This is a pretty decent concept. It's like Tropico but with the addition of drugs. The game has a concept of clean vs. dirty money. All money comes dirty and can be laundered through various businesses. Clean money can be spent like in any other sim, but dirty money has to be manually delivered. This adds an interesting dimension to the game because dirty money represents a logistical challenge, since it is delivered to every business the player operates, just like a raw input, but the player can choose to use clean money instead and forego the logistics. This game is basically unplayable in its current state. You earn a wanted level (called Terror) which brings different levels of authorities to your business, a la GTA. It starts with customs agents investigating/seizing goods and ends with the military assaulting your facilities and seizing them. If the army seizes any building, it will shut down every other building in a small radius around it. It will also seize any of your lieutenants within that radius. To unseize the lieutenants and buildings, one must wait for a cool down timer + pay a fine. And this is where the game breaking behavior strikes: ithe fines are prohibitively expensive to pay. A single building costs $250,000 in clean money to unseize. For reference, the best money laundering building I've found so far can launder $30k every 8 game days, this is about every 4 minutes of game play at max speed. And you can build 3-5 of these per city. I ended up in a situation where I owed $5,000,000 in fines while paying salaries for 6 lieutenants frozen from a siege. It would be faster to just start over than to try and buy back all of my buildings. Also, it seems that there's no way to actually stop the army from coming once you hit a certain terror level. While you can lower you terror level by paying clean money, it doesn't seem to stop the more powerful enemies. So, it's a good game, but needs another year of development time.
The controls are good, the graphics are wonderful and the environment is enchanting. Unfortunately, the gameplay is monotonous combat punctuated by infuriating platform challenges. I spent 60 minutes in this section where you dodge bullets and timed spikes. The bullets are one-hit kills, if you get hit, you are warped back to the last save point. Even though it only takes you 20 tries to figure out the challenge, it takes you three minutes to get back to where you can try again. Once I got through all that BS. I was confronted with the same challenge, but this time, each attempt requires a consumable that only lasts for maybe 30 seconds and can only be purchased from a merchant at the start of the game. So I quit. I fully expect this game to be an episode of Angry Video Game Nerd.
