For people who love the music industry, and are looking for a way to at least get a taste of it, management sims like this can be a fun way to live the dream at least to some extent. The thought of being the person to discover, and then help to guide, a singular star or hot group absolutely has some appeal, but it isn’t unusual for these sims to make you feel a little more detached from the process and the talent you’re looking to cultivate. 

K-pop Idol Stories at least attempts to throw a little variety at you, injecting periodic mini games and some moments that try to help give everyone some personality at least. While there are multiple means of working to discover your potential talent, once you’ve gotten a few signed up you’ll need to engage in some pretty common activities for sims like this. Working to balance your budget with the need to whip your people into shape, you’ll need to make some tough decisions about what to prioritize and where to expose yourself to some risk. The hope is that if you’re able to hang in there and do your best you’ll be able to put together a winning crew, having enough talent in the right areas to be the next big thing.

The problem though, also one that isn’t uncommon for this subgenre, is that you’re going to have your work cut out for you. How and when you train, give people breaks, or let them blow off steam will require some degree of strategy, but a lot of the nuance in how best to handle this will need to be learned through trial and error. Since obviously you shouldn’t be able to do everything right your first time through, this is fine to some degree, but in this case the deck generally felt more stacked against me than normal. In addition, while the inclusion of some mini games makes for a decent diversion, I also wish they were handled with more care where the gameplay of it all is concerned. They do look nice enough, but in terms of the execution more often than not they lean into being a bit clunky. With some decision points I also wasn’t always sure how the choices I made would lead to certain outcomes, injecting more vagary into the mix on how best to move in the direction of success than should be necessary. I have no doubt that given the lack of options for a game with this specific flavor out there, this will still appeal to the right crowd, but while it’s certainly quite playable it falls short of what I’d consider great or terribly polished.