car park capital first impressions

Car Park Capital nails the aesthetic that calls back to Chris Sawyer classics like Roller Coaster Tycoon and Transport Tycoon, which I do admittedly like. However, the thing that really sold me on trying out this game was its overtly satirical messaging:

You've been hired by Big Auto to unleash the Freedom of Car Dependency on unsuspecting townsfolk!

Design the slickest parking lots ever seen, then convince citizens they absolutely need them.

Spread glossy pro-car propaganda, outsmart those pesky anti-petrol protesters, and transform quiet neighborhoods into your parking empire!

It's time to drive up car sales and oil consumption! For profit.. but mostly for freedom!

I'm a person who is a fan of urban design and walkable spaces, enjoys watching channels like Not Just Bikes and About Here, and doesn't own a car.

I have memories of taking the bus in Austin as a student to interview an indie game developer doing what I wanted to do, even though the bus took about two or three hours one way largely due to the long layover at North Lamar Transit Center. Memories of walking by myself one hour back to my dorm through a poorly lit downtown in the dead of night during SXSW, because I missed my last bus back home after spending too long hanging out after Juegos Rancheros back when it was still at the Highball. Memories of getting delayed while taking an intercity train from Toronto to Ottawa because freight trains have priority on the track, coming to a complete stop in the middle of nowhere for what felt like half an hour. Memories of our train in Italy, which was the last train we could take to get to our destination that day, getting cancelled because of a fire in Rome and not knowing because the cancellation was only announced in Italian over the intercom and the split-flap display still said our train was on its way, until it wasn't.

I have many memories where mass transit sucks. It's inconvenient, it's slow, it's uncomfortable. But, I've also had incredible travel experiences taking mass transit in Japan and in the EU (especially in Switzerland). I know just how good a mass transit experience can be because of these places, and it's incredibly good. Exiting a station directly into a lively pedestrian-only street full of people, restaurants, and shops at pretty much any time of day, trains arriving exactly on time or so often that you don't need to plan for when they will show up, actually enjoying the travel experience in a comfy chair where you can actually talk over food that tastes great or read a book or play a game. The realization that you're just less stressed in general now... because you don't drive. It's so much better than even the best experience driving a car.

I feel like I'm going crazy just existing in a largely car-dependent culture in North America. I patiently listen with furious rage while some of my neighbors at town hall meetings talk about how bike lanes are a danger to pedestrians and how the local BART station which I love and moved here for is an eyesore that supposedly no one wanted to have built in the first place. Aren't cars more dangerous than bikes? Aren't the cancerous car-congested stroads more of an eyesore? Why do we have to deal with such a stressful, injurious, inefficient mode of transit -- and why do so many think it's an unavoidable necessity to have this deep of a dependency? It's an understatement, I think, to say that I deeply loathe the car-dependent culture in North America.

So, to me, it's super appealing that there's a satirical game that attacks this dependency. I think this game has a lot of potential as a social commentary and immense cathartic value in letting you play the role of the villain. I want Car Park Capital to be an incredible game, one that delivers a strong message while still being a really fun game to play. Unfortunately, as it is right now, I think a few issues hold it back from becoming what it could be.

micromanagement

The first is that most everything you do in the game has to be micromanaged. Every time you build a police station, a firefighting station, or a towing service building, you need to set a patrol route. These patrol routes have to be painstakingly placed, keeping in mind that every waypoint has to be within a certain distance of each other. You can't tell one station to copy the patrol route of another or to even roam the entire map freely. The station simply won't do anything until a patrol route is set.

For the police, you also need to hire individual cops and dogs to fight protesters. Unfortunately, large protests are typically started outside of the range of your patrol routes (unless you've spent an inordinate amount of time making sure the entire map has police coverage instead of just your businesses), so you'll have to manually press a button to send a van full of cops to deal with them. You also can't send more than one van at a time, which means that fights with particularly large groups will take a long time and probably fail -- after which you'll have to rehire more guys manually (they don't replenish automatically) and send them again.

Car dependency also means that people want a lot of drive-through services like fast food, restrooms, and gas stations. In order to meet demand you have to build multiple parallel drive-throughs. Unfortunately, the coaster-style editor is more pointless tedium; it's not like the design really changes the value of the experience for the customers like it would in Roller Coaster Tycoon. Moreover, you can't quickly copy-paste drive-through services, leaving you with manually duplicating dozens of stations with the same design by hand.

Building a car garage is also a pain. The initial process is fine, but once you want to expand you'll probably end up with some kind of structure you'd like to have repeated on additional floors that you can't copy-paste. Instead, you have to replicate everything again by hand, tile by tile.

carbrainess

The other issue is that the game decides if you've beaten the scenario by checking for "carbrainess", which appears to be a measure of the "quality" of the experience for the people who are driving. However, it seems that if you sell too many cars, this sets you up for a situation where there are literally thousands of cars on the road like in my playthrough of the Gulf of Freedom scenario.

Since there are so many cars and everything you need to do has to be manually done one by one, it's basically impossible to set up enough services for people to use. The need grew faster than I had the patience for building to accommodate it. In addition, there are other problems like gas trucks and drivers not distributing evenly across your gas stations, leaving some drivers constantly dissatisfied at empty gas stations while other gas stations are full on gas but can't process customers quickly enough, nerfing parallelization efforts.

This essentially prevents you from winning the game even as car dependency levels up -- until you realize that the only way you can catch up is by no longer selling cars, which feels ironic.

conclusion

On one hand, you could point out that my negative experience with the carbrainess mechanic actually shines with the theme of the game -- that car dependency will ultimately leave you in a situation where demands require so much physical space that they cannot be fulfilled and everyone is mad. However, I feel that I played the part of the villain well and I instead wish the game didn't block me from finishing the scenario. I think the game could still allow me to have fun, while finding more ways to satirize car dependency as things get even more crazy. I think the game could cook much harder.

Unfortunately, I found the experience of Car Park Capital to be more frustrating and tedious than I would have liked. It feels natural for me to compare this to Roller Coaster Tycoon. This game has many problems that RCT has, such as having pretty shallow mechanics and having an easy-to-reach end-game state where money no longer matters.

However, RCT let me build the roller coaster park of my dreams, giving me tools and time to design and build to my hearts content. In Car Park Capital, I did not do the same thing. Instead of building massive parking garages, horribly complicated drive-throughs, and covering the world in asphalt, I found myself doing the same boring rote actions over and over again. Buy more cops, find tiny signs to delete, set more patrol routes, mindlessly replicate the same drive-through design, and repeat.

In a sense, it reminds me of ΔV, another game I had high expectations for but was disappointed in for the same reason of boring and repetitive gameplay. It also reminds me of John Company: Second Edition, except that it pulls off what I wish this game could do for car-dependency!

There are some really good moments in the game. You can weaponize pollution to buy land on the cheap, the game has some incredibly funny moments, and you can really see how interconnected the problem of car dependency is. I know the game is in early access and that the developer plans on adding some great things like more mid- and late-game depth and difficulty, more quality of life improvements, and accidents and ambulances. These are all things I would greatly appreciate and enjoy.

The style is impeccable. However, as the game currently is, I'm sad that I only really enjoyed the first few hours. I feel like the game could have less tedium and have more advanced, ridiculous levels of car dependency. For these reasons, I find it hard to recommend to anyone for now, though I'll keep a close eye on it.