2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good, February 17, 2008
= Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars
This review is from: Circus Empire (Video Game)
circus empire is a very fun game overall but gets much harder as you go in to the game at they dont give you enough money, (10,000 euros since you start in europe)if you do good you shold make about 5,000-7,000 euros a day(only when you plan 2 shows a day)your preformers ae awsome and you can get addicted to this.(i spend about 3 1/2 hours playing)i hae not completed the game, but BUY IT, IT IS SOOOOOOOOO MUCH FUN.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A Charming Surprise For Circus Lovers, September 15, 2010
= Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars
This review is from: Circus Empire (Video Game)
I bought this game at a very low price with no high expectations, and it surprised me in a positive sense. While strategy games don't normally have storylines, this strategy game is basically built around a story. I started out thinking I would find it annoying but soon found myself enjoying the approach. This game was unpopular with hard-core strategy game players according to reviews, but that should never have been its intended audience. I am not sure into which genre this game does fall.
Pros:
1. Humor and realism in the storyline are balanced with an evident care not to make the player fail. However, the walkthrough I found online was valuable for the second of the three campaigns. Overall the game is low on stress and high on circus-related entertainment.
2. The trained animals don't die of old age the same year you finish training them. The Marine add-on to a well-known zoo program annoyed me very much because I no sooner had my orcas trained than they started dropping like flies to old age. I am pretty sure that orcas live to be over 30 years old, so dying in two years is silly. No animal, or anyone else, dies of old age in this game. You do get three children and a lion cub born. There is also another child and a baby elephant that appear as available for hire, with their mothers.
3. If you are a fan of circus performances, you will enjoy setting up and veiwing your own shows during the campaign. This includes choosing outfits for the human performers except for the clowns, who have their own customary garb, and choosing lights, music, and special effects.
Cons:
1. The game crashed every so often for me. It is not tolerant of ALT-TAB or the Windows key, nor of being forced to minimize by some program trying to run an automatic update. Sometimes you can get back into the game after that happens, and sometimes it just crashes when you try. Trying to "Continue Campaign" after a crash is a very bad idea because it seems that some of the data gets out of sync. You may find yourself trying to achieve a goal for which you've not got access to the performers, because the game thinks are you further along than you are. If you crash from this game, load from a save. In fact, even if you don't crash, always load from a save and don't "Continue Campaign". Nothing else is reliable.
2. The spelling in the game is a little sloppy. For instance, you play the role of Peter Principal. I assume this was supposed to be Peter Principle, but someone goofed the spelling. It got a little tiresome to see the word "average" mispelled on the summary screen of show performance, which displays twice per day. There were other instances but those are the ones I remember in detail.
3. There is one place in which the voice-over of the talking dog gives a goal of 1600 Impression Points and the on-screen text says 1000. The correct goal is 1600. If you play with the sound off then you will miss this. This happens in the third campaign, which is not completely documented in the FAQ I located online. I can only suspect that the author of the FAQ never made it past this point because he didn't realize the error.
4. The freeplay mode is probably useless. You can play with any animal or human performer that you have unlocked through the campaigns, but they lose all of any training that you gave to them in the campaigns. Training is maintained from campaign to campaign, so it seems strange to me that it disappears in freeplay after you've finished playing all of the campaigns. Also, the lion cub and baby elephant don't appear to be available in freeplay, even if you hire the mothers. Two of the four human children are also absent.
The total number of animals that you can keep depends on the total number of "care points", which you get mostly by hiring keepers. I imagined that all of the keepers would also be available in freeplay, but they are not. You get a fixed number depending upon in which of the locations you start your freeplay circus. These are never enough points to keep all of the animals. There are only the three campaign locations available for freeplay, and the one with the most care points is the final campaign. Since you end the third campaign with well-trained performers and are making a pile of money on each show, why bother with freeplay, where you start with 500,000 and a bunch of untrained performers? Just continue on from there and you are better off.
Summary:
This game is an odd mix of good design and occasional shoddy implementation. The inability to suffer a change of focus without crashing is frustrating. The lame freeplay mode would probably have made the program feel like it was not worth the money when it was first published. However, I have played no other game where I could set up and view my own circus shows. Even though I have finished the three campaigns, I find myself going back into my final save and fussing with the game just to see what something looks like. If you liked animal acts on TV in the old days, and always longed as a child to go see Barnum & Bailey circus, you may find this game worth the occasional trouble it gives in running.
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