Tycoon City: New York Review

Tycoon City is a visually rich and fun representation of New York City, but isn’t as open ended or as complex as it should be, and in the end, that detracts from the game.

(Reviewed using a Pentium 4m, 1.6GHz, 1 GB RAM, 256MB ATI Radeon Mobility 9600, and two-channel sound. and also a Pentium 4 2.0GHz, 1 GB RAM, 512 ATI Radeon X800, SoundBlaster Extigy)

Tycoon games are to the PC market what first-person shooters once were: ubiquitous and spread across the quality spectrum.  The genre has spawned great, long lasting games like Railroad Tycoon--the game that gave the genre its identifying word--to Prison Tycoon, a horrible piece of trash that is an obvious money grab and is too expensive at any price.  With that, it is interesting that no one has made a successful “city tycoon” game, where building and managing properties is at the forefront--perhaps SimCity’s presence is so dominant game developers think twice about challenging it. 

However, Tycoon City is not SimCity.  You do not manage infrastructure and levy taxes, instead you buy and sell properties and businesses, acquiring wealth through applied capitalism.  You expand your businesses through upgrades, and these upgrades affect multiple factors.  Build a bigger storefront sign, and you expand the reach your business has through the city.  Add another employee, and your customers become more satisfied.  Balance is forced upon you because each building can only be upgraded so much, so the player must decide what factor or factors is most important in running each business.  Also, businesses affect nearby resident’s happiness, based on what they want and what they need.  If you place the wrong business in a particular neighborhood, it results in angry residents and a poorly performing business.

The game offers several tasks to accomplish as well which are called Opportunities.  Successfully accomplishing Opportunities results in a range of rewards, but the real meat is landmark bonds.  When you save up so many landmark bonds, you can build a particular New York landmark, giving the neighborhood is own look and adding to your status in the game.  Other than the preset missions and landmarks, you are allowed to build whatever you want wherever you want.  You are also able to buy and sell businesses.  This can be used to bolster a sagging bottom line by selling off poor performers and buying profitable businesses, but your competitors can come in and buy that sold business and turn it around, allowing them a toehold in a neighborhood you’ve built. 

As you build out a neighborhood and reach gameplay goals, new districts in Manhattan open up to the player.  Each district, much like in Manhattan itself, has its own feel and demands.  The player must be cognizant to what the populace demands and what the competitors already supply.  Each person on the street can be queried to what they want and what their needs are.  Different types of people want different businesses available to them, even if the live in different neighborhoods.  The trick is to find the one particular business that will satisfy as many needs across demographics.

All of this is great in theory, but in practice, it isn’t pulled off particularly well.  To begin with, since upgrades are monetarily free, there isn’t much of a deterrent to build a business, let it generate a few months of lackluster profits, then sell it back to the city at a profit.  With the trouble it takes to place, upgrade, and expand a successful business, Tycoon City almost plays easier by being a slumlord than by nurturing the neighborhoods.  The capitalism aspect isn’t handled well, either.  This is a game without a game.  After a couple hours of playing it becomes obvious that you cannot lose.  The missions will all be successful--just some may take longer than others--and it is nearly impossible to lose money.  There are no penalties, taxes, or any other deterrents to building as fast and as furious as you can--plus you can always sell off businesses to fatten the coffers and keep constructing.  Your AI opponents are useless--they are neither aggressive nor very smart--so beating them in business is excruciatingly simple.  This is the biggest issue with Tycoon City.  You follow the instructions to a tee, rinse, and repeat, and finally win.  There are no real challenges.  After a few hours of playing, it becomes tiresome.

Thankfully, however, there is a sandbox mode that takes you out of the single-player game.  The sandbox mode focuses entirely on building--which Tycoon City does well--and doesn’t require the player to unlock more neighborhoods.  Because the business-building portion of Tycoon City is so shallow, the sandbox mode gets to what the game does best more quickly and without forcing the player to jump through superficial hoops. 

Graphically, Tycoon City is gorgeous.  SimCity 3000 was supposed to have a 3D gameworld where you could fly through the streets and see what your city looks like from the sims’ perspective.  Maxis was never able to pull that off, but Deep Red does and does so very well.  SimCity 4 and its isometric view now feel very dated.  The screen scrolls very smoothly, and zooms in and out without noticeable delays.  On a machine approaching the minimum requirements, Tycoon City runs very well, but on a nicely tuned computer, Tycoon City is jaw dropping.  Each building is customizable with bolt-ons, and a lot of these details animate.  Real-life advertisements flash on top of buildings, and real-life businesses can be built alongside their computer-generated peers.  Sure, there might be a few too many Hertz car rental locations, and too many bars generically named “dive bar,” but the variety is enough to look great and not feel too repetitive.  Add to that the ability to zoom out to see the entire island then zoom in over Battery Park and drive the camera up to Harlem at street level, and Tycoon City really shines.

The sound in Tycoon City is pretty well done.  The sounds go along well with the game, even if the in-game characterizations are annoying and ooze with video-game-dialogue cheese.  The music that appears in the game is nice and catchy, but is best experienced with a 5.1 setup. 

Tycoon City, even with its underlying shallowness does appeal to a certain type of gamer.  Deep Red has said that it wanted the strategy portion to be streamlined to appeal to a large cross-section of gamers--but there is a fine line between streamlined and simplistic and Deep Red has crossed it.  Again, however, for anyone interested in a beer-and-pretzels building simulation, especially for anyone who has lived in or traveled to or has an interest in New York, it’s a solid game and a lot of fun.  For someone who is looking for a capitalism simulation, or a deep strategic experience, Tycoon City is not the game for you.  In any case, Tycoon City may not stay on one’s hard-drive for a length of time--but it offers a great experience for as long as it can hold one’s interest.

Tycoon City is worth a recommendation, albeit a guarded one.  If a player is interested in the subject material or is interested in a light strategy experience, Tycoon City fills the bill nicely.  That being said, Tycoon City has the feel of being pushed out the door, and it leaves one to wonder if a deeper game was planned but couldn’t be pulled off before the release date.  It also leaves one to wonder if Deep Red’s explanation about appealing to a larger set of games is nothing more than corporate spin.  To begin with, some of the textures aren’t loaded during install.  If you place a bouncer at the dive bar, for instance, a yellow block with “Default Texture” written in it appears, and then a pink-granite block is placed in the game.  The initial tutorial lasts about five minutes and deals more with camera controls than with the actual game play.  The manual is a portable document format file on the CD, which isn’t usually an issue, but this file has registration marks on it, as if it were ready to go to the printer but burned onto the CD at the last minute.  Atari’s technical support was contacted twice about the texture issue, and a response was not received either time.  A patch has been hastily cobbled together--as evidenced by a complete lack of release notes for the patch at the time of this writing--and fixes the texture problem, but doesn’t do anything to alleviate the rushed-out-the-door flavor.

In the end, Tycoon City is an enjoyable, shallow game with plenty of wow-factor.  If you are a player that likes strategy games that are easy to pick up and don’t require a learning curve, try this title out.  If you enjoy building games, again pick this up.  If you are looking for a tycoon game that will challenge your business savvy, this isn’t going to be it.  If you are looking for a fully open-ended building game, this also isn’t going to be it.  For what it is, Tycoon City is decent. . .the problem is there’s a market full of merely decent tycoon games.