Commuting is the most important self-inflicted wound in human historical past. Whole cities are designed round numerous dead-eyed souls expending monumental quantities of bodily and psychological vitality ferrying themselves between their bedrooms and the place the place their employment occurs, flushing out and in each morning and night like fleshy clockwork, like turds on the tides. When the nice revolution comes and we’re freed of the shackles of capitalism, commuting shall be a protracted useless nightmare informed to frighten unruly kids. You’ll by no means should stroll greater than fifty toes to get the place you wish to be in my new and excellent socialist utopia, wherein there aren’t any trendy contrivances like motorways or hospitals, and we merely commerce Pogs, Nintendo DS cartridges and doodles of cool canines for meals and shelter.
As such, Overcrowd: A Commute ‘Em Up will one day be a valuable artifact of this darker time. It’s a Theme Hospital type isometric tube station builder, wherein you could assemble and function a tube station from scratch, after which run it in such a means that your passengers don’t change into so abjectly depressing that the game merely ends out of a profound sense of mercy. You preserve everybody comfortable by assembly a set of standards, guaranteeing that the trains run on time – not within the fascist means, however out of a real dedication to punctuality – that garbage bins don’t pile up, that ticket costs aren’t too excessive and that there’s sufficient sickly fluorescent gentle with which to make out the haunted visage of your fellow commuter.
It’s instantly compulsive, if a bit fiddly on this early model, with a seed-generated marketing campaign mode that walks a satisfying line between sandbox and mission-based ranges. The maps on which you construct are procedurally generated and suffering from randomised chunks of immovable bedrock and water that encourage you to construct corridors, concourses and platforms in fascinating locations and over 4 depth ranges. Each subsequent map of the marketing campaign mode units you a sequence of more and more troublesome challenges: greater passenger numbers, extra platforms and dirtier stations. As you progress, you retain your entire tech upgrades too, and so every new station presents you the chance to wipe the slate clear and begin once more with your entire newfound unlocks below your belt.
As someone who occupies the sliver of the Venn diagram between Theme Thing followers and individuals who subscribe to more than one YouTube channel about how tube stations work Overcrowd pushes all of my buttons. Every final button, unexpectedly, just like the game is making an attempt to manufacturing facility reset me. It open palm slams its palms on my keyboard and drags them up and down the keys, prefer it’s acquired a password supervisor and is making a powerful password for its Amazon Prime account, in order that its ex can’t preserve ordering free same-day supply on kitchen towels.
As such I can forgive most of this model’s tough edges and clumsy interface, and the meticulous micro-management, as overwhelming as it’s, squeezes down arduous on my dopamine glands. You should create environment friendly routes by way of your station by designating signage at turnstiles, pointing passengers in the direction of particular platforms or to the way in which out. You construct and furnish workers rooms, management rooms and utility areas with turbines and wheelie bins and water coolers in your workers.
Tools should be manually geared up, and workers should be informed the place to face with a view to be at their simplest. Anything inside their area of notion – litter, overcrowding, a sizzling puddle of commuter vomit – shall be mechanically attended to, nevertheless it’s as much as you to continuously reassign them to totally different elements of the station as and once they’re wanted. Your workers have troublesome human emotions too, and require such lavish luxuries as meals, water, chairs and day without work work to keep away from turning into gibbering, nervous wrecks. All of this element will be fussy, and may really feel like pointless busywork while you’d moderately be concentrating on increasing your more and more congested tube station. This game would profit from, and can be forgiven for, straight up swiping the workers zoning function of numerous different profitable Theme X games.
This workers administration facet of the simulation feels extra like a hands-on, real-time technique game than a passive base-builder, and as workers perform their duties they earn expertise factors, change into sooner at their assigned job and fewer prone to break the factor they’re engaged on. Like your everlasting tech upgrades, you carry workers with you to every new station, so even with frequent recent begins there’s some tangible progress being made at every new stage of the marketing campaign.
When you begin to push up in opposition to the arduous boundaries of every map is when Overcrowd shapeshifts into a 3rd style, turning into a 3D puzzler wherein you’re making an attempt to maximise platform area over a number of flooring, tracks and entrances. Ideally you need your station to resemble a Marble Madness stage, with escalators and footbridges channelling commuters previous retailers and billboards and on to fancy upgraded trains with a number of, trendy carriages, air situations and automatic signalling. Your objective is to create a easy operating machine working at peak effectivity, to assemble the beating coronary heart of an interconnected metropolis, to gaze with awe upon a well-oiled organ.
Reaching that wonderful transit utopia is unreasonably difficult on this early entry construct, the place passenger grievances appear to mount sooner than they are often addressed, and your fame can tank in a matter of minutes in case you neglect to empty the bins or screw in a lightbulb. Overcrowd has the match and end of a two-man job: efficiency slows to a crawl with bigger stations, resolutions above 1920×1080 lead to unusably tiny interface for ants, and far of how the game works is obscured behind a whole lot of clunky menu screens.
There’s hundreds to enhance, however what’s right here is already an exquisite mixture of technique and puzzling, and a compelling simulation of the inescapable distress of paying £158.30 a month to be locked in a hotbox of sweat and farts twice a day.
