Industry Giant 2 Review (PS4)

So you think you can run a conglomerate?  You say you want to affect change and provide for the masses?  Well, here's your chance.  This is Industry Giant 2.

Industry Giant 2 is a business simulator and a fairly complicated one at that.  In it, you play as an all-seeing, all-knowing, invisible tycoon in your bid to create a monopoly in everything...or just one thing.  If you want to focus on grocery stores, that's possible.  If you just want to focus on toys, like Toys 'R' Us, you can do that.  While you can't create a bunch of one-stop shops like Walmart, put your fingers in any many pies as you want.  You get to decided the type of greedy bastard you want to be.

Gameplay-wise, the game is like a city simulator, but not really.  There are various cities around the map, but you don't build them up.  You can plop down parks, colleges, roads, and other things, but you don't have full control over when and where the people build.  Instead, you "influence" them to grow by giving them the products they want.  But how does one do this?  It's here where things get complicated.

As a tycoon, your job is to control every aspect of the products you're selling.  I mean EVERY aspect.  Gathering the raw resources, manufacturing the products in factories, and getting them to stores for the customers to buy, making sure you have enough products to buy, it's all on you.  You have build storehouses, transportation, and stores, making sure everything is in sync the whole time.  You have to determine how hard your workers work and how much to pay them, what and how much product the factories make, what products the warehouses store, where the transports take the products.  It's all...pretty tiring to be honest.

A number of factors go into meeting your goals.  Placing buildings is a very finicky process.  Generally, you want to aim for maximum effect.  You want your stores where there are a lot of customers.  You want your farms where they will produce the most, but as far as possible from cities.  You also want to make sure you products are within range of the storehouses and that your storehouses are in range of your stores.

At the start, place stores in areas with lots of customers to profit quicker.

It's not just enough to produce goods and build stores.  You also need to figure out the best way to get those goods from city to city.  You can chose to use trucks, trains, and boats to transport things from storehouse to storehouse.  Good sense comes into play when choosing your transports.  Trucks may be good for transporting good to small markets that are near your producers, but they don't make much sense when trying to supply a large market on the opposite side of the map.  When in doubt, trains are the way to go.

Everything would be fine if the game wasn't so clunky.  I mean EVERYTHING is clunky.  Producing goods is clunky, especially when said goods need multiple resources to create.  Every part of the good has to be in the storehouse or you're not making anything.  If you're not sure what you need, you can always check the Lexicon and search for whatever you're trying to produce.

Make sure everything you need is in a storehouse if you want to make products.

You'll see the makeup of every product as it becomes available.

Transportation is even clunkier.  You select a transport station near a warehouse, select the good you want to transport, select another transports station near another warehouse that's also near a store, then finally send your vehicle on its way to the next station, which is hopefully near another storehouse.  To select a station, you simply press X.  Then selecting goods requires you to press L1 to get to the goods menu and Square to select the goods.  Finally, to select the station to transport to, you have to press L3 (or pressing the left stick down for the uninitiated).  This sounds simple, but it took me TWO HOURS to figure out what to do and how to do it.  So yeah, don't pass on those tutorials.

Figuring out transportation can be a bitch if you forgo tutorials.

Well, on to the little stuff.  The graphics look good for what they are.  The buildings look good, on par with games like SimCity 3000, maybe even a little better.  You'll see the cities slowly growing, building its own roads and structures.  The resources are clearly indicated on the map, so you'll immediately know what building you need to harvest them.  You'll see your trucks, boats, and trains cruising along as fast as they can from transport station to transport station.  In short, the graphics are adequate.

With these comical-looking markers, you'll always know what harvest building you'll need.

The cities look quite good.

If the graphics have a flaw, it's that they are too small.  This is especially the case with the text.  It's barely readable.  There's no option to resize it.  You're just stuck to deal with it the best you can, which is bullshit.  You shouldn't need a magnifying glass to read the darned text.

If you want to read anything, bring your magnifying glass.

The sound is serviceable.  When you get close to a store, you'll hear a cash register.  Approach a chicken farm and you'll hear chickens clucking.  Things sound generic, but it's not something that can be vastly improved.  The same is true of the music.  Nothing will have you rocking your head, but you won't be reaching for your earplugs, either.  It works for the most part.  Each song has a unique flavor, but there aren't many tracks, so you'd better get used the them because they'll repeat often.

A major flaw I came across was a loading error where I couldn't load a game I'd been working on for a while.  It only happened once and I was able to load the game later, but it was quite odd.  There was some minor freezing here and there, but the game performs well enough otherwise.

On the whole, Industry Giant 2 is a clunky, complicated beast.  It has quite the learning curve, so you'd better be ready for some growing pains.  You'll learn that it's not easy being a greedy bastard.  Besides the small text size, though, nothing was too off-putting.  Things will be quite clunky in the beginning.  As long as you aren't expecting the game to be like SimCity or Cities Skylines, you should be able to get some enjoyment out of it.  Give It A Try.