It's a little less brutal in the campaign mode-a comparatively rudimentary affair based on meeting certain conditions with limitations on buildings and resources-but I admit I never fully found my footing in the multiplayer. One second you're converting iron to steel as usual, or looking for a plot for a new wind-power generator, and then, bam, you're slapped with a notice that you've been bought out.
(And no, alas, I wasn't the lucky entrepreneur.) At times, indeed, it suffers from the suddenness of such victories, as it's difficult to keep tabs on how your rivals are doing aside from watching their stock prices. The longest match I've ever sat through lasted for about half an hour the shortest lasted about the span of a commercial break. Victory comes when you're still standing after all of this and you've bought out all your opponents. And at last, when things get really dirty, you call up the Black Market to do nasty things like freeze a competitor's water sources, trigger bombs, or instigate worker strikes. (But watch it! You can oversaturate the market by unloading too many goods.) You start buying stock from other players, making sure they don't buy you out completely in the process.
If you've played your claims right, you've got plenty of surplus resources that you can sell to pay off debt or buy new claims that go up for auction every now and then. Aside from using the four to five new claims that appear each time you level your base, from here on out it's all about buying and selling. From there it's all about staking claims-slapping down a hydro plant for your workers here placing an iron mine over an iron node there-to the point where you simply run out of claims. Once your claims are used up, you have to rely on your cash-making skills to expand.Īnd that's where both the fun and the differences begin. This is cutthroat strategy as mining accountants see it, where the world turns according to who has the highest numbers. As with so many other strategy games, each match begins with a probe working its way through the darkness beyond the home base, uncovering, as it goes, nodes for metals and resources like water on hexagonal spaces. This may be science fiction, but it's the kind that could become fact if given enough decades.įamiliarity, of course, isn't necessarily a bad thing, and that's especially true when it's used to ease players into navigating the strategic map.
Not only do Mars’s crimson vistas lack the exotic appeal of a Pandora or even a Hoth, but for the most part they conceal little more besides old terrain friends like aluminum, carbon, silicon, and iron. Mars is a fascinating choice, as it's both realistic and (if you'll pardon this use of the term) a tad mundane. The world here is Mars, although, aside from OTC's red-hued maps and the looming graphic of the Red Planet on the title screen, it doesn't assert its presence much. At heart, this is cutthroat strategy as mining accountants see it, where the world turns according to who has the highest numbers.īy clicking 'enter', you agree to GameSpot's But you'll find no marching soldiers and rumbling tanks here. Even better, OTC takes this bleak concept and builds an entertaining strategy game around it-one that shines even on Steam's Early Access. Cynical, perhaps, but it's a vision that Offworld Trading Company seems to share. Perhaps life in Texas’s oil country has left me jaded, but I've come to believe that our first earnest forays onto other planets will begin only when we've stripped our own of most of the valuable resources underground. The review below critiques a work in progress, and represents a snapshot of the game at the time of the review's publication. While the games in question are not considered finished by their creators, you may still devote money, time, and bandwidth for the privilege of playing them before they are complete. GameSpot's early access reviews evaluate unfinished games that are nonetheless available for purchase by the public.