Car Tycoon

Have You Ever dreamed of being the cigarchomping CEO of a major American automobile manufacturer making key decisions on chassis components, maintenance packages and consumer finance incentives? Neither have we.

Your goal in Car Tycoon is to become obscenely rich by building and selling cars. You do this by making cheaper cars than your competition, offering customers incentives such as free maintenance and bombarding the populace with ads. You can play a scenario, or just kick off in 1950 and plough through to 2005.

Things take place in the Sim-game standard overhead view of your city. It’s colourful and busy, though looks blurry when you zoom in, but at least there has been an attempt to move away from the boring static screens so often found in games of this ilk.

We won't beat around the bush - Car Tycoon is otherwise generally pretty bad. There are crucial shortcomings in what decisions you can make, and the feedback you receive after you’ve made them. Take car manufacturing for example, each design is made up of only four components, all your cars are the same colour, and try as we might we couldn’t even name any of them.

Worse still is trying to find any useful information. Virtually the only data on sales comes in the form of the all-too-brief annual report. Where are the screens showing which models are selling and what customers want? The simulation is also dodgy. You decide to place your luxury car dealership in the rich neighbourhoods to boost sales. It doesn’t work. Funny that, as we thought economic sims tended to function better based on the laws of economics.

Add in massive loading times, unexplained features, as well as bugs that can lock your PC, leaving messages in German on your screen, and you get a pretty repellent package.