The Movies has charm and a Sims-like appeal to it, but the gameplay becomes boring and repetitive unfortunately soon.
It's a tycoon game first and foremost - the game functions mostly as a tycoon game. But The Movies tries to fit into multiple genres and the end result is that the game is a mish mash. It becomes very confusing as what you are supposed to do, or accomplish. This game tries to be a tycoon game, a Sims game, and a movie-making game.
The problem with the tycoon part being the main focus of the game, is that it is actually very boring and repetitive. The game starts in the 1920's. You are starting up a movie studio. You have a huge empty lot you start out on. You then build things like an actor's studio, a movie production studio, and sets to shoot movies on.
Then you hire actors, producers, extras, and other people like janitors, scriptwriters and research scientists. Then you pick up your people and put them on the building and then they shoot a movie. You have no control over what the movie is about - you have to play two or three hours until you "discover" how to write custom scripts.
Your actors and producers have egos and they also have needs, that's how the game relates to the Sims. You have to make sure your sim actors are happy, or they'll be in a bad mood and then make bad movies.
You level your actors up by putting them on a set and making them practice a certain movie genre (romance, horror, sci-fi, etc.) They'll then make better movies if their level goes higher.
Ultimately, this game is the most repetitive and boring game you could buy. The first time you play it through, it's okay, but toward eight or nine hours of gameplay, even with all the bells and whistles that you discover and unlock, it's still doing the same exact thing. Build sets, put your people making movies, and do it all over again.
The game doesn't have any bugs - the gameplay and the graphics aren't bad, bad by themselves. The gameplay is not broken. The problem is that the gameplay is bland, uninspired and repetitive. You'll be bored soon. I only had one major sit down with the game. I played it once for an hour and a halfish just to experiment with the game to see how I should play it, and then I played it for six or seven hours straight to see how much depth there was to the game, or basically, how much content is in this game? I was trying to get my money's worth.
After that major seven hour sit through, I knew I had seen what I would see every time I started up the game.
The bottom line is that the game has only two to three hours of actual gameplay that is new, or that you can learn, or really have fun with. That time is not bad time as the game from a gameplay standpoint is not broken. However, anything beyond that amount of time is just that same repetitive gameplay that gets boring quickly.
I paid $15 for the game, not the $40 or $30 it used to be, so I'm not as upset about the value.
I felt that the game is only worth about $8-10 - just about the price of a movie ticket - about two to three hours of entertainment.