not only is it gorgeous, but all features are laid out in an easy to understand way, so even with the amount of things you have to control, you never feel as if you're overwhelmed or missing important features due to a lack of explanation.

I've been following this game since it was announced, and I hope the early access goes well. I will tell any strategy enthusiast that I know about this one and hope they jump on. Please, if you even remotely like these kinds of games, add this to your library. You will not regret it.

Released a banger. The lead actor died shortly before the premiere. His family demanded a percentage of the gross. I said no. They sued and won. Then they died from the heroin they bought with the money. 10/10

I like this game a lot, but the tutorial sets you up for failure. Please add a "sandbox" start or option to skip the tutorial. It makes the game feel like a demo when I don't even have the freedom to start my studio how I want to.

Otherwise, this is the most granular and interesting simulation of the movie industry that I've ever played, and I'm extremely excited for the future of this game.

But please, PLEASE: LET US SKIP THE TUTORIAL!! I can't recommend this game to my friends when it feels impossible to get to 1931 without going bankrupt. I will change my review the moment we can skip the tutorial.

Another gripe: the contract renewal "mini-game" is interesting, but having to do it 20 times for every employee/actor every 3 years is extremely annoying. Either streamline this process or allow us to automate it somehow.

**Edit: some tips for new players who want to find success after the tutorial:
1. Make sure your first Distribution Dept upgrade is Marketing and Outreach. Or else you won't be able to advertise your movie once your 3 free campaigns run out.
2. Start slow. Don't blow a bunch of money on high-quality buildings and staff. You will need the money.
3. Don't be afraid to churn out cheap, low-quality slop films at first. Use them to finance upgrades that increase film quality. Then you can invest in more expensive actors/writers to make some real blockbusters.

You can't start over without playing through the tutorial again, which locks you into certain choices and feels like a slog. So try to make the best of your first start!

TLDR: The game is very poorly balanced currently and just a slog to play in its current state. Don't buy it until they fix the problems.

The core of the game has a lot of potential but it's infuriating to play in it's current state. For starters, every time you start a new game you HAVE to go through an arduous intro and tutorial which takes at least 10 minutes to fully complete. So every new game starts off as a slog just to get to the actual gameplay.

And you WILL have to start new games often because right now the balancing and difficulty is way off. Without going too far into spoilers, it's basically impossible to not lose millions of dollars every year without super min-maxing the game which is an altogether unpleasant experience. You're railroaded into churning out fast, ultra-low budget films that offer no room for creativity and sandbox experimentation since genre and story elements affect the cost of your film.

You'll also find that your employees will constantly be unhappy because the only way to increase their happiness is to research and buy ever increasingly expensive gifts that you can only give to them once in a while. And this will further affect your film quality and how much money you can make.

On top of that, researching new technologies and skills will take literal years in-game and if you don't research the proper stuff then you're basically guaranteed to lose. For example, if you miss that you need to research the ability to repair (a problem I faced in my first playthrough), then you'll find that eventually all your buildings are shut down and now you have to wait 500 days in-game to research it by which time you've gone bankrupt. Similarly, if you don't finish researching advertising by the time the tutorial section is finished then your films won't be able to be marketed until you do finish it. Despite having a large skill web that seems to offer experimentation, there's really only one viable research path if you want to survive more than three years.

Obviously this game is still very early access to there's hope that all of this will be fixed soon, but in its current state I would avoid buying it. The game feels more like a survival puzzle game rather than a simulation sandbox.

(Edited after roughly 3 hours of play). Enjoying it so far. The game is similar to an older title called Hollywood Mogul. The UI is generally a pleasure to use (though the text is a bit small), and the overall dark tone and style is entertaining.


A lot! There are many ways to interweave different aspects of this game. You choose filming directions; you have to deal with relationships with actors/directors/producers; you need to make decisions on a regular basis based on random happenings, some of which are also affected by the propensities of people you have working for you

For example, if you have an actor who is an alcoholic: expect consequences. But does their popularity outweigh the need to constantly clear up their image?


