As usual, I heard about this from Broken Forum and decided to give it a shot, thinking it’s one of those small, indie puzzle games. It turned out while this is indeed an indie game that was basically made by just one person and it has the rudimentary graphics to prove it, this may actually be the most time consuming game ever made if you want to complete it. However I could seriously question the mental health of anyone who would want to.

The premise is simple enough. You own a fleet of trucks and want to ship goods between various cities. Each city needs various goods in various quantities and may produce goods as well, often needing inputs to do so. Once you deliver enough of what a city wants, you’re done with it. A complication is that cities will also consume goods as you make deliveries so you slowly build up the needed quantity over time. The larger the city, the faster its consumption so you need to think of a way to quickly and efficiently dump on it what it wants almost all at once. Once you complete a city, you can set up industries of your own in it. This is necessary as you want to produce goods near to cities that want them and it’s often impossible to supply a city fast enough if travel times take too long.

The specifics differ according to individual scenarios but you usually start off small with a tiny tuk-tuk and work your way up. Making deliveries earn you cash which you invest in bigger and better vehicles and eventually build your own industries. Sometimes you need to open routes by delivering enough asphalt, gravel, concrete etc. to the site. On harder maps, you also have to deal with quarantines which block certain goods from being transported across certain routes. It sounds like a lot to take in at first but the basic rules are simple enough and indeed feels similar to some board games.

What is daunting is the ridiculous scale of the game. The Australia scenario alone has over a thousand towns to complete across a vast land mass. Words alone cannot convey the scale of the task. Sydney alone is frightening in its hunger for coffee and completing it is a herculean effort requiring multiple storage facilities nearby. The early small towns are simple enough, requiring only some exploration to unlock industries. But many of the large ones need to build your own industries nearby and sometimes to work around quarantines. The game does give you all of the tools to get it done, even if the user interface can be a hindrance and simple as the graphics are, there are still hiccups as you scroll around the huge map. It is in principle possible to complete the whole map. But after a while you also realize that it might take well over a hundred hours to do it. So the question is: should you?

I confess that there is a certain addictive quality to this game. The knowledge that there are so many towns to complete and the certainty that you can complete them given enough time is tempting. The game isn’t kidding about the ‘just one more town’ allure. Yet the truth is that this is a shameless time waster of a game. Each scenario has tight limits on the number of vehicles you can own. There is no way to program a more complicated route than collect this good here and deliver it there. The whole point of the game is intense micromanagement. Even boosting the game speed is a reward for completing key cities. That’s why as tempting as this game may be, just say no. The developer himself claimed he never expected anyone to complete the first game yet many did. I fear for the souls of those who clamor for more, even bigger maps.