It greatly adds to the original title, turning it into a much more involving experience than you could ever expect.
Stunts & Effects is, as the name indicates, based around incorporating stunts in your movies. Just like in the real Hollywood business, audiences require new thrills and become more and more demanding regarding what they want to see in the next blockbuster hit. The burden rests solely on your shoulders, since you – the new motion picture mogul – are the one who has to make it happen. Most of all, you have to make it happen right.
To first start your "stunty business" your previously saved game needs to be past the 1960's timeline. If it's not, the new features belonging to the expansion will not be available. Alternatively, you can begin a new game starting in 1960. Either way, a handy tutorial will tell you what you need to know to include stuntmen and stunt facilities in your studio lot.
The first step is to create a stuntmen recruiting office. Once the candidates start lining up at the office, recruit two or three and you will obtain your first stunt movie script. Gather the crew and you they will proceed to shoot their first stunt: your typical "board on the face" comedy.
Once the stunt has been completed (successfully or not), you will learn about your stunts condition and skill. Each stuntman (or stuntwoman) has a condition and a skill meter. They both dictate how successful the stunts will be performed. Stunt skill can be raised by training in the appropriate facilities, while a stunman's condition can be restored in the hospital.
As your stuntmen skills go up, they will be able to perform more difficult and outstanding stunts. From boards on the head to rabid dogs gnawing on their arms, spectacular car crashes, fires and explosions, falling from tall buildings, martial arts fighting and destroying entire cities through UFO invasions of giant monster attacks, there is a stunt for every movie.
Not only action movies can have stunts. If you drop your scriptwriters in the little helmet icon in the respective genre room, they will write a stunt script for that genre, so any romance or horror flick can have its own stunt too.
Aside from new sets and facilities, the new content includes several wardrobe and hairstyle options (you can make your actors look older or heavier if you wish), many realistic backdrops, weather effects, smoke screens, lasers, three new award categories and a bunch of new critic reviews (some of them being quite harsh).
But Stunts & Effects doesn't stop there. For the hardcore movie-makers who already own The Movies, the new Free Cam Mode will allow more flexibility for creating your own movies by letting you step into the cameraman's shoes. Change the camera location, add new camera angles and customize your own camera pathing to add a whole new artistic level to your work.
That's not to say the game is flawless. The most apparent problem with The Movies is the lack of candidates for the different job categories. It's difficult to find people waiting in line at the doors to your recruiting offices, especially now that there is a new job.
The Movies: Stunts & Effects does get to be quite the handful with so much to do and so many things to control in one lot at the same time. You must really enjoy micro-management to truly appreciate it, since all this simultaneous activity makes it easy to overlook certain things. But it greatly adds to the original title, turning it into a much more involving experience than you could ever expect.
Review text part of Grrlgamer.com. Full text and screenshots at:
http://www.grrlgamer.com/review.php?g=themoviesstunts