Freview - AdVenture Capitalist

For anyone who read my Time Clickers review (first of all, EEEEEEEEE!), this should look eerily familiar. Not content with a simple shooting gallery turned team management simulator, Hyper Hippo decided to simplify things further by cutting out the shooting. That’s right, now you can step into the shoes of all the great captains of industry by working hard to build a business long enough to hire someone to work hard for you while you reap the rewards. Of course, when I say “working hard” I really mean “pushing a button” and by “build a business” I mean “wait a few seconds to make a profit”. And that’s essentially the game. You can stop reading now.

Anyone still with me? Good. Sorry about that, but you’ve got to weed out the lazy society leeches to make room for the real job creators, right? Allow me to elaborate. You begin with a lemonade stand and push the button a few times until you have enough money to buy a newspaper delivery service, then a car wash and so on and so forth until you own your very own oil company! Don’t want to keep pushing the profit button yourself? Hire a manager! The profit button then pushes itself thanks to one of these friendly employees, like Cabe Johnson or Milly Bayes (get it?), leaving you free to buy more lemonade stands and car washes and the like, increasing your profits with every new venture.

Hyper Hippo Games

You may be thinking right now, “…Seriously? That’s the whole game?” I know, I thought much the same thing and was disgusted with myself for taking part. But, wait! There’s more! Hyper Hippo adds another layer to the fun with angelic investors. No, that wasn’t hyperbole, literal angels gather to invest in your business empire, adding a small percentage of overall profit per angel for the low, low price of completely restarting from scratch. That’s right; you start completely over, but get back to where you were a bit quicker. Or you can just buy gold with real money and use gold to buy angels. If you choose the latter option, I would like you to take a step back from your computer and seriously reconsider the choices that have brought you to this point in life because you have clearly taken a wrong turn somewhere.

Hyper Hippo Games

As I sit and watch my profit counter slowly climb into the billions and trillions and beyond, sipping my fine cognac and smoking a Cuban cigar, I can’t help but ponder on the current state of casual gaming. Granted, a casual game is nice because you can simply put it down and come back to it when you’ve got some time to kill, but this isn’t the sort of game I feel should have been made for a PC (Hell, even a Mac doesn’t deserve this shit). This is a phone app if I ever saw one and not a very engaging of one. You upgrade your businesses until you run out of money and then wait for more money to accrue before doing it again. If the game didn’t keep passively collecting money while shut down, it’d be completely meaningless as a game. At least Time Clickers has targets you can shoot and pretend to be having an impact against without the help of your AI companions. If I wanted to sit around and watch numbers climb, I’d pay more attention than money to my student loan interest.

Hyper Hippo Games

Why not just make a game where you’re in charge of building one business? You can handle customers until you have enough money to hire employees, then slowly amass a greater fortune until it’s time to franchise. Eventually you can incorporate and choose whether or not to publicly trade the business on the stock market before your board of directors votes you out of the company and goes ahead with the stock trade anyway. The rest of the game is simply you living out of a cardboard box beneath the freeway and fending off pneumonia while organizing bum fights for crack money. You’re welcome, Hyper Hippo.