Industry Giant 4.0 is a business simulator game by Munich-based devs Don Vs Dodo and published by Toplitz Productions. Launching on PC on 24th Oct, I had the chance to play the demo of what is a hopeful revival of the Industry Giant franchise.
Ah, Breaker One-Nine, This Here’s The Rubber Duck!
The first Industry Giant game was released in 1997. Oasis had just released their 3rd album “Be Here Now”, and Backstreet Boys were telling everyone that “Backstreet’s Back” while the Spice Girls were getting us to “Spice Up Your Life”. Meanwhile, gamers around the world were playing GoldenEye 007 on their Nintendo while others were venturing into a strange top-down game called Grand Theft Auto. Life was good.
There were subsequent offerings of Industry Giant 2 in 2002 and then a spiritual 3rd entitled “Industry Transporters” in 2015. With the first 2 games of the franchise receiving great reviews, and the 3rd taking a bit of a hammering from the fans, a lot is riding on the fresh-faced 4.0 release.
Gameplay
The concept of Industry Giant 4.0 is to successfully build an industrial empire from nothing. While games such as Transport Tycoon have you creating a logistics supply chain across a map, here you have to also build and run the businesses that the supply chain will serve. At launch, Industry Giant 4.0 will have 25 different industries ranging from mines, farms, and manufacturing plants and approx. 60 goods to manage. There will also be 30 types of vehicles at your disposal.
Starting in the 1950s during the 4th Industrial Revolution, the demo begins by giving you a very basic step-by-step guide to start you on your way. Choosing your company philosophy affects how Industry Giant 4.0 will play, including events, policies, and financial influences.
Let Us Begin
Set in a 9km² map (100km² in the full release), you take to the assortment of tools on your screen to build a farm and some fields in the designated town. Using your mouse to navigate around, construction is a simple case of clicking on the relevant building from the menu and clicking where to deploy it. Having created a farm and surrounded it with fields, next was constructing a lorry depot and purchasing a fleet of lorries with trailers.
Setting up a Truck Line, or route, was paramount to operations. From experience of other transport games, it was a similar experience of selecting the locations of where you want the vehicle to stop. You can then assign to each location whether to load and unload, which commodity, and also the quantity.
So far Industry Giant 4.0 appeared fairly self-explanatory. That was until the trucks did not appear to want to leave the depot and do what I had asked of them. I could not fathom why this was happening, or if they did drive to the destination they did not take a full load despite goods being ready and capacity available.
Choo Choo
I was slightly puzzled, meanwhile, the next part of the tutorial was playing out. I built a train station in a forest area to collect wood to then take to a sawmill that I had built in a nearby town. Connecting the rails and buying a train presented no issues. However, once I then set the route for the train along with the loading and unloading of wood, nothing happened. I sat there for a while bringing up a multitude of inquiry windows trying to fathom out what I had done wrong. I couldn’t find anything. With no other ideas to go by, I removed the stops from the route and did it again. All of a sudden the train was released from the station and I had some wood going to the sawmill.
Seasons came and went as the date progressed in the bottom right of the screen. While this creates a graphical representation across the map, the seasons also affect yield from places such as farms. This in turn has a knock-on effect along the whole chain. The supply and demand has to be monitored vigorously to ensure that you produce, and supply all at the right time. It is a bit of a nightmare as there is so much to be aware of.
Each town has its own supply and demand requirements in order to grow. By clicking on each town you can find the information very easily. Whether your vehicle will decide to go there and deliver is another thing.
Money, Money, Money
It was at this point in the demo that I could not work out what I needed to do. Money was dwindling rapidly as I was not making any sales. The objective “Transport and sell 3 specific goods” did not seem to be satisfied as trucks were not delivering fruit and veg to the shop in town to be sold.
A processing plant was requested to be built on the map and I obliged. Once more I then sat there waiting for a guide as to what to do next. Nothing appeared. I started to interrogate the plant and could see that it required cardboard boxes and fresh fruit and veg in order to package up and output the completed products. Immediately I changed truck routes from the farm to go to the process plant rather than the shop, while I tracked down cardboard boxes. I finally found them as an output from the sawmill and selected them.
Heading To Fruition
Having arranged my transport accordingly, the processing plant started to receive, rather sporadically, items that could then produce the final packaged fruit and veg product. All ready for selling to the shops. Eventually, the city did grow and another objective was met. This was just one example of the requirements for a couple of outputs. I could see that eventually the chains would become more in number as well as complex to manage.
Graphics & Audio
Visually, Industry Giant 4.0 lets you zoom in lovely and close. This means you can see the animations of the vehicles and sites carrying out their work in detail . You can spin around the map and see each location with ease. While the gameplay graphics are good, the windows that you must navigate could be a bit better worked out. You sometimes have a few up at once when organizing your transport and quickly the screen is a bit of a mess as the windows are quite large and cannot be resized.
Industry Giant 4.0 has a progressive soundtrack. This plays in the background while the sound effects vary depending on how close to the action you are. For example, when you are zoomed right out of the map, all you can hear is the roar of the wind. As you zoom in this changes to birds tweeting, along with vehicle effects and background music. There is also an option to play music from Industry Giant 2.
Longevity
Once you get your head around how to play Industry Giant 4.0 then there would be many an hour to be had growing your empire. However, the game does have a steep learning curve. To the point that I felt that if I was any good at it, then I could probably go and run a business for real life. Yes, the game really is that involved.
Final Thoughts
The gameplay of Industry Giant 4.0, like its predecessors, is all about the detail. Business management, logistical management, financial management and even construction management all play a huge role. I found trying to run all 4 of them in such graphic detail pretty confusing. The tutorial in the demo felt lacking. Thanks to this the understanding as to why vehicles were not serving their routes illuded me throughout. I just sat there watching my produce slowly rotting in the warehouse. Hopefully, that is just my experience and somebody else who is a bit more business-savvy could take this game on and make a profit. It will be interesting to see how Industry Giant 4.0 is received when it is released.
Disclaimer: A code was received in order to write this preview.
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