Cartel Tycoon Review | New game network

Drug trafficking is an illegal and dangerous business, but that makes it an enticing subject for much of the media. Video games have jumped on this bandwagon lately, with everything from Weed Farmer and Drug Dealer simulators to more elaborate attempts like Weedcraft Inc. Cartel Tycoon is the latest entry to delve into the setting, offering players the chance to create a Build drug manufacturing and oversee empire in this business strategy game.

Cartel Tycoon is set in the 1980s when drug trafficking was booming in Latin America. Players take control of a capo, the newest “entrepreneur” hoping to make it big. After all, from a small piece of land you hope to grow your production and your territories. The solo campaign mode features three stories to play through, although the first is just a tutorial. In the tutorial you are a young man and the son of an existing powerful drug lord trying to break into the business with the help of one of the lieutenants. The tutorial goes over the basics of this strategy game, although it’s not as extensive as it could have been. It explains some of the structures you can build, but then it just ends without addressing every aspect or the deeper late-game mechanics.

You can continue playing the tutorial map and learn for yourself, or hop into one of the two story campaigns available at launch. The first story promises a medium challenge, while the second campaign is more difficult. It’s nice that the developers have tried to fit some sort of narrative into the experience, and you’ll meet a range of characters and observe some scripted events along the way. There’s some conversational text to read and even a few cutscenes – although it’s mostly for window dressing. Disappointingly, while the tutorial features voice acting, the actual story campaigns do not. Aside from the campaigns, which last around 10 hours in total, you can also jump into a hardcore survival mode or a freeform sandbox mode with customizable settings.

The core of the experience is building and operating a drug manufacturing industry. As with most games of this type, you’re free to zoom and rotate the camera across the lush green terrain and start placing structures. However, unlike most games, this tycoon has very few buildings at its disposal. There is only a farm, a transport depot, a warehouse and a few other buildings to place. Sure, some buildings have different modes (e.g. farms that can choose between different yields), but on the whole it’s not an overly complex experience. In the end, you’ll figure out which layout and design works best and most efficiently, and as new areas unlock, just start rebuilding in the same way.

Placing structures is easy enough, but you also need to make sure they are connected with roads. Roads are a bit of a nuisance in Cartel Tycoon, seemingly by design. Placing roads is very free and you can put them on any side or corner of the building and connect them to another road. The problem is that all AI vehicles transporting the goods cannot “drive through” buildings. This means you can’t have a hub-and-spoke design, you must place additional roads so that each structure connects to a main feeder road. This design results in a lot of wasted space and a flood of back roads. The only exceptions to this are Lieutenant units, as they can pass through buildings. Also, there is a small bug, when you delete a building, the small indentation driveway that connected it is not deleted and cannot be removed.

The campaign structure itself follows narrative elements that happen at certain points and a series of linear quest chains that guide you through building and expanding. You start with a piece of land in the fictional nation, and the rest of the map is divided into territories. To claim territory, you may need to fight rival gangs and complete a questline for the local town’s mayor. After that, the territory is yours to build on.

Many of the structures work in two ways – they automatically interact with everything in their radius and have the option to manually designate a target. Storage depots, for example, automatically use the yields from surrounding farms. You can then use a transport company that can pick up the goods from warehouses nearby and manually point to the airport/seaport as the destination. After all, this is about growing and exporting the drugs, not storing them. You can eventually build your own airports to create these smuggling points on the map, but you’ll often use the seaports and airports already in place to conduct the sales.

There is a variety of commodities in the game – you start out by growing opium and you can work your way into other drugs like cannabis and heroin. The prices of the goods are displayed and generated randomly, so that on some days you can earn more or less money with an export. You can also trade with locals or grow your own non-illegal goods like vegetables. Cleverly enough, the game even has a building where you can pack drugs into veggies to appear to hide them. But interesting ideas like this are underexploited – it seems no better to export drugs directly than to try to hide them. If you have a warehouse full of veggies (legal, with no special payload), the cops will be just as suspicious. In fact, you could just become a legal vegetable farmer, which offers flexibility but also seems a bit silly.

In order to get the business off the ground, the most important resource is money – and it comes in two forms: legal (laundered) and illegal. Illegal funds can be used to construct most buildings, and legal money can instantly complete any structure under construction if you so choose. Money is also used for the research tree, where you can pay to improve the usefulness and effectiveness of the different building types. To get legal funds, you can interact with cities on the map where a limited number of structures can be placed, from churches to taxi companies that will launder your money over time. Mansions are the building that manages your finances and again, everything around it is automatically funded for upkeep and you can manually designate more remote locations for cash flow to take place.

Mansions also allow you to hire lieutenants, the only units in the game that you can control manually. These people are hardcore criminals and will do anything that is asked – as long as you give them raises to keep their loyalty strong. You can ask them to do things like assassinate another lieutenant, manually deliver goods and money between remote locations, and so on. You can also be instructed to attack buildings owned by a rival gang – which simply means waiting for your side to win, provided your firepower rating is higher than the defenders. Having to constantly monitor these units and manually move them around the map can become tedious – as can some other aspects of the game.

It may seem like once you get some farms, roads, transportation, and exports going, all powered by a mansion or two, you can leave Cartel Tycoon to its own devices. However, this is not the case, and a significant amount of micromanagement does indeed need to take place. There’s a constant balancing act of money laundering to keep your empire afloat – buildings start to close down if their maintenance isn’t paid for, which can quickly snowball. You can switch maintenance from legal to illegal money, which can give you a temporary lifeline. You also have to keep two meters in mind – the loyalty of the locals and their terror. Those two meters guide many of your actions and, in turn, can have snowball consequences that are difficult to recover from.

Keeping the local populace loyal is one way to keep yourself alive and avoid revolution. You can visit cities on the map and interact with the mayors to ensure they are “on the same page” with your operations. As mentioned, structures such as churches and casinos can be built where you can spend money to improve ratings. You can ask mayors for a favor to help you manage the two meters, and it all costs money. The conversations with mayors are scripted and unfortunately the text is repeated for pretty much every city.

It is also very important to keep terror levels down. The meter goes up as you expand your territory and fight rival gangs, or even just when your warehouses and buildings are full of “goods” waiting to be exported, drawing the attention of law enforcement. As the terror increases, the cops will quickly be upon you, blocking important roads, seriously disrupting your transportation routes, as well as completely closing down your buildings, which after a period of time you will have to buy up. Just like potentially collapsing your economy because you don’t have enough cash on hand, slipping the terror knife too far creates a snowball effect of problems that campaigns can be too difficult to recover from.

So while things can get tricky, you can at least enjoy the game’s colorful aesthetic. 1980’s style is subtly recreated and you can zoom in almost to ground level to see your business in progress. The colorful terrain and hustle and bustle of ground, sea, and air traffic give the map a decently lively feel. The art style isn’t particularly original, but is of decently high quality, as is the UI design. The light background music fits the setting with Latin American beats. The game also runs without any technical hiccups, although there were the occasional gameplay bug or two.

Cartel Tycoon is a fairly well designed production management game with decent mechanics and presentation. The core gameplay is fairly predictable, and if you can stand the micromanagement, this might be a solid option. However, there’s not much variety or depth here, and while the drug trade makes for a somewhat unique premise, the game doesn’t take full advantage of it. Replacing the drugs with something else (which you could actually do) doesn’t change much – and you might as well play Tropico instead, which is arguably a more extensive and enjoyable game – although this title comes in a lower price point.