Fewer than positives, by a lot. The text is a bit small, yes. I also wish there were a kind of encyclopedia to list out all the possible directions in the game -- as it stands, you do not get information about things which are unresearched.

The main negative so far: YOU CANNOT DISABLE THE TUTORIAL, and that is shockingly annoying. Hopefully the devs will change that, though it was already a complaint with the demo months ago. (Devs have responded in discussion that tutorial skipping is coming)

Not really. As above, it is much closer to Hollywood Mogul. But, it does feel a bit more involved than that title. There is some creative freedom in terms of projects, if you use your imagination a bit. The main focus of this game is management, and that is fine by me.

Works great out of the box for me without having to change any Proton defaults.

Very enjoyable.

TLDR: Good ideas hampered by poor execution (tons of QOL issues and bugs). Wait until the game has been improved and fixed before buying.

To preface my review, I was a fan of their other games, This is the Police , and to a lesser extent This is the Police 2, and to an even lesser extent Rebel Cops. Hollywood Animal was one of my highly anticipated games for 2025. I chose not to play the demo when it was out to wait for a more "polished" version of the game and lastly, this is my first ever Steam review. This game has a lot of promise and good ideas. The execution though, less so. There are a lot of issues that make me genuinely wonder how much play testing did they do, bugs aplenty. I acknowledge that this is early access but there are glaring issues that should have been addressed before launching into early access.

First off, some glaring issues that the devs have already announced they'll be working on: 1. you're unable to skip the tutorial (which will take over an hour to get through), 2. unable to skip the many repeated cutscenes (they are beautiful don't get me wrong, it's just I can only see them so many times before it's just a hassle), and 3. when your department manager dies or leaves you lose all upgrade progress (which if you've played the game, upgrade progress takes a long time so this is a major setback). The Devs are currently working on these issues and I do appreciate that but it begs the question, how did these things even slip by QA? Anyone that has either failed one game save or played the game for a few hours will quickly run into at least one of these issues.

Speaking of the tutorial, the tutorial has you choosing between 3 movies that were left for you to complete. I've only done two of these (the romance genre option and the detective option). Upon completion of the romance movie and getting your reviews, the reviews clearly are not about a romance movie. Again, i'm surprised this slipped by as there's only 3 options to test for the tutorial. It's not game breaking but since it's the tutorial where things are scripted, how does this get missed? There are other issues with the tutorial where it'll tell you that you should do some thing but don't tell you HOW to do it. Off the top of my head I remember being told to consider placing a spy/mole in the police department. It doesn't tell the player where or how to do that, It seems many people go to their contacts page to try to embed someone via the police chief. That's not where you're supposed to go, you're supposed to figure out that you have to go through your security services and find the police surveillance button to even get there. Speaking of security services, they gain experience extremely slowly and there's a reported bug that sending your boys to protect other employees can cause that employee to completely go no contact with you. Another issue is not explaining what the threaten and beating options for security are used for. The tutorial pushes you to learn how to protect your actors but in no way explains what the other options are for. The tutorial further doesn't explain happiness and loyalty, what they do and how to manage them. For anyone that's played the game already and are curious, to manage their happiness and loyalty, you pretty must just let the person leave for whatever they request whenever they request it, and send them bribes using items from the Services building. Loyalty gives you an edge in negotiation, happiness makes them perform better at their task (thereby making the movie better).

At some point you'll be able to buy theatre management to buy up independent theaters. You (and the other movie studios) will buy up theaters so you can play your movies there for free. The problem is, once you and the others buy up the theaters, there's nothing left to buy. You're at a stalemate. You have yours, they have theirs. Even if there's demand for your movies there's a capacity issue. At this point I have no idea what I could do to acquire more theaters or how to force the others to get rid of theirs. I imagine this is something they'll be working on.

