OFFWORLD TRADING COMPANY

looked good up to the point it said it required STEAM. nevermind, I'll buy something else.

Listening to the development team and reviews of this game I had high hopes for an in depth strategy game that would while away the hours but it's nothing like that, it's too basic and over very quickly.The concept is to build a business on Mars attempting to dominate products and buy out your competitors to win the game. There are only thirteen products to trade and they include necessities for life such as oxygen, food, water, fuel, and power. Then you have the building blocks of products such as steel, aluminium, iron, carbon, silicon, chemicals, and glass which are also needed to build your facilities. In fact the only real product is electronics.The land mass is broken up into tiles and you only have a limited number of tiles to build upon, although upgrading your HQ will increase the number of tiles you have available and you can buy additional tiles on the black market with each new tile you buy costing more than the last. Occasionally an auction occurs at random where you can buy new land which is a single tile with a commodity on board. This new land is not included as part of your tile allocation.There is a black market where you can carry out various sabotage types on your competitors and you can control information with a hackers array in order to manipulate prices, although the effects are very short lived. There is also a patents lab and an optimization centre which will help increase production of any commodity or product you choose.The problem with this game is that it is too basic, I found again and again I could beat my competitors very quickly. There is a building called Offworld Market. This building enables you to sell your wares off world for more than on Mars, much more. Once you build this building the money pours in and buying out your competitors is easy. Further you can build more than one of these buildings to sell more than one product off world.The concept of the game is interesting and sounds complex but the implementation is severely lacking. The development team claimed you'll have to keep a close eye on dynamic market prices to decide what to produce but you don't as there simply aren't enough commodities or products to warrant such close analyses. Another supposed challenge is to keep your business self-sufficient in order to keep your debt under control but again this isn't even slightly challenging. There's no longevity, no real challenge, the tactics to win are the same making it very boring after only a few hours play. I had high hopes for this game but it hasn't panned out that way. Also this is a steam game (aren't they all nowadays) so if you don't like steam that's another reason to avoid this game.