When comparing Game Dev Story vs GTA San Andreas, the Slant community recommends Game Dev Story for most people. In the question“What are the best Android games without in-app purchases/paywalls?” Game Dev Story is ranked 8th while GTA San Andreas is ranked 11th. The most important reason people chose Game Dev Story is:
Nearly everything is self-explanatory, and the bits that aren't get explained by your secretary. This makes for a game that is easy to understand, even if it does not seem evident at first.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Simple and intuitive gameplay allows the game to be accessible, no matter the skill level
Nearly everything is self-explanatory, and the bits that aren't get explained by your secretary. This makes for a game that is easy to understand, even if it does not seem evident at first.
Pro Very engaging due to quick progression and frequent events
Contracts are measured in weeks and development cycles in months, but time passes at the rate of one day per second. Though the core gameplay involves watching little icons pop up over your employees' heads, rarely do five seconds go by without some player action being prudent, if not required.
Pro Fulfils a fantasy of creating a game studio
You get to choose what type of game you want to make, what tools you use to make it, who you hire to make it, what systems you publish the final product on and you get to watch how it is received by the world. Then you do it all over again bigger.
Pro A free demo version is available for anyone to try out
Game Dev Story Lite is available for free on the Google Play store. The Lite version ends after 2 in-game years.
Pro Entertaining business success model typical for Kairosoft games
Pro Tons of content will keep you entertained for a long time
You could spend days going through just the main story itself, but there is a ton more content as well. Side missions add numerous more hours of gameplay, and one-off encounters can help keep you entertained as well. Depending on your mood, you might even just want to try abiding by all the laws and driving around. In-game, there's always something to do, and you have a choice of what you want to do during that particular gaming session.
Pro A classic that translates great to mobile thanks to attention paid to the port
This game was originally launched on PlayStation 2 and Xbox. Tweaks were made to make it more mobile friendly - multiple ways to control the UI (optimized for touch), as well as cloud-saves which let you pick up where you left off on different devices (for example a tablet or a new phone).
Pro Familiar multi-city world that is actually based off of real locations
There are 3 huge cities to explore: Los Santos, San Fierro and Las Venturas - each loosely modeled after certain real-world cities. In addition to the static map, other aspects of the game make it feel even more immersive. There's a fairly wide selection of vehicles, minigames and weird one-off events to find and take part in.
Pro Tons of vehicles
Tons of cars, bikes, planes, jets, tanks, jetpack, KTM rc, etc.
Pro 0sam
Cons
Con Game is not free
Con Punctuation and grammar errors
Game Dev Story is a Japanese game that was translated to English, which shows, as sometimes there are a few grammatical errors in game. This shows a lack of polish, which may aggravate some players.
Con Unclear method of determining a game's success
Sometimes it is unclear how to find out how successful a game is.
Con It's very hard to fail
Your employees' salaries are waived the first year ("government subsidy") and you can go into the red to pay them after that. You can't develop a game without some initial funds, but since you can always take a contract to make money, there's basically no hole you can't crawl out of.
Con The control scheme doesn't translate well to touchscreens
For a game that was originally designed to be played with 14 physical buttons it can be difficult to translate that to a touch screen interface. Sadly, this shows when trying to play on a tablet or phone. To get the best experience, you're going to want to grab a compatible bluetooth gamepad/controller which adds cost, and you'll need to carry it around if you want to play on the go (likely at home you'll be playing on a console or computer).
Con Doesn't load on a Galaxy s20+
Hasn't worked for years. The game shows a black screen then immediately crashes.
Con Choppy performance at times
Sometimes framerates will drop, even on high end hardware. Typically framerates are good, but when there is a lot going on at once there will be dropped frames while the device tries to catch up with whatever is happening in-game.
Con Takes up a lot of space for an Android game
The game is 2 GB and does not fit most memory cards. but it's a very good game.
Con Expensive considering it's a port of an old game
The app costs $7, which is very expensive for a mobile game. In addition, this game is just a port of the original game (with a few mobile-focused optimizations) and there isn't any new content.
Con Bad graphics
The graphics aren't very good compared to newer games. Considering GTA SA is pretty old, it stands to reason that the graphics won't hold up as well as something newer.