Reviews

• gamedeal user

  Feb 4, 2022

  TLDR; Devs need to put more focus on this being a criminal organization that you're running with lots of moving parts instead of a generalized logistical manager with loads of caps and regulations. Cartel Tycoons creators need to take a step back and remember its title is CARTEL Tycoon. As of right now i'm pretty sure they think they're making a Package Delivery Tycoon. 1. Gang structure is really bad RL Cartels have excess amounts of soldiers, cars, and money. Cartel Tycoon doesn't reflect that excess in anyway. For the gang they've gone with a system of "Lieutenants" only, soldiers/muscle are not really represented in anyway there are no cliques or anything to command or direct you're simply dealing with a character and some characters don't even have the ability to fight in combat!? Where's the character's bodyguards where is the hired muscle? None of that is represented in your organization at all its a VERY shallow system. You should be able to hire Lt's then buy muscle on top of that and that could increase the fighting power of the Lt but instead its all preset RPG "special character" style layout with predetermined combat powers. Same for building they give the owner a combat bonus when a fight breaks out but it would have been better if I could buy muscle and implant them in said building for a stronger base combat stat eliminating the need for my Lt's to run around taking care of every conflict and allowing me to prioritize the defense of critical buildings to my organization. Instead they give just Lt control and generally Lt's have useless abilities that your never gonna be able to optimize thanks to how the entire system is formatted especially having to keep an Lt stationary in a city because if you don't you lose the city. So every city you control your sacrificing a Lt just to make it not get lost and there is nothing useful or productive your Lt can do inside of the city making them completely useless filler. On top of that killing a Lt completely divides your Cartel unless its done in secrecy which like 5% of the Lt's have this ability. This is suppose to be cartel life people don't get eliminated and everybody looks at each and goes this boss sucks i'm done, everybody says "its just business" and moves on but not in "Package Delivery Tycoon" everyone is going on strike and is going to fall out of line over one elimination. And now with the new "Balancing" patch certain Lt's have Terror requirements which doesn't make any sense at all. What Lt refuses to be part of an organization because they don't have enough heat on them??? The whole point of most organizations is to fly under the radar and avoid heat! 2. AGAIN RL cartels have EXCESS amounts of soldiers, cars, and money. Your struggling to make money almost the entire time until the end game of a map. When the reality is you should have excessive amounts of dirty money pouring in even from the beginning with the biggest problem being limited amounts of businesses to wash it clean. Cars and trucks are always limited sometimes to a point that make no sense and completely stops you from making money. You start a whole delivery company and it will get 1 delivery truck? Seriously? Trucks and cars for your buildings should be able to be bought separately and without little to no limits on how many you can buy. Its as if there some government regulated limit on how many cars or trucks a building can have MAKES NO SENSE. And sure you can upgrade your buildings and get more trucks/cars but again this technology on the research tree isn't available until almost the complete end game of the map! Which leads me to profit margins that could be much higher from the start and on top of that the supply and demand system for pricing goods is god awful and changes way too fast for something that your producing infinite amounts of. Plus the price is dictated by your output supply instead of destination demand which is represented by a slow baseline increase which doesn't make sense cause it never really changes so the the market will never have a demand increase or have a demand higher than what I'm supplying it slowly dwindles down to bare minimum everytime. Furthermore I feel like if you were making more money overall through better margins and whatnot you would go through the research tree faster thus giving your access to more reasonable buildings earlier in the map but again the base profits/cars/trucks of the level 1 buildings are terrible. 3. (Lastly and most importantly IMO), there's no real underground factors in the game yet. Hopefully this will change since the game is still in development and there are prisons and guerrilla camps and other buildings that simply say "Coming Soon" and have been for quite some time sure would like to see what the plan is with that? But as of this moment the bribery/corruption aspect of this game is again VERY shallow. Where is the police chief that i can bribe so i can permanently freeze my terror star so the police won't raid my building as long as I can afford to pay him my buildings should stay raid free! Or the judge to stop the warrants for my raids? Or the politician that backs off the DEA? Your connections are a whole lot of nothing... They've got it where you work your way up on the "Terror" bar which is a whole other set of nonsense that's very poorly implemented especially after this "balance" update. To which the police begin to randomly block roads and federales raid your buildings at random. You can bribe the blockades but it has to be with "clean" money which doesn't make any sense to me seeing as its a bribe but with the federales you just have to suck it up and try to use your political connections or fight back when they raid you which if you win they will go him with their tail between there legs for a while. But even your connections in the city again is very limited choices being reduce terror or unseize buildings. And sometimes its cheaper just to pay the fines to reopen than unseize through your connection. But again your not really pulling strings in your connection that puts you in a position of power or advantage just always the ability to salvage something that's already occurred to you. No judges in the pocket no police chiefs or anything of that nature, again SHALLOW. This is a big reason why Cartel Tycoon doesn't feel like "CARTEL" Tycoon I will commend the devs on there constant updating but again they are going on about balancing and making money getting more easy and things when your not letting the cartel be a cartel you're regulating a black market your not focusing on the criminal aspect of everything but instead the mechanics of a system that isn't matching the genre of the game. I will update this as time goes on but right now I can't recommend this in its current state.
• gamedeal user

