Big Ambitions

When I heard ‘New York business management simulator in the 3rd person’, my curiosity got the better of me and I wasn’t disappointed. In the early game, your rich uncle acts as the tutorial and you find yourself running around supplying your small shop in New York with whatever you’ve chosen to sell. You can design the colour scheme and layout of your shop in pretty granular detail. You can even drive around the city, delivering stuff yourself and you only have to obey [i]some[/i] of the traffic laws (I’ll get to that later) and the more you earn, the bigger your businesses grow and the easier they become to automate. A couple hours in, your rich uncle helps you set up a HQ office building that will handle all your deliveries, logistics, HR and recruitment. From that point on, there’s very little to actually busy yourself with, as all of your businesses will continue to make money as long as you have effectively managed the figures on your supply chains. So you’ll find yourself sitting around watching TV and playing videogames while the money rolls in. I do find it hilarious that you can choose not to bathe or take a dump for a week and then finally doing so on Friday gives you a happiness bump. I’m about 60 hours in now. My businesses are making about a million dollars a day and I have bought a mansion in The Hamptons. My rich uncle has gone silent now. I can’t even go over to his house. I can play golf or tennis, but the minigames for those are both agonizingly boring and I quit both after a single match. Suddenly I am confronted with a horrible question for the first time in the game. What am I supposed to [b]do[/b] with all this money? Buy [i]another[/i] boat? A [i]faster[/i] car? Remember those traffic laws I mentioned earlier? I can park in the middle of the street now, as traffic fines are no more than a drop in the ocean. Perhaps I'm not the right audience for getting excited about large amounts of money, but for a game called [b]'Big Ambitions'[/b], I can’t help but feel like I’ve hit the ceiling towards the endgame. It would be cool if there were a few massively expensive supergoals you could invest in towards the endgame. You get a happiness bump throughout the game by giving $100 to homeless people out on the streets. What if one of the endgame supergoals was “Solve Homelessness in NYC”? How about “Cure Cancer”, or “Build a Space Station”? You could even have some non-altruistic ones like “Become King” or “Build an 800ft golden statue of yourself where the Empire State Building used to be” Some kind of legacy, rather than just dragon-hoarding a bunch of money. Or perhaps this is exactly the point and the game is actually trying to teach us all a valuable lesson about the foleys of wealth? Could this be why all the billionaires of the world are so disaffected and alienated? ... nah it's probably not that deep. tldr; really fun game. The endgame just needs a bit of work to give the player something non-frivolous to actually [b]do[/b] with their vast sums of wealth!