A QOL issue is that the movie production won't tell you why a movie can't progress. I encountered this issue when I mistakenly placed a misogynistic actor and an actress in the same film. Now the game does indicate that an actor is a misogynist on the actor card itself, but there's no tooltip when hovering over the greyed out continue option. A failure on my part (or maybe a design issue on the game's part) is that some contracts that you'll negotiate are for a one time payment, others are paid monthly. It took me quite some time to differentiate between the two (this would be nice to explain in the tutorial). Going from viewing your employees to available employees is needlessly cumbersome. If i'm looking at composers at my studio and swap to employee center to hire, why does it automatically go back to actors on the employee center page instead of composers? Further, the actor page is typically longer than most other pages, if you scroll down the actor page and then swap to a different role's page, it'll swap to the role BUT it'll maintain how far you scrolled down. Which means i'm typically looking at an empty page. There's also the tediousness of negotiations and keeping track of who to fire and who to hire, or when an employee of another studio is about to end their contract. There's no way to track these people so it's up to you do it manually. No ability to move buildings once placed, no tutorial about fixing buildings or what "condition" means when building things. Minimal sorting of employees, if i'm making a movie about X Y and Z, allow me to sort employees that have genres or themes X Y and/or Z. Allow us to repeat training at the film school when the training completed pop up occurs instead of having to go back to the school, find the person that just finished training, and queue them back up. Just a sidenote, some upgrade times are sliightly too long. I don't mind certain buildings being long considering the game should be spanning multiple decades (although this causes a balance issue if you research the wrong thing early on) but why is it so hard to research the ability to hire more crew or hire a nanny. A random movie/name generator is also sorely missing for the amount of movies the player pumps out.

On bugs and softlocks. Softlocks are everywhere. Sometimes you'll have two popups at the same time and that can cause a softlock. Sometimes it's just one screen and it'll softlock. I also softlocked when one of my managers leveled up at max level, since he was maxed out I couldn't choose any of the level up options, so I was stock there. Not something i've personally experienced but i've seen that there's integer overflow when it comes to movie sales and employee levels. There's an ongoing audio glitch (I believe it happens when you skip watching the audience and critic score changes). The game has a "tricks" system where you can have actors do PR stuff to garner attention for the movie releasing. The problem is all tricks are set to 100% success rate BUT it's not actually 100%, I do get failures (one time multiple failures back to back). I've chosen to forego that system until it gets fixed, again i'm surprised how all tricks being 100% slipped pass QA.

I do enjoy the game. Hiring people, writing scripts, upgrading the tech, advertising, etc etc. The game's just not where it should be, even for early acc. Currently softlocked at 1938 so I have no idea what happens after.
I could go on and on about gameplay issues and bugs but it's already a wall of text. I am hopeful that the devs will continue working on the game and improving upon it. It's genuinely a unique and generally fun game, it's just hard to recommend it in its current state, definitely wait for improvements before you buy. I will amend my review one day when the game is in a better state.

The game is a blast so far with one major disappointment. After a few hours of learning the ropes, I decided I wanted to start a fresh save having a better idea of the gameplay loop only to find that there's no way to skip the pretty long tutorial.

This seems like a really big oversight and I hope it gets fixed soon, it really discourages exploration.

Edit:

Shifting my review to "negative" for now. After putting a substantial amount of time into it there are just a lot of things that currently feel really bad. The animations that were fun and really cool at first become a drag when you've seen them 10,000 times, and everything feels SLOW.

The animations, navigating menus, negotiating with your actors/crew, researching... everything just moves at a snails pace.

Another huge complaint I have is that if you don't build things in the right order it feels like you are just in a situation where there's no way to win.

Decide you want to build or research something else before you research marketing? You're absolutely out of luck when you realize that after your first 3 movies you literally just can't market unless you've researched it... and since research takes 8.5 billion years, there's no way to get it going quickly to rectify your mistake.

So, you start over.... and have to go through the loooooong tutorial again because it's unskippable.

I really hope this game has a bright future. It has solid bones, and a few more updates could have it in a much better place but how it stands I can't recommend a purchase.

