Casino, Inc. review (PC)

Considering that Casino Inc. eventually lets you open and run several large casinos at once, you might expect it to be a large-scale strategy game that lets you, with good advance planning and occasional maintenance, sit back and watch the cash roll in as your casinos essentially run themselves (with occasional guidance). Unfortunately, because of important concerns like catching saboteurs, monitoring your staff's salary, and keeping on the good side of the cops, you'll need to constantly micromanage each casino, and you can't do this effectively with the game's clunky interface.

According to the game's manual and box, Casino Inc. lets you create a Las Vegas-style casino from the 1970s, though you wouldn't know that about the game by looking at it. Casino Inc.'s graphics are bright and colorful, and they don't look especially bad at all; the game's simple 3D graphics do a good job of creating the big cities in which your casinos are located, and they also do a decent enough job rendering onscreen characters. Both your staff and your guests are short, bigheaded, cartoonlike characters with exaggerated features, though your staff dresses in uniform, and your guests dress in straightforward suits, dresses, and T-shirts, and no one looks, acts, or sounds like they're from the '70s.

Casino Inc. doesn't sound like it's from the '70s--or from any other particularly exciting decade--either. The game's background music generally consists of soft, ambient techno tunes, unless you build a dance floor or theater in your casinos to provide music, in which case the game sounds like rather subdued Muzak versions of disco and jazz music. But you may not pay much attention to the music, since every game of Casino Inc. is punctuated by an almost continuous stream of voice samples, including your staffers greeting guests, your guests loudly proclaiming what they think, and the game's announcer frantically and constantly informing you that "the staff are demanding a raise!" You may find the strident comments of elderly guests, who are the loudest guests in the game for some reason, to be especially annoying when you hear four of them stammer, "You're only as old as you feel," in unison for the hundredth time. You can set your doorman and bouncers to keep seniors out of your casino, but this setting doesn't actually work too well, even with the most highly ranked staffers money can buy.

The fact that this and other features don't actually work as they should doesn't really help Casino Inc., a game that already suffers from inconsistent sound and a problematic interface. Though Casino Inc. does occasionally let you feel like you are running a bustling casino, all too often, it interrupts the action with an important event that you'll have to micromanage, and you'll be reminded all over again of just how inadequate the game's interface is. Considering that the game has only a handful of single-player scenarios (though each is fairly long) and no free-form sandbox building mode, it seems unlikely that you'll be able to get much out of the game once you're finished with it.