Of course, we've all been there. The DEA won't stop raiding your meth labs. A city gang continues to disrupt your supply lines. Your most trusted lieutenant threatens to miss you unless you give them another raise. And all you want to do is throw another event at the salsa club.
This is the world of Cartel Tycoon, a business management game from Moon Moose where the business is not entirely legal. Set in the 1990s, Cartel Tycoon puts you in charge of a burgeoning drug empire. Your task is to outsmart rival cartels, law enforcement and your own accomplices to conquer the narcotics market.
Released in Early Access on March 18, Cartel Tycoon shows a lot of potential, even though it's still very early in development.
Cartel Tycoon Early Access Impressions: This Is Bat Country
Like any good tycoon management game, Cartel Tycoon starts small. In the beginning, it's just you and your opium farm. As a set of narrative quests teaches you the basics, you build a few new farms, take over a few expedition points, and start a few production lines. You ship your product to a private airfield. The money is starting to flow.
One of the most interesting mechanical surfaces soon after you start cooking. Cartel Tycoon offers you two money pools.
The first is a pool of “dirty money”, which is used to support many illegal activities in which you engage. As you sell drugs and bribe politicians, your dirty money stores fluctuate rapidly. However, there are a lot of things you do in the level too - or at least should seem like they are. You might be sitting on a huge amount of cash but unable to spend anything because most of the purchases you make won't accept suspicious cash.
To solve this problem, you also need to invest in other businesses so that you can launder your money in another pool. It can take the form of a casino, a taxi company or some other facade.
You must eliminate rival gangs using violence to start these businesses, which eventually attracts the attention of law enforcement. Soon you have too much product to handle for your small private planes. You need to grow legal produce and build production hubs that hide your medicine in vegetable or coffee crates to get through bigger shipping hubs. Naturally, this requires more violence. The cycle continues.
While Cartel Tycoon starts you off with “small,” that's a relative term here. The game does a great job of making things feel “big” and substantial right away. You manage what seems like a lot of money early on, and things escalate in a hurry. It's nice that you don't have to start selling bags of weed from your dorm and build a criminal empire from there. The stakes are high from the start.
This feeling is compounded because Cartel Tycoon isn't really an idle tycoon game. There aren't many opportunities to build the perfect machine, then sit back and watch it hum. You are constantly putting out fires and juggling more and more plates. You gradually lose control of towns and expedition points if you don't have minions stationed there. You must use these same characters to move dirty money from building to building, capture rival buildings, and fight enemies. Loss of a machine sprocket can cause the shredding to stop.
In one scenario, I was paying off a debt and loading a bunch of cash into the trunk of a lieutenant's car before heading to the drop-off point. Shortly after I started driving, the DEA started looting a shipping point, so I had to shut down operations there for a few days. At the same time, a faction attacked another expedition point, forcing me to divert a substantial crew to fend them off.
Closing these shipping points along with such a huge payment caused my laundering activities to stop. Without any of this money, my workshops and farms ceased to function.
I had to keep moving my gang members around to keep control of various hotspots, and I contacted a mayor for a loan to keep me afloat. The only problem with that? I should pay it back, with interest in a relatively quick turnaround. So it all started again.
This cyclical nature is the big problem I currently see with Cartel Tycoon. Even though it is not an idle game, it also has no events. You just sort of do things, but those things aren't big or substantial enough to provide a steady sense of accomplishment. Fighting a rival gang is just a matter of moving enough 'power' to be higher than the enemy 'power', then waiting for a meter to fill up. When the police come to investigate, you just turn off the building they're looking at until they're done.
Much of that polish will likely come over time, as the game is still in its early stages. Although the developer is a relative newcomer, publisher tinyBuild has a pretty solid portfolio and a long history of listening to community feedback to provide support for their builds. It would be nice to see a bit more punch in Cartel Tycoon, and I really hope to see more variety in how things start and play out as they go.
The only other issue with Cartel Tycoon in its current state is the tone of the game. It's really hard to tell if it's completely serious, ironic, or outright satire. Its cartoonish aesthetic and somewhat goofy trailers give the feeling that things here are campy, but I saw almost nothing that suggested it was a silly or light-hearted game when playing.
It may seem to be in the same vein as Tropico (or something similar), but I didn't get that sense at all in this first version.
Cartel Tycoon Early Access Review – The Result So Far
It's always difficult to give a recommendation for games that are still so young in the Early Access phase. Cartel Tycoon has a very solid foundation and could definitely become a really impressive management game. Nor could it fill in the holes that currently exist and never gain traction.
At the moment, it's still a bit too early to go all out and fully recommend it. Keep watching this one, though: it could turn into something great.
[Note: tinyBuild provided the copy of Cartel Tycoon used for this Early Access review.]
