Review: Car Park Capital
When someone tells you that a city needs more parking, show them this game.
THE GAME
Car Park Capital is a city-building and management game developed by Hilkojj Interactive and distributed by MicroProse Software. You've been tasked with creating a car dependency among the population. Your primary job is to create parking lots so that city residents ditch public transport, buy cars, and use your parking spaces. And to use parking lots, you need cars, right? So, create and sell cars to the citizens. Make the population unable to live without a car and achieve capitalist success, consequently destroying everything good.
MY IMPRESSIONS
If you've played any older, much older management games, you'll feel like Car Park Capital is transported directly from that era. Both its visuals and gameplay perfectly emulate what we had in a simpler era of computer games. Starting with the visuals, Car Park Capital has its charm, with an aesthetic I really like – very cartoonish and exaggerated, with vibrant colors that, even in its simplicity, clearly convey what it has to offer. The gameplay, while maintaining older management game elements, is often confusing and not very user-friendly. It's easy to get lost in the menus or not understand what's happening. In this case, the interface is more of a hindrance than the gameplay itself, which is ultimately hampered by the former. This is one of the problems; replicating a game in this style has its good parts, but also its bad parts, which could have been handled a little better for the game's overall quality.
The game is not in Brazilian Portuguese, which makes it quite difficult to understand for those who don't speak English. It's essential to thoroughly understand the mechanics of Car Park Capital, because the tutorial only scratches the surface of what the game truly has to offer, and often you'll have to learn through trial and error until you get it right. You can play on predefined maps, but you can also play on custom maps. The main maps have objectives that must be completed within a certain time, so pausing the game doesn't allow you to interact with anything other than information, as the idea is that the game is entirely time-lapse, as if you can only change something while the time is running, since, as mentioned, you have a certain amount of time to meet metrics.
Despite being the main theme, building parking lots is only the foundation of what you can do in Car Park Capital. They are a very fun part of the game, giving you great freedom to design your parking lot however you want. To make the parking lots useful, it's important that the population owns cars, so you build a factory, produce the cars, build a distribution center for these cars, and a store to sell them. You'll notice that many game mechanics, like the car production mentioned above, are designed in a way that one thing depends on another to function. This is the case with oil, for example, where you'll end up extracting, refining, and selling fuel at some point in the game. Furthermore, various services, such as food and car painting, also become drive-thrus. To gain more space for parking lots, you'll have to evict residents from the housing in the area you acquire, but it's not that simple: you must build houses outside urban centers, and only then can you force them to live far away. Of course, this is also designed to encourage them to use cars more. This way, you can build larger and newer parking lots or support buildings, such as advertising vehicles, fire trucks, or an anti-riot squad. And why would an anti-riot squad be necessary? Well, when you destroy the environment to build factories and extract oil, the population doesn't like it, and some protesters will try to boycott your business, and that's where the anti-riot squad comes in. As you can see, Car Park Capital starts one way, but opens up a huge range of new mechanics that will constantly make you try to fit them in the best way possible.
Car Park Capital is clearly a satire of rampant capitalism, doing so with humor and sarcasm. Although it may not seem so friendly to more casual players, it tries to keep things simple, even though it requires a lot of micromanagement at all times. It's difficult to grasp the idea right away, but the game flows well if you start to understand what it wants from you, that despite having a time limit, you'll have enough time to complete the objectives. It's a great challenge for those who enjoy management games.
ACHIEVEMENTS
At the time of this review, the game unfortunately does not have achievements. Perhaps they will be added in the future, as there is room for more challenge in Car Park Capital.
CONCLUSION
The central idea of Car Park Capital really caught my attention. In a satirical way, it uses a very current topic to build a game around it. It's funny how sometimes it feels like you're building an amusement park instead of modifying an entire city. The pacing is a bit strange, because you feel like you need to do something, but the interface doesn't help much in orienting yourself. Everything seems a bit out of place, like some of the building grids, which is a little irritating, but it might just be my need to keep everything organized. Car Park Capital is a great management game, with really cool ideas, and the developers seem to have many ideas for additions, but it could improve the quality of life in some aspects of the game a bit more. Even understanding the idea of it being a game in the older style, we don't need the bad parts.
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