  May 8, 2022

  It's been a year since someone cared about this game. There is much focus on automating actions, yet automated actions rarely end up in an automated supply chain. For instance: imagine the game told you that these farms, over here, produced X product per time period, and these factories consumed X product per time period, and these outputs consumed X product per hour. It would be really easy to figure out what to do in this game. Imagine you are a game dev. Imagine that you realize that you can't really find a mechanic to keep people interested, because once they know it takes 8 product per hour, reaching this delivery mechanism, to turn a meaningless infinite profit for whatever time period, they lose interest. Nothing about this game will ever maintain interest, beyond "Can I max out the skills?" or "How much many can I actually make before the counter overflows?" Nothing really matters, and that's why this game doesn't matter...
• gamedeal user

  Jul 10, 2022

  A lot of potential. Needs come quality of life enhancements to avoid all the micro managing. Early Access but actively being developed and good overall.
• gamedeal user

  Jul 27, 2022

  From what I have playyed so far the game is fun and im enjoying it... but I will say that the story is very lackluster both in terms of the actual story and how it involves the gameplay. Forcing you to do certain things and giving you the kind of objectives that at the last minutes notice are just not really logical. The Story should have been less on rails than what it is and i think thats where it fails the whole sandbox. But if you put the story aside there is something here that is quite enjoyable :)
• gamedeal user

  Jul 28, 2022

  Too many issues... Just some examples: If a building under construction is seized by police, your vans will keep delivering dirty money to finish building it; however that money just disappears into thin air. DEA fee should depend on building value, not a flat fee. Residence deliveries aren't prioritized properly and can't be prioritized manually. So $3000 go to the salsa club, but $0/$100 to farms or warehouses to keep the economy running. Have a mission to pay a debt or assassinate one of your guys. Well placing them into a building with a narco raid get's them arrested (=removed from game), but then game just decides that's game over instead of realizing that the problem is solved.
• gamedeal user

  Jul 28, 2022

  The game has a tutorial that is longer than the refund window. The problems you will encounter wont show up until after. I don't know what the icons are trying to tell me. I have no idea why production has stopped. I am currently watching one Lt just moving cash back and forth between two buildings. Why is any of this happening? Can't tell you. The 3 hour tutorial didn't go over it.
• gamedeal user

  Jul 30, 2022

  Ignore the time played. I experienced a bug where the game continues to "run" after I save and exit. Had to have steam end the game. The game doesn't tell you basic information. Why are deliveries down? Why is the airport not selling the vegetables? Time to investigate! Why is my transport company not moving coffee to the workshop? No idea! It is connected to both. Transport company is set to only move coffee. Why let me connect to them if it does not work? Why does the transport company have so few trucks? Even if you start the game with a million dollars you still only get the one truck per company. This is a game about logistics! The quests your goons give you are annoying. They constantly want you to build stuff whether you need it or not--whether you can afford it or not. Not accepting the quest reduces their loyalty. Lose/Lose. Just leave me alone and let me build. While taking over a vegetable farm got a quest to not take over buildings for 30 days. I said sure, that is fine. This is the last farm. Accepted quest and immediately failed because the attack was in progress. Why was that one counted? Why give me that quest while an attack is in progress? The laundry buildings suck up your dirty money. I basically have to pay for my operations in legal money because otherwise my economy gets shutdown because of the laundry operation. Why doesn't it pay my workers first before cleaning the money? Also, you have to deliver dirty money to build which is an annoying step to take when constructing using dirty money. The police will absolutely seize a farm shortly after you pay 4000 to free it up again. Due to how easy it is to have logistics issues the police end up visiting quite often due to your stuff piling up. The game starts with several buildings laying around to use. Saves money right? It is a trap. Your terror will build up and your stuff gets seized. Just build things and ignore the free buildings. I want to like this game but it has too many little issues like that which makes it frustrating to play.
• gamedeal user

