Preview: Party Hard Tycoon’s Alpha Build is a promising and entertaining party management sim

TinyBuild’s Party Hard and TinyBuild’s Party Hard Tycoon are two very different games. The former is a game where you absolutely loath parties and instead of head-spinning until your brain drowns in blood, you “rationally” decide to coat the floor in it by murdering any and all partygoers you can get your hands on. Party Hard Tycoon is the exact opposite. As its title suggests, Party Hard Tycoon is a party management game where you set up and manage the events that all these spunky victims attend, and who knew it would be such a hard job?

Party Hard Tycoon is a game of investment. With your starting budget of $25,000, you have to pick one of two starting locales, a theme, entrance fees and some personnel before getting straight to work on pouring money into your party. Any items you purchase from the game’s three item categories—Equipment, Décor, and Trade—are there to stay; revisiting locations will still have items from previous parties remaining in their place allowing you to spend less of your hard earned dollars to get the party started. In the initial stages of the game, you can choose to either spend a lot on improving one location that you’ll be returning to often or spend a small amount to widen your coverage to across the city. Both choices have their own benefits and consequences, but even in this early Alpha Build, Party Hard Tycoon already caters well to multiple play-styles.

Items from each groups have their own uses and restrictions. Equipment items use up your electricity budget which differs by location but includes tech objects like speakers, DJs and smoke machines. Décor items range from mats and sofas for guests to hang out at to chat all the way to burning trees for building that ever-important hype. The last section, Trade, covers the essential consumables or any party: alcohol and food items. Depending on the party’s theme, you’ll want to have different amounts of items from each category to suit your guests’ expectations. For example, the 70’s and 80’s themed parties will have more focus on music and lights, whereas other genres might lean more towards food and drink.

Planning parties isn’t the only job that you’ll be doing as Party Hard Tycoon is quite an active game when the raves get going. While your guests are dancing, making out and trying to bottle each other, you have to make sure that the food and booze are constantly topped up, check that your personnel aren’t slacking off and turn on various electronics, all of which are on a cooldown timer. Even when the party is nearing its conclusion, you can risk investing more cash to keep the fun times rolling. Be careful though, as artificially extending the lifetime of the party may have diminishing returns overall; longer parties may end up decreasing your gross profit margin and heightening your party’s disappointment rating, decreasing the total amount of likes you can gain.

After the party’s conclusion, the total amount of likes you’ve gathered goes towards filling up your experience meter. Upon the meters fulfillment, you get to choose a reward. In its current Alpha build, Party Hard Tycoon’s available level rewards are on the bare side. Offering a choice of locations, party themes, and personnel. Right now, there are bountiful options to choose from but many—especially the personnel—don’t provide many differences from each other to make the rewards feel satisfying. Hopefully, as we come closer to release, PHT’s rewards will offer more of an incentive to keep playing through the full game’s campaign, extra maps and additional modes.

Party Hard Tycoon is an incredibly unique and entertaining party planning game. With the same style and comedic style of the original game, this spin-off has the potential to be another hit from TinyBuild. As of right now, the game is purely an amusing proof of concept that, when bulked up and fleshed out more, could be a great entry into an unventured subgenre of Tycoon gaming.

If you want to try out the Party Hard Tycoon Alpha for yourself, check out the official site here.