betting on anyone with early childhood trauma basically guarantees a huge dip during the inevitable midlife crisis when all that ♥♥♥♥ catches up to them, easy bag if u can see the signs

This game was a terrible dissapointment, sadly not only did it fail to meet the bar the previous title set, but actually failed to leave the ground.

First thing first:
The game looks wonderful, the thematics are good, the story telling is what I'd expect from this universe, all-in-all, the theme of the game feels great.

But the gameplay is, very nothing sadly...
There is 0 incentive to make money first off. Yes money is how you win, but it's basically a highscore, not actually money at that point. You have nothing to do with money other than dump it on stocks or put it in gambling. Because gambling doesn't actually cost money up front, nothing stops you from doing both, so any interesting resource management there is already diminished.

The game is also just, effectively a mobile game, the only goal is to get gold rating on 6 levels then you're done. If you're like me and don't care about getting top scores, this game will be even worse for you, ignoring the other problems.

Then you get the level/campaign/character design, which is, aggravting. For instance there is one character who just, loses access to betting. Does he get anything in return? some special feature? No he just don't have access to betting, which is like 33% of your money making options gone. You also have a character who's a market regulator, you'd expect his gimmick to be that he can rig the market? NOPE! He simply trades extremely slowly because he goes through a proxy. Another character just loses access to his consultants for part of his campaign. And while all these mechanics are fine *in theory* if they compensated you with neat skill/effects or buffs, no they all hurt you and/or remove decision making, in pursuit of making the game harder. The only character who felt fine was the sixth character, who, without spoilers, doesn't actually lose any decisions, and is probably the only character who is actually compensated for their negatives by having good consultants. Notice how I said 'fine', not good, fine. This is what I'd expect a basic character to be like, not end-game. Characters need to have some gimmick that makes you excited to play them, not some restriction that makes you never want to play them again.

This game is almost entirely carried by it's consultant system. Consultants are fun, and their characters are charming, and they change up how you play. I so desperately wish there were ways to acquire different consultants over play.

Now we get to the actual gameplay, trading. Now if this game had extremely high quality trading mechanics, it could probably make up for the lack of quality. But, it does not.
During gameplay you can buy, sell or short, nothing else. While this might have been interesting on it's own if you could make decent assumptions about a baby's life, you simply can't. As far as I can tell, events that happen during a baby's life are totally random, with one or two being restricted to childhood. I've seen a person get married 3 times in a row (so over a period of maybe 6 years?) for example. Life events seem to have 0 impact on eachother, so you can't predict that someone getting married leads to a higher chance of having a kid because that's not how the game works. Similarly, even if a person goes through a series of unfortunate events, they're exactly as likely to try suicide as the guy with a wife, 2 kids and a good life. Oh but also, because events are pretty much specific to planets, some things like suicide aren't even possible on most planets because there isn't an event for it! Same goes for marriage, and such, basically many important life events can just, not happen on most planets. And even though the game has like 200-300 events, it doesn't feel that much because they're all spread on different planets. It's a very common occurance to have multiple repeat events per life, regularly.

It doesn't end there though because next is balance! Other than the aforemention "playing as most characters feels awful because their unique gimmicks are all negative", the balance of the game is just off as well. There's no reason not to always bet on your first day, if you fail the bet, just start the campaign over. There's no reason not to immediatly ask the loan shark for money, if you lose everything, you're gonna restart anyway because there's no penalty for doing so. Once you reach your desired money goal, usually bronze if you don't care about score chasing like me, you have nothing to do the rest of the campaign and can just sit around in low stakes trading because risking your cash trading when you have what you need to progress is pointless. Some planets are also just definitely better than others. And some consultants are borderline useless too, and it's not like you can upgrade them or replace them with better consultants over time, you're just stuck with them.

And that's all there is to the game. This entire review touches every single mechanic the game has, literally all of them, which is sadly very little. As a fellow developer I also hate to give negative reviews but I adored the previous game so much, and I could not recommend this game, and I feel so strongly about this I felt compelled to actually review it despite my reservations about doing so. I would love to see this game get a rework, move away from the mobile-style format of levels you need to complete to get stars/trophies, and into an actual campaign mode, hopefully with characters that aren't purely detriments to play and with more decisions to make, since as it stands the game feels very lacking in that department. Organ trading simulator was an amazing game, and I really want to see this one reach the same heights, it feels like such a shame such great visuals and theming is given this level of gameplay.

I screamed at a street urchin for overcoming drug addiction and cult indoctrination to live a rich and full life. Little bastard cost me everything. 10/10.