When comparing Game Dev Story vs 80 Days, 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 80 Days is ranked 26th. 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 Branching story that will take multiple playthroughs to experience it all
The way the game plays out there are many story options that will be triggered due to previous choices in the game. Being that it branches out like this it will take many playthroughs to experience all of the stories options.
Pro Heavily focused on reading
Pretty much a visual novel, 80 Days should interest anyone who enjoys reading and makes for a great introduction to the visual novel genre due to it being spearheaded by a big name in text adventure fiction, Jon Ingold.
Pro Supports portrait and landscape play
80 Days allows for the user to play in portrait or landscape, making for a good game across tablets and phones.
Pro Does not need internet connection to be played
80 Days does not need the device it is being played on to be connected to the internet to be played, which makes for a good game during air travel as well as other places where one does not have an internet connection.
Pro Stylish design based on Jules Verne
With the Steampunk motif and the way that the game transitions, users can see that a lot of style and imagination was used in the creation of the game. Being that it is based off of Jules Verne's novel "Around the World in 80 Days", fans of the author should find a lot to like here and those new to the author should be able to find something they like being that it is an established classic.
Pro Uncovered routes stay uncovered on next replay
Once completing a playthrough the routes that were uncovered will stay uncovered for the next playthrough, thus helping the player chart better courses the more they play the game.
Pro Very replayable
With the vast swath of options in 80 Days players will be hard pressed to replay the same scenarios more than once.
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 Single playthrough is short
Lasting about 2 hours a single playthrough is pretty short, though with all the branching story triggers there is plenty of reason to play over and over again.
Con Unintuitive user interface
The inventory system in the game can be hard to understand at first and it can be difficult to control the scrolling of text in some areas.