Cartel Tycoon is a real-time simulation game that focuses on building a drug empire during the “narcotics boom” of the 1980s. As you manage to grow your illegal business across a number of cities, find the optimal locations for maximum profit, muscle your way into rival territories to take over and make sure you have enough respect from your peers to see the light of the next day.
That’s the quick bump of a coin version, but let me cut you a few more in-depth lines as you sit down and relax while reading the review.
Gameplay
There’s more to Cartel Tycoon than simply placing a structure named “marijuana farm” or “cocaine farm”, each point of origin for your drug of choice needs careful planning. Sure, the land next to your airstrip you’ve placed may look neat and make for quick growth and distribution but the land it’s built upon is bad soil and bad soil leads to poor quality product and no one wants to be paying to stick that up their nose on a Saturday night.
Farms require transportation of their product to warehouses and then that product needs to get moved out to the world. Through the tutorial, you’ll be learning the ropes and creating areas that output your product and over time you will be upgrading each building to be more efficient in their jobs.
Of course, this is the drugs business and drugs are bad (m’kay) so with every illegal activity you perform, you’ll start generating more heat with the law and once they catch wind of your operation they’ll shut it down sharpish.
Getting your property back can be done by paying out a fine and unlocking the buildings back to normal or having a chat with the city’s mayor.
Cartel Tycoon has a vast research tree to dive into to help grow your empire. Either by upgrading new tiers for your existing buildings or unlocking new builds for your empire.
Story
The story has five campaigns which will last up to 15 or 20 hours on average to complete, each with their own difficulty assigned to each scenario.
Story beats are told through transcripts, along with some voice acting. A nice touch is that it’s not just the dialogue that is shown on screen but stage directions that help build a scene for the player to picture in their head while listening/reading the conversations on screen.
Should you partake?
Cartel Tycoon is a beefy title with a large amount of content to dive into to kick-start your drug empire. If you have a head for simulation games/city builders, you will have fun with this game. So if you’re looking for a new game to provide that kind of buzz there’s no harm in giving this one a whack.
Words from the addictively sweet Lewis Magee.
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