In The Movies players become a movie mogul, responsible for a studio from the dawn of the industry all the way into the modern era. It's all about micromanagement. It is a pure blend of tycoon and The Sims, which means you'll be watching meters and frantically trying to keep track of a thousand things at once.

Most of the micromanagement comes in the life-simulation parts of the game. Like real movie stars, your stars throw tantrums and need trips to rehab when they hit the bottle. They have a range of demands from the size of their entourage to the shininess of their trailer. Mostly this depends on their star rating - a sort of Hollywood ranking that goes up depending on the success of their career. Managing the demands of five to ten stars is often too demanding. Lionhead did a marvellous job on the user interface - completely ripping most of what one would expect out - but the competing demands of the stars and the studio are overwhelming.

Unlike The Sims, where your micromanagement is rewarded with an evolving attachment to your character(s), the stars of The Movies remain faceless. Most of the game experience is spent zoomed way out - a necessity to manage the studios - and as such they never evolve beyond a tiny speck on the screen and a face in a card along the left side of your monitor. That, combined with the sheer number of stars you probably have, makes it hard to care when they whine. I couldn't even come to dislike my stars; I just did not care.

The mogul gameplay is extremely repetitive. The Movies is fun for an hour. Pretty good for five. After that you just want to claw your eyes out! The problem is that, while the ages advance and you get new toys to play with, it never really feels different. The art remains the same, while your stars get makeovers they're too small for you to see properly, and the completely frantic nature of the game (I was gaining advancements faster than I could build them) means that any initial noble ideals of a beautiful studio layout are quickly scrapped. Within a few years you'll be forced to throw new sets in every available nook and cranny of your lot.

The game also lacks any sense of accomplishment. As an overarching purpose, players are supposed to compete against other studios to gain awards, star-rankings and unlock the rewards that come with these accolades. It is tough to explain, but in playing, the awards seemed moot. There was no reason to pay attention to them. You got a little stats screen at the end, but it did not seem to affect my game at all. After the first few times, I ignored them completely.

The same goes for feedback after you release a picture. The first time it was neat to see the stats and the reviews, but by movie number five (and you'll often have three movies in release at a time), it just all seemed the same. Typically, you know before you release the picture how it will be received, since it is quite obvious whether the stars were appropriate to the genre, liked each other, have chemistry, or if your director went on a drinking binge in the middle of production.

The other half of the game is the much-hyped movie maker. Again, the interface is stellar, and in this case players can take as long as they want. You have total control over their film, through a series of canned situations. In this the possibilities are endless.

However, it is sometimes difficult to figure out what is going on, and the movie scenes - when I finally release the picture and watch it - often do not match what I thought I was doing. For example, in one scene I thought I'd killed my main character, but when the movie was finally released I realized he got back up a few minutes later and killed the bad guy - despite a knife to the heart. Another scene was supposed to have my bad guy jump through a hole in the roof to startle my female lead. Again, I was baffled; when watching the movie, the actual jump down and scare never happened.

These and other similar problems make for some interesting plot holes.

The movie-maker also suffers from being overly integrated into the micromanagement-fest. There is a sandbox mode that lets you cheat and build the studio with near infinite money, but you still have to worry about the studio before you can produce your own movies. The movie-maker would be much more interesting if it was also available as a simple link from the main menu, and combined with a detailed star creator.

As a tycoon game, The Movies is nothing special. It has a slick interface, short learning curve and everything you would expect of a tycoon game, but there is an overwhelming sameness to it. The movie maker, on the other hand, gives the game some value, but will probably only appeal to a certain section of the gaming population.