Well, we tried. Great vibe, great systems. However, I cannot recommend the game in the state it is in. So rarely do I play a tycoon and just drop it altogether because of unpolish, but I will be doing that here. First and foremost, there is zero replayability in this game. The tutorial is not in your face, but is very present your playthroughs. This means that it will stick around for... well, I have 5 hours in the game and I'd say during hour 3 it started to cool down. Important note is that in this tutorial, everything is scripted. No, you cannot skip the tutorial, either

So any time you feel like starting over for a clean slate, tough luck because the gameplay loop will unfold the exact same way until you are about two years in or longer. Fun. You start with predetermined staff that you have no control over, and events will play out the same way each time. This includes events tied to these predetermined characters.

Moreover, the UI is not great. On the surface it looks presentable, but the problems arise with the features attached to it. It is quite inconvenient to execute simple tasks, like firing people. For instance, there is a button in the top right that gives you an overview of your staff. One might think that this overview would let you, y'know interact with them or something. Nope. Instead you have to find their assigned building and go from there.

There is also a plethora of bugs that exist. I am willing to overlook those, but the aforementioned problems I cannot. A tycoon with minimal replayability does not have a whole lot to offer.

It's finally happened. Ever since The Movies we have been hoping for something just as good. This game has the serious potential to be that and more.

So why is this game not 'Very Positive' and as of right now 'Mostly Positive'

Lets list the problems
-------------------------
-- Its Early Access . We got bugs, missing content, and more bugs
-- The games fairly hard at the beginning.
-- The tutorial beginning cannot of skip. Want to start over? Yep watch the game explain to you how to play again. It's a slow process at the start.

Now the biggest problem is this game is not forgiving. I felt like I was playing Dark Souls the movie game. Started over several times. Almost every player was going bankrupt 3 years in and the general boards were on fire. People were upset and no one really had answers. This is the reason for the 'Mostly Positive' reviews. They went bankrupt, couldn't figure out the game, and gave it a thumbs down.

Now the bugs are CRAZY. Some are actually hilarious. But I admit I can't wait for the fixes. They really do interfere with the game.

NOW .... why do I feel this is the BEST GAME EVER ?!

The potential of this game is crazy. It's got depth I mean serious depth. 20 hours already played and i'm barely a decade into this game. I believe there is 30 years in the game right now with more planned.

Every time I start over the actors and other workers are different. Some stay the same but this game has a ton of replay in it. The Story works. I love the quest lines so far. And it's actually challenging.

Listen the games got some issues , it's Early Access. But a game like this is worth the investment. If the developer gets the community support they deserve this game has endless potential.

Don't mind an EA ? Then this is a must buy.

I'm going to echo many reviews and notate that the game is actually incredible. The gameplay, art style, overall depth is all very intriguing.

HOWEVER, the game is extremely frustrating to play at this point in time. Even after the hot fix and small game balance update, there are still many bugs present. One in particular that I've encountered since beta is when you start a film and choose your filming locations. Sometimes an area is completely greyed out and you are unable to select it. The only way to fix it is to save and completely restart your game.

Another issue is that the game is just incredibly difficult to pilot in your first play through. It is very likely that by 1932, you will go bankrupt or you wouldn't have known to research marketing and outreach to advertise your films. The latter is pretty much game breaking as you aren't even able to release profitable films.

Another annoyance is that the tutorial is automatically built into each new game. Everytime you start a new save the same characters, same exact events, with the same exact outcomes will happen; and you can't even skip through these screens. So it's just a massive waste of time.

Overall, the game needs way more polish and better quality of life adjustments. While I don't mind games being difficult, this particular game is difficult due to the lack of clarity and overall game balance. It sets you up for failure right out of the gate.

Oh...forgot to add! For the love of God, please create a way for us to negotiate employee pay without going through a million cutscenes! Be prepared to shift through a million screens when you have multiple employee contracts ending at the same time. Ugh!