Management of any large variable problem is usually a logistical nightmare. From coordinating a basketball tournament to overseeing operations of a grocery store, nothing ever seems to go as planned. Skill is established and applied by how well villainous variables are reorganized into working parts. By virtue of unlimited unknown, you can never be good at anticipating some of these problems, but you can refine the way you approach them.
So it goes with management simulations. From RollerCoaster Tycoon to Theme Hospital to Football Manager, gaming has a long standing tradition of making what is (ostensibly) one person’s job into another person’s preferred means of escape and relaxation. BigFest’s approach to multitasking your way into and out of resources isn’t especially unique, but its application to the riotous music festival scene is a welcomed novelty.
BigFest easies its players into the life of a festival promoter. Your plot of land is almost remarkably disgraceful; an old refrigerator, a crashed airplane, and what appear to be ancient ruins are strewn across its premises. Worse, the machinations set to fuel your festival are in dire need of an upgrade. Your stage is pathetically small, the water treatment plant looks terrible and can’t support more than two bathrooms, and the dire state of attendance can’t support very many vendor booths. Cap it off with your ugly power station and moribund technical layout and you’re all set to host the world’s worst festival.
Thank god for Big Dave. He not only provides brief explanations of how all of your resources connected to one another, but he’s initially your only roadie. In BigFest, roadies act as the physically moving specimens that take time to build or repair all of the resources scattered about your festival. Dave can build a food stand, empty the trash, fix a toilet, and, somehow, construct world-class stage upgrades in the middle of a band’s set. With enough money you can also purchase other roadies (who weirdly appear to be clones of Big Dave, setting off conspiracy theories about his incredible ability to get things done), though their cost gets higher with each additional crew member.
There’s a smooth economy powering your festival’s production. If the general Vibe—literally, Vibe is a measured resource—of the show is great, more people will come and the show will generate a higher return. If the Vibe is good, more people will also patronize the vendor booths. You can see what people want by tapping the thought balloons over their head. Sometimes this is obvious, if it’s raining they’ll want a place to buy warm clothes and a vendor that serves hot tea, but more often than not it’s to help steer you in the right direction. Your festival needs campsites, better sound equipment, less clutter, and an escalating series of tasks for you and Dave(s) to deal with. Ideally, you make money and immediately reinvest it in your festival. This is a management sim’s core loop, and BigFest isn’t one to shy away from it.
Progression and persistence are important parts of BigFest’s mission. Each event is channeled through flyers which challenge the player to complete certain extraneous objectives. You’ll have to do things like sign a band with a certain Vibe, physically eject people with colds, or make sure to have a specific vendor on site. It’s important to note that your festival grounds and money are persistent throughout the entirety of BigFest. Upgrades made to facilities last forever, though some minor resources like toilets and trash break down and require a bit of vigilance.
Other variables require your attention. The occasional diva band will make absurd demands that either burn your time or your resources. Scouring the crowd to find their lost drummer is kind of fun, but hocking over money to promoters or satisfying their concert rider (“two liters of orphan tears”) just drains your cash. Along similar lines, manually ejecting moochers, streakers, and other assorted idiots from your campgrounds helps keep your attention when you’re waiting for more cash to roll in. A typical festival only lasts the length of one song from each band which, depending on how many bands you have signed up, is only a handful of minutes.
After you learn the nuts and bolts of BigFest’s progression, the inevitable grind starts to set in. Higher-leveled facilities demanded a greater amount of my income, and I found myself stuck repeating flyers I knew I effectively manage. Eventually this got kind of boring, and BigFest crossed the Rubicon of a fun game about management to something that mirrored an actual job about management. It felt like work, which is a sensation I go out of my way to avoid when I’m not stuck at my day job. Climbing the ladder to get there was pretty fun, but I was ready to jump off before I reached the end.
BigFest’s music helps ease its slide into repetition. By partnering with Jamendo, a free music service for unsigned bands, BigFest subtly allows for real music to populate your fictitious festival. Better, it actually ranks artists by how frequently they’re used in other player’s games, which helps with the Vibe they’re capable of giving. While a bit derivative of some obvious influences (most acts seem to sound like someone else you’ve heard of), most of BigFest’s music is pretty catchy; “Dilemma” by Phrenia, “Echoes” by Ocean Jet, and “Breathe in Breathe Out” by Singleton all seem to be decent songs.
Oddly, BigFest’s platform does the game a bit of a disservice. Searching through band listings and waiting for their music to be downloaded can be a drag, and potentially game-halting if you’re not connected to the Internet. The Vita’s touchscreen, while considerably large, doesn’t seem to have the range necessary for BigFest’s operations. Twisting booth placement with two fingers is a pain, trying to tap on the right person (especially when one of them in a streaker soaring across the field) is prone to error, and the directional sticks aren’t especially great for precise map navigation. It’s great that the content-starved Vita has been granted a rare exclusive in an uncommon release window, but I can’t help but feel that BigFest’s would have been better served with a large tablet or with a mouse and keyboard.
With all of that in mind, it’s tough to argue against a ten-dollar Vita exclusive at the tail-end of 2015. As far as management simulations go, BigFest’s mechanics are sound enough to support the novelty of its theme, and the injection of legitimately independent music helps balance the inevitable grind. Like actual management, BigFest is a game about dividing time and trying not to waste it.
