Not Exactly Henry Ford

The idea of designing and marketing your own vehicles is something that appeals to many of us, including me. That's why the announcement of Fishtank Interactive's Car Tycoon brought about so much excitement. However, the game comes far from realizing such a dream, seemingly rushed to market with some silly mistakes made. Ideally, you would design an engine, suspension, and axels before using many different techniques in order to bring it to the public. Car Tycoon takes a much less intricate approach, and even has many flaws in that.

In a nutshell, Car Tycoon has you select an engine, chassis, body, and interior to create a car model. Once these models are produced at factories, you then distribute these to dealerships and promote them by offering services at garages, advertising, and running promotions. Factories, garages, and dealerships are either given to you at the start of a scenario, or you can purchase them at auctions that run every few minutes during the gameplay. The downfall is that I did not just describe Car Tycoon to you in a nutshell, but more in its entirety.

Visuals/Sound

At first glance, the quality of the graphics in Car Tycoon looks pleasing enough. That is, until you try to play with the zoom feature one of many buttons along the bottom bar of the screen. Zooming into the action only enlarges the pixels, resulting in a blurry view. Because you can see so much more when zoomed out, this feature is utterly pointless. When zoomed out, there is a reasonable amount of detail in the vehicles and buildings.

For a game whose appearance is largely 2D, the load times frustrate me. It takes about a minute to get into a game, even if you're just reloading, meaning part of the data should already be in memory. The 60s era beach music played in the front end of the game is fitting, although I wish they had more than one track of it. There is more variety in tunes once the gameplay begins, with upbeat peppy music to support the atmosphere.

As far as sound effects are concerned, don't look forward to much more than a "cha-ching!" upon the sale of one of your cars. When one of those rings through your speakers every other second, it's a sign that you're company is performing well.

Gameplay

The simplicity of Car Tycoon would not be as painful if it weren't for the overwhelming number of broken features in the game. I don't know how many of them could be repaired by patches. For example, a scenario can take you upward of two hours to complete, so obviously a useful save feature would be in order. However, the save feature rarely works properly. When loading a previously saved game, sometimes the names of the cities in which you are working change, or disappear completely. Other times, the ability to win is completely lost. No matter what you do, you are told that a competitor has attained the goal before you. The losing message is accompanied by the aforementioned 60s music, which in this case is hardly appropriate.

Your secretary, whose messages appear in the lower right-hand corner of the screen every now and then, supposedly keeps you up-to-date. Are these supposed to be helpful? Quite a bit of the time, they appear to have no relation to what's actually happening in the game. She informs you, "The demand for cars has gone up." Then why are we selling less than ever before? About the only thing about which she is accurate is whether the company is gaining or losing money. I had to chuckle when I came across one of her messages that the developers failed to translate from German before releasing the English version. Sorry, that doesn't help me a great deal. Speaking of which, when the game crashes, which is far too often in the middle of the gameplay, the error messages are frequently in German as well.

Car Tycoon lets you cycle through your factories, dealerships, and garages by use of icons along the bottom bar of the screen. What irritates me is that there is no miniature map to use as a reference. You are forced to switch to a full screen map, which has the factories and dealerships marked. Garages? No. I found that if I located a garage and then switched to the map, it does have my viewpoint marked, so I could use that to determine where my garages were.

One of the ways in which to generate revenue in Car Tycoon is to sell fleets of cars to "big customers." So, I search the map and finally find one, and make an offer. But a bug is that big customers never accept offers. They just sit there even if I want to give them sedans at $10 apiece.

Games of Car Tycoon are played in two ways. You can select either one of numerous scenarios all of which basically involve selling as many cars as possible or an open-ended game starting in 1950, 1960, 1970, and so on. Scenarios have goals such as: sell a certain number of sports cars, or rebound from being in debt. You lose if one of your opponents reaches the goal first, but the only way that you are updated on the progress of your opponents is by a bar graph at the bottom of the screen. It seems, though, that even if your bar is ten times higher than theirs, they can still reach the goal before you do.

I can see somebody drooling over the chance to design the looks of a car. However, Car Tycoon never gives you the chance to alter the appearance of your vehicles. When you start the game, it allows you to choose a name for your company and the color of your company (red, green, yellow, or blue). Whatever color you choose is also the color of every single one of your cars, whether it's a sports car, a van, or a sedan.

Other manners in which you compete in Car Tycoon range from playing the stock market to participating in espionage and sabotage. These are worth very little though, because the espionage information is no longer available as soon as you close the espionage window, and you are never informed if your sabotage attempt was successful or not. Even when it appears to have been successful, no benefits come of it. Your competition might slow down in production for a little while, but nothing noticeably helpful to you occurs.

Advancing the technology in your cars is accomplished via in-house research and development or purchasing it through subcontractors. But just like garages and big customers, they are not marked on the map so you have to scroll all over the place searching for them. And as if that weren't hard enough, finding the same place again if you want to come back is next to impossible in a reasonable amount of time. Research would be far more interesting if it corresponded to major breakthroughs that did happen in history, such as anti-lock brakes and the like. And the fact that newer things are cheaper to develop than older things is just plain confusing.

Pros & Cons

Pros

• Decent musical score
• Detail in low-resolution graphics

Cons

• Useless features
• Very little customization
• No sound variety
• Stability problems
• Broken features
• Missing translation

Conclusion

Car Tycoon's information in general is rather vague. About the best summary you can find is the one that you receive annually on the screen. You can head over to city hall where you can find the number of each different type of car in the city, and by whom it was manufactured. Documentation is provided in the form of a thin manual that doesn't present much more information than is available from within the game's tutorial.

There are no difficulty levels, but you usually succeed in this game if you just stick to a plan such as making your cars as cheaply as possible and making a specific type of car. You can typically sell a lot of technologically inferior vehicles if they are inexpensive enough. I'd have to say that Car Tycoon is attempting to capitalize on a concept that has not yet been branded with the "Tycoon" label; one that has become synonymous with successful computer titles. I recommend it to only those who want a shallow opportunity at running their own car corporation.

SLRating: 4.5/10

Re-Printed From SLCentral

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