  Aug 7, 2022

  I love the aesthetic and really the gameplay is quite fresh. It's very different than most other tycoon games, in some good and some bad ways. The good is that you really do feel like you have your finger on the pulse of a cartel. The bad is that the cartel is about as fragile as a 55 year old cartel members heart and as manual as rolling a new joint for each individual toot. It's fairly miserable. They seem to have embraced a roguelight approach where everything is so complicated and manual that your capo is going to fail by design so that other cartel members can be promoted. That seems pretty fun on paper, but I'd argue that the game is way to slow to execute this roguelight approach (it's similar to the nemesis system). I honestly don't have endless patience for it and because of all the micro, you really need all your idiots doing specific things because the micro is so heavy. I love tycoon games and may bang my head against it again, like in 10 minutes after this writeup. But I don't wish this on anyone.
• gamedeal user

  Aug 26, 2022

  It's a great game. I think a lot of negative reviews are from people expecting an easy-to-understand game. It's not. It's a tycoon and it's a bit complicated, because you need to run chain of drug productions->smuggling said drugs->laundrying money->managing your thugs and fighting wars. Personally, I love the theme and I enjoy complex tycoon games so I love it. The art is really amazing and you can see the devs put a lot of effort in it. The graphics are great, soundtrack, atmosphere. Each criminal in game has an elaborate portrait with backstory, etc. Overall, I think it's great, but like I said, there is definitely a learning curve. Hopefully there will be multiplayer support in the future.
• gamedeal user

  Sep 3, 2022

  I'm hoping this is a review I can turn around but there is a single fatal flaw so egregious that I'm forced to give it. First up, I want to like Cartel Tycoon. It is, at it's heart, a visual novel crossed with a supply management sim. Bit weird, but it's just simple enough it doesn't feel overwhelming and just intricate enough that it feels interesting. I've played 18 hours actively, and I almost enjoyed them. The problem is it's a supply management sim and the supply management AI is a problem. This isn't esoteric, this isn't subtle, this is, "How did this get through testing?" The problem is this: suppliers do not prioritize places that *need* goods over places that *have* goods. From what I can tell, any connection is fair game. Now, you can CLOSE connections but let's just step back a second: I could also manually move resources around with my Lieutenants. As the game tells you, they should have better things to do. But that's the only way you are getting out of this death spiral. You might get a shipment, the cash is moved to your house, the farms and warehouses need that cash, but it gets all taken to the casino for laundering. That little, "Needs cash to keep operating" flag is apparently just for my eyes, because the AI doesn't seem to consider that a problem. This is compounded by trucks leaving mostly empty. This one I'm mixed about. Like, it feels solvable but it is endlessly frustrating. The most common solution is to reduce the number of things a warehouse is expected to do, but the problem is that trucks don't wait until they are full, nor can you tell them to. So they will happily take a single load of vegetables to a warehouse that doesn't need them while a farm sits full of product that needs to be moved. It's really frustrating. I shouldn't watch a supply chain collapse because the warehouse refuses to pick up a load of opium, or deliver it, because it has half of its trucks moving a single resource to a place that is already full! I shouldn't watch my warehouses shut down because the residence wouldn't stop delivering money to the launderers while buildings are ACTIVELY signalling they need cash to keep operating. If I run out of cash, that's on me. But if I have cash and the only thing screwing me over is that I should be micromanaging my warehouses, that's an issue: it's a big issue and it makes me not want to play or recommend until it's been improved.