Oil Tycoon Review (IL PALLINO)
TL;DR
7/10: Will gladly Drill Baby Drill and lead expeditions from my floating city based around a giant oil drill (and on multiple platforms) while I try to work with a limit of fifty people, balance deliveries on food and building materials, and hope that the upgrades I'm purchasing are the correct upgrades. The score would have been an eight but the length of the campaign does not represent value for $14.99 USD.
Overview
Tycoon game? City builder? Drill Deal - Oil Tycoon is a bit of both. The campaign features mostly unrelated missions, but satisfying all three victory conditions all have one thing in common: The player will need to build a sustainable economic model for their oil rig which involves expanding and upgrading buildings to increase the types of products to sell via two types of contracts, and hope that they picked the correct upgrades, purchased the correct tech tree advancements and product contracts without going broke while making sure that there's enough food to keep the employees fed. Building materials also have to be managed in order to build (or upgrade) buildings. Eventually, the player will need to build an array of cannons in order to fight back against pirates and various terrors of the sea.
Graphics and Sound
On the surface, the cherry Bomber Crew/Space Crew seemed like a poor fit for Drill Deal - Oil Tycoon, but after awhile, the cherry-looking characters were a perfect fit after witnessing giant sharks and Krakens that the player will have to shoot at to either protect their oil rig or protect tourists or natives on the run. The biggest negative in the graphics is the gold on silver text that appears at end of the day contract notifications.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2808399832
The sounds on the other hand are nothing special, except hearing the cannon(s) fire in combat situations sounds nice enough. The music isn't bad, but does not set the mood of the game, nor does it change for any reason.
Positives
It involves an oil rig, duh! How many of those types of games are on the market? There is The Oil Blue, but that game sucks and doesn't involve any real management.
The challenges are all interesting, be it trying to make money, make an environmentally friendly oil well (LOL), and fighting pirates. The way that each scenario has three victory conditions to meet makes the player want to play until they meet all three conditions. (For any n00bZ out there, players can be counted for mission success after satisfying only two of the three scenario requirements.)
Proving there's a world beyond the oil rig, a dock can be built for 2-4 explorers to go out (with enough gasoline, food, water, and sometimes other supplies) and explore nearby islands. Sometimes the player will make money, find supplies, and sometimes even find tech tree advancements. Sometimes the explorers will find nothing.
Negatives
The fifty employee limit. This limit makes building the library and jacuzzi only worth building for the sake of hiring five star employees, because the limit will make it likely that the aforementioned buildings will be unable to be staffed twenty-four hours because the player will need their employees doing *REAL* work. (As opposed to staffing entertainment buildings.) Fun fact: Ol' Il Pallino fully completed the final mission with only four star employees.
The campaign is too short for the cost of the game. The player may need to start over a few times early on when they realize that their rig's economic model is unsustainable or they did something that prevents completing a mission with all three objectives being met.
Conclusion
Drill Deal - Oil Tycoon is good fun for management/tycoon lovers, but there's some missing element that other (and better) games in the genre have. Not a strong buy, but potential players would do good to wait until a sale. (Unless a friend was gifting the game to the player!)
The honest word of Il Pallino... OR ELSE!
This review has been provided independently by an admin at REXCurse (REXnetwork).
No compensation was provided.
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