t’s been a productive year for Lionhead Studios. With a couple of new and well-reviewed games already under its belt in the last few months, the release of The Movies takes things in an entirely new direction. Through an ingenious combination of building simulation and actual honest-to-goodness movie creation, the studio has struck gold in offering something that people have wanted to try for a long time. This is the ultimate game of pretend for Hollywood wannabes – a unique gaming sensation that I feel comfortable recommending with only minor reservations.

The game starts you right at the birth of the movie industry in the 1920s as a fledgling studio exec trying to get some silent movies off the ground. As the years pass you must guide your studio to greatness by managing a number of factors. Maintaining a clean and attractive lot, keeping your stars happy and out of rehab, picking scripts, and of course making a healthy profit all figure in to your success. Regularly scheduled awards shows let you know how you stack up with the competition, and you’ll watch and participate as the movie industry grows from its infancy into the giant it becomes in later years.

All of the studio upkeep and sim-style people management is all for one end – making your own movies. And that’s where the game really shines. Early on, all your scripts are arranged by your writers, and the earliest black and white silent films you create are generally pretty dull. All of that changes when you gain the ability to write your own scripts. While the studio management aspects of the game offer more objective-based gameplay, the movie making lets you do things you’ve never been able to do in a game before. Through a simplified and streamlined engine, you’ll craft a film by piecing together scenes and characters into a unified whole. Hundreds of pre-made template scenes can each be tweaked in dozens of ways to set them apart. A vast array of costumes, props, sets, and camera angles change the look. Meanwhile, sliders let you alter the weather, the attitude of the characters, and the degree of action in the scene. Pick your actors from pre-made hires in your studio, or import cast members of your own creation from the flexible Star Maker program. Finish a script and it will go into shooting. Upon completion, you can even drag the movie into post production. Here you can make edits, add sound effects, music, subtitles, or even record your own dialogue through a microphone which will then be lip-synched by the actors.

Crafting these short epics is simultaneously time-consuming and hilarious, offering a degree of creative freedom that interactive experiences rarely achieve. In fact, it is the incredible level of innovation that ultimately left me frustrated, as I found myself hungering for even more ways to adjust the onscreen action. Also, the studio management aspect of The Movies could be dull for the wrong player, so it’s a good thing that a sandbox mode is included that eliminates most of the distractions beyond movie creation. You’ll certainly notice the glass ceiling on your creative freedom in the game, but The Movies offers 500 percent more flexibility than anything that has come before.