“Construction Simulator 2015”

Realistic physics be damned!

By Sean Perryman on January 12, 2015 at 5:56pm

Introduction

"Construction Simulator 2015" published by Astragon and developed by weltenbauer GmbH is a one player experience in the daily task simulator genre. In this simulation you take on the role of an employee of a burgeoning construction company, and are tasked with accepting jobs and carrying out the task lists that are assigned for them.

Controls

The controls run all over the keyboard, and don’t exactly make themselves clear when you are looking up how to do something. For example to perform most any action with the small trailer, you have to be in the truck and holding down the shift key. This took some getting used to, and had the game complaining at me that I was doing it wrong. When you are using the small excavator, you have to hit the tab key to change into the mode that lets you rotate the cab and work with the boom. I spent a good 5 minutes wondering why the boom wasn't extending when I was hitting the keys. Lastly the steering seems to be really slow to respond. Don’t just hit the gas and turn left expecting the thing to respond like one of the cars in Grand Theft Auto, it just won’t happen. You have to make calculated and deliberate movements to avoid hitting obstacles on the road.

Gameplay

The game starts you off by driving a flatbed truck to the company’s construction yard. Though you are only in this for a few minutes, the truck drives adequately. The steering is a little underwhelming, and definitely takes some getting used to. From here you will interact with your foreman (I think?) named Hape; like cape only with an “H”. I don’t get it either, but it’s whatever. From here he instructs you on completing tasks and finishing jobs. The first few jobs you take on mostly cover the basics you will need to continue playing the game. The player has to pay very close attention to the instructions given; many times I found myself with no idea what to do and had to re-read over the task items again and again.

Issues

My biggest gripe with this game is the instructions for completing the missions; they are not at all clear. At one point it tells you to go to grab a particular truck and a container, and the next instruction is go to the nursery and pick up some seed. One would expect because these were sequential instructions you would use that truck to pick up that product, but that is not at all the case. And getting to the nursery was an even bigger headache, because the in-game map guidance system plain just doesn’t work. Sometimes it draws the green line for you, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it draws it to some random location out in the middle of nowhere that takes you 20 real-world minutes to drive to. Sometimes you want to pull your hair out.

After figuring that part out, and spending 15 minutes trying to flip over the flatbed truck with a forklift when I accidentally hit another car, I got the items delivered and finished the job. Though they don’t tell you this expressly, you have to get all of your equipment off of the job site and it triggers the job completion event. Unfortunately for me this happened when I still had my tracks a little bit on the property. Because new constructions don’t just fade in (they just spring up), and the physics engine here is wonky to say the least, it threw me and the excavator up in the air. Not a pleasant experience for my little construction guy, and definitely takes you out of the environment if you were beginning to feel immersed.

The last issue I take with this simulator is the physics. If you look through the Steam reviews for this game, most of them are griping about the physics. In “Goat Simulator” this wonky physics started off as a bug, but they had so much fun with it they just kept it in. Here it is a huge detractor from an otherwise mediocre simulation game. Really I had just wanted to start this game up and drive some giant tractors around a big map. Instead I have to spend a bunch of time driving around and digging with an excavator to get further along. If they added a sandbox mode to this game that just opened up the map and gave you a parking lot full of equipment to play with, I would probably give this game a 10 out of 10.

Conclusion

As much as I wanted to give this game a terrible review, I just can’t. Though it has a really slow progression system, and the work you have to do is tedious, it is a fairly solid simulation game. It looks like the developers are still updating it as well; hopefully they will put in some kind of sandbox or free play mode and really allow you to dive right in.

Review Score: 6.5/10

Pros

Big machines
Big machines
Big machines

Cons

Physics
Slow progression
Sluggish controls