What was that, eight, nine week of Halo reviews? Boy, am I glad I wrote them last year over the course of like a week or two. Saved me no end of time this year, especially with my reduced writing schedule. I’m actually doing this one a couple months in advance too, since I’m not rushing to get something out each week now (I am, after all, a very busy man these days!). So yes, today, Gas Station Simulator.
This is, as one would expect, an America-set business simulation game in which you own and operate a gas station or, if you’re British like me, petrol station. Your role requires you to order fuel to fill up your own tank, then pump it into customer’s cars for them, get paid, then repeat the process. Then you can start selling things in the shop attached to the pumping station, so you have to start scanning products on the checkout, ordering stock, selecting what goes on the shelves, tidy up because people leave trash and mud everywhere… And then you unlock the garage were you can work on cars for people, which means you need to order things like tires or wing mirrors, and then you unlock the car wash, which means you need to start washing people’s cars for them with a high-powered hose…
And that’s the nature of the base-game. I made the foolish mistake of picking up the air-strip DLC, which gives you access to a small airport on the other side of the street and, with it, the frequent airplanes that need fueling up. Why is this foolish?, I hear you ask. Because the game lets you hire people to do some jobs for you. In my save, I’ve got two day shift and two night shift workers cover the garage, the fueling, the cleaning and the checkout, so that there’s always someone doing the main bulk of the work. Sadly, you’re not able to delegate the product ordering, the airport stuff or the car wash, which means I spend most of my time going back and forth between car wash and airport, trying to make sure that we’re not keeping people waiting, and that in itself has sort of sapped some of the enjoyment from me.
At my core, I rather enjoy business simulation games. I’m never going to be an immensely wealthy man, but with games like this, I have the opportunity to feel like some sort of a success, albeit slowly and after a grind. It is, for me, generally quite fun. It’s why I enjoyed Lawn Mowing Simulator, and why I’m also currently enjoying The Tenants, which I may or may not write about at some point. I enjoy working towards a goal which I can set, outlined by goals the game will give me to indicate my next logical step. In the late game, when it’s just a matter of “get cash to buy the upgrades and get more cash”, it stops being fun for me, and sadly, it only took about 4-5 hours of gameplay to get past the main campaign. Not necessarily a problem, if you’re looking to become a gas station millionaire and are prepared to put the graft in, but I’m not that into business simulation games. If you’re not going to make a point of telling me “hey, early a million dollars”, that’s not going to be a goal I set myself unless it looks obviously attainable, and when my cash flow situation in game struggles to get past the $5k mark (fuel is expensive to buy and always seems to happen at the worst time), I’m clearly never going to have the cash to hit such a goal.
Visually, it’s nothing overly special, but also, nothing too disappointing. It does what it needs to do, has a few visual jokes in there (at least, I think the alligator in the sewer is supposed to be comedy), and there are certain side-activities you can perform if you want to entertain yourself outside of the business side of things – such as trying to get rubbish into a skip from the furthest distance in just one throw.
I will say, it seems odd to me that there are still Christmas themed visuals in place, such as Santa sometimes flying overhead, or people wearing festive hats, so I’m not sure if they’re meant to have done an update and just haven’t yet, or whether that’s a permanent thing, but the Santa thing really grates on me now I’ve heard him and his damn jingling bells a dozen times every half hour…
6/10
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