Big Ambitions Review: My New Favorite Business Sim, By Far

After stumbling upon Big Ambitions by a happy accident, I decided to read a few reviews online and see what I was getting myself into. I was really surprised to see very little coverage of this ambitious little game out there.

On the spot, I decided to treat this game as a review. Now, I do love this game, but it’s far from perfect, and I do need to be completely unbiased for this review, naturally. So, here’s the good and the bad of Big Ambitions, after launching its 1.0 on August 28, 2026.

A Boring Concept, Executed to Perfection

Big Ambitions is a business and life sim game by Hovgaard Games. You get to work in a shop for a while, then assign and manage staff schedules, then plan and manage stock levels for your warehouses, and finally manage your factory output to match your sales and streamline everything.

Sounds exciting, huh? Alright, that sounds incredibly dull, I know, but somehow everything is just streamlined enough, playing the 50+ hour tutorial (not a joke), that it feels pretty smooth transitioning to each new level as a business owner.

Your rich uncle hands you $10,000.00 to get you started, and he takes you through the steps to starting your first business, and then every other more complicated step along the way.

You’ll also need to keep your character happy, which means going to nightclubs, taking showers, watching TV, and even playing on a PC. You’ll also need to worry about food, but you can’t actually starve to death. Your energy just drains faster when you’re hungry.

Run on no energy for too long, and you’ll pass out and incur a steep medical bill, as well as spawning in a far-away corner of the map. Better hope you can find a cab then; it’s a long walk back.

Business sims, by their nature, are dull games. Something I’d even refer to as a “dad game.” And most I’ve played are fun at first (I’ve always had an interest in business), but quickly become boring and feel more like actual work than anything else.

So far, I’m almost 70 hours in, and I intend to keep playing until I top the leaderboard. So that’s saying something.

Oh, and that leaderboard is a collection of all the biggest business owners in the city, and climbing it is immensely satisfying. Once you open one too many stores in a rival’s territory, they’ll launch attacks against your business, too.

They can steal your employees, drop their prices, flood the market with the same goods you’re selling, and who knows how many other conniving tactics to try to drive you out of town. It’s great fun; it’s just a pity you can’t launch counter-attacks.

But beyond being fun, is the game actually any good?

Beyond Gameplay, It’s Dead-Average

Big Ambitions is by no means a technical marvel. There’s a ton going on under the engine here, for sure. It’s always simulating your businesses, your employees, all your staff at HQ who need to make a series of decisions to keep your warehouses and businesses stocked up, etc.

So it’s a miracle that it runs smoothly, especially being the product of an indie dev. But it certainly won’t run smoothly on just any machine. I experienced a fair bit of frame drops on my laptop, which has an aging Ryzen 7 3750H, a 4GB GTX 1650, and 16GB of RAM. Turning down the graphics worked like a charm, though, but even then I still got the odd frame drop.

I’ve had zero problems on the PC, which is a fair bit beefier, with a Ryzen 7 7700, an RTX 4060, and 32 GB of RAM. Even at the highest graphics settings, it runs like a dream.

Speaking of graphics, though, this game is (again) nothing special. You can tell what everything is, but it won’t win any beauty contests. The graphics feel functional, and that’s about it. There’s no unique style or artistic flair; it’s just enough to make the game work well enough.

The songs contained on the various radio stations are decent, though. Some of them are actually surprisingly good, and the one about the guy who lost his invisible dog (again, not a joke) keeps getting stuck in my head.

The stations all feature fairly similar-sounding songs, though, and don’t exactly live up to their respective genres.

Finally, the cars sound just dead average. There’s no tyre squeal, even when you’re bolting down the high and do a sudden handbrake turn. There’s just nothing special about this game beyond a really addictive and satisfying gameplay loop.

Which ties perfectly into a belief I’ve always held about games. The most important thing is that they’re fun, and everything else is just some icing on the cake. I still cherish so many OSTs from time gone by, sound design that stood out, and graphics that blew my mind. But without a strong core gameplay loop, none of that matters at all.

So, in that respect, Big Ambitions ticks all my personal boxes. I wish I could give it a ten for how much enjoyment it’s brought me, but I have to remain professional here.

Finally, the game has an active Steam Workshop, too, so when you’re sick of the vanilla experience, you can spruce it up with a range of mods of your choice. This won’t impact the review in any way, but it’s always nice to know if a game’s moddable.

Verdict

Big Ambitions is a perfectly average game, with nothing to set it apart other than the intensely addictive gameplay loop. The graphics are just functional, the sound design is barely practical, but the gameplay is smooth and enjoyable, and that goes a long way in this instance.

The game doesn’t really need all the bells and whistles we’re so used to these days. Big Ambitions’ aim is to make business feel fun, and it does that almost to perfection. If you’re into business sims or tycoon-like games, this genuinely is an unmissable title.

I’d love to see more from this developer in the future, maybe even with some (dare I say it) stylized graphics and comprehensive sound design. It might not need it, but it never hurts to dream.