I know, I know - The game is 14 years old. It’s mentioned a little in a couple other threads but there aren’t any dedicated threads. Who cares you say? Probably not many.
I’ve had this in my backlog for a while and I finally played it and as a whole I think it’s pretty good. It’s basically a logistics / business simulation game.
Harvest some natural resources / farm some crop.
Use those in another building, sometimes with another ‘ingredient’ to convert them into a product to sell.
Ship the product to a store within a city to sell - cha ching, cash!
It’s actually a pretty simple game to come to terms with, but there are some aspects that make it pretty challenging. After cruising through the easy campaign, I keep failing on the medium campaign. It can be hard to juggle everything at once, and since there aren’t nice modern notifications. It can be frustrating because a problem may go unnoticed for a while if you’re not paying enough attention to a little icon over a building or train.
One of my biggest problems is managing the warehouses and making sure they are staying in balance. You can set limits on how much of a particular good it will accept, but I think I’m overusing warehouses by trying to keep too many types of goods in each one. This is tempting because land is needed for factories, farms, and truck and train depots.
Also, my train tracks haven’t been efficient. Trains spend too much time waiting for another train to exit the depots.
In any case, it can be addicting to try and meet the requirements of the scenario to move to the next one. If you like these types of games and haven’t played it in the 14 years it has been out I’d say give it a try. The lack of notifications can be frustrating and may be a large source of the challenge, but it’s still a fun game. During sales you can usually pick up for fairly cheap.
I’ve had this in the wish list for a while, but never bit the bullet as the review are basically ‘Not as good as OpenTTD’, which is all I need to know.
Do you play OpenTTD? How does it compare from your POV?
I really loved this game. It had some flaws with the age of it, but otherwise was great fun for years in MP. I believe the new iteration, Industry Transporters, is in EA and expecting MP… someday.
I loved it at the time, though I daren’t open it up again for fear of having the nostalgia destroyed. It’s a lot less openended than OpenTTD, in a pretty similar vein to the Anno vs Sim City divide.
I finally persevered in the first scenario of the medium campaign. I really had to expand into new businesses pretty aggressively to make it, and I made it in the last month of what I think was a 10 or 15 year game.
I’ve played 15-20 hours over the past week or so and the fact that I kept coming back to try and beat that scenario is pretty good evidence that I like the game. My intention for the past couple days was to buy either Rimworld and / or Factorio, but Industry Giant 2 kept pulling me back. I’ll probably take a break from it now, but it will go on my ‘play again list’ instead of my ‘done list’.
