GearCity

No wonder years in development. Too much to manage by one player. Real companies have many people managing many departments. Original DETROIT (1994) game this is based upon was very manageable. Those designers understood "simplicity" for a person to play it as a game. But here is too many details and sub panels to control. Many events happen in a 1-month turn; competition, new tech available, government offers, military requests, new construction, labor issues. There is no advance news of what might be coming up as in real life. Screens and pop-ups are poorly organized. Many cover over each other, and Help/Tutorial screen has the same color as normal game pop-ups! Controls you need to access are covered up. Moving a pop-up screen may not move the ghost highlight for a button you must press! Poor Panel Design! They should "dock" in one location and not cover needed sub panels. This is what clean game design is about! Background music volume depends on the song played NOT the overall volume and often drowns out the tutorial voice. Some songs are barely audible. Changing the volume makes other songs too loud when they pop up. The game tells you how many months an action will take, OR it only tells you a future date and you must find the current date (very tiny) and figure how many months that will be. Glitches occur, like the ability to let time pass a certain number of months. Often this doesn't work and only one month will pass! One "bottom line" report for all factories and dealerships is presented each month. Details are elsewhere! You can't just duplicate a current factory. The game requires you to Upgrade or Redesign your single factory! Designing an engine that has to "fit" in a chassis by inches with a slider that moves by 2 or 3 inches... come on! If adding complexity, you better make it manageable! As a designer, you just have to know your limits. Sorry, but this labor of love ruins the final "picture" you are presented with, even if you wanted to like it

If you always liked excel-sheets, numbers, clicking here and there, adjusting - than this game is for you!

This game is not for everyone. You stare at graphs and numbers and plan out yourr producton across mutiple factories. It looks kinda bad, it has some weird quirks but it will be a time sink for the right perrson.

I have played on steam for years. Well worth it. There are a lot of ways to go about playing, and it is always fun to come out with your latest-and-greatest giga-super-car with 999 billion horsepower. A lot of business aspects, but also engineering.

The simulation is probably good. For the amount of time I forced myself to play, it seemed balanced, and the features are impressive and almost exhaustive on the topic of car manufacturing and business operations. But the game you interact with is >95% GUI. And the GUI sucks very, VERY much. It sucks in so many ways I cannot describe it effectively, tho I will try: Mostly it feels like an amateur programming project from 2001 with how bad it is to interact with. For example, data is presented like web 1.0 HTML tables, buttons are in inconsistent positions and sizes, there are horizontal scroll bars in windows that are unnecessarily small and cannot be resized, much information is obfuscated behind 2+ tier nested menus, and there is no taskbar or way to minimize windows so you can focus different things and multitask. Many indie solodev economy simulation games from even the 90's had such functionality and better presentation. Because there is no minimizing or taskbar, you will have windows on top of windows on top of more windows, and the worst part is that when you click on any overlapping windows, the click is registered also to the window below it! So you sometimes accidentally press buttons or move sliders you cannot even see. This is a problem solved 3 decades ago and everyone has the answer except this developer, how did this happen? Also the sidebar flies open when you hover the side of the screen, tho resets when you move the cursor even 1 pixel from it, and pinning it causes it to be in the way all the time. This is not how sticky hover elements should work. It is like the developer has never used functional GUI before. So very, very bad. This seems like bad parody to design a game with so much menu clicking but forgetting to make the menus good, yet it takes itself so seriously! How does this have any 5 star reviews? Is this a joke I do not understand?