English
Gamereactor
reviews
Offworld Trading Company

Offworld Trading Company

The lead designer of Civilization IV has brought out a real-time strategy game that features just about none of the things you'd expect from an RTS.

Subscribe to our newsletter here!

* Required field
HQ
HQ

Say the words "Real Time Strategy", and you'll usually invoke thoughts of games like Starcraft, Command & Conquer, Dawn of War, or Company of Heroes. Games that involve you commanding units around on a battlefield, perhaps constructing new armies, and defeating your opponent with overwhelming force or clever tactics.

Offworld Trading Company is a real-time strategy game, but it has none of that. It has no armies, no soldiers, no killing of your enemies. It barely even has units in the traditional sense. Instead, the game is built around something much fiercer: stone-cold capitalism.

Rather than being about crushing conquest, Offworld Trading Company is all about business. Instead of killing your opponents by dropping bombs on them, you do hostile take-overs of their corporations by buying them out. Rather than rushing to build the biggest army and the strongest fortifications, you're in a race to claim the most lucrative ground and harvest the richest resources.

This is an ad:

All in all, Offworld Trading Company has less to do with Starcraft and more to do with Transport Tycoon. It also has a touch of Civilization to it, which isn't surprising given that the game's been headed up by Soren Johnson, who was the design lead on the venerable and universally praised Civilization IV.

Offworld Trading Company

As the name implies, the game takes place on Mars. Strewn across the map are patches of resources like water, coal, aluminium, iron, and silicon. Each of them has several uses, either in constructing new buildings for your company or for refining into other resources like steel, fuel, food, or glass. Depending on which of the game's four factions you've picked, you'll have different needs. One faction foregoes steel in favour of carbon in all their construction, while the robotic faction has no need for food or drink.

You can only lay claim to a certain number of tiles at a time. You can increase that number by upgrading your HQ, but that also requires resources. As a consequence, you'll often find it impossible to gather all the types of resource that you actually need to expand your business, at least in the early stage of the game.

This is an ad:

If you've ever played the Civilization games, you know the headaches that come with not being able to secure a vital resource that you need for building something. Like uranium for nukes, for instance. It's the kind of thing that can completely wreck your plans. Offworld Trading Company takes a different approach, and that's the game's genius move.

Every resource in Offworld Trading Company is available for a price. There's a free market principle going on, meaning you can always buy steel, aluminium, glass or whatever else you need in a pinch. The prices are entirely related to supply and demand, meaning some commodities are dirt cheap, while others are ludicrously expensive.

Offworld Trading Company

If you look at the screenshots, you'll notice the UI taking up a hefty chunk of the screen. There's a good reason for that, as the lefthand sidebar both works as your building interface, but also tells you your current production surplus or deficit of any given resource, your stockpile, and the current trading price. Earning enough money to buy out the competition is often a matter of becoming the leading supplier of something like food or glass and selling it at exorbitant prices.

Although Offworld Trading Company isn't about armed conflict and has no armies, you still have plenty of options for fighting dirty. There's a black market that regularly offers to sell you different types of sabotage. You can wreck individual buildings with dynamite, make workers go on strike or even commit mutiny, or take out all the opposing transport ships in an area with a magnetic storm. The dirtiest of all options is perhaps the underground nuke, which permanently reduces the resource concentration on a given tile. In other words, you can nuke the iron right out of your opponent's iron mine, either limiting their supply or forcing them to rebuild the mine elsewhere. It's agonising when it happens to you, and fills you with a Mr. Burns-like glee when you do it to others.

Similarly, you can improve your own production by investing in science patents or optimisations. The latter ups the output of a given type of building, while the former grants you one-of-a-kind advantages over your opponents that remain exclusively yours for the rest of the game. There's other ways to increase your revenue, like building a launchpad and sending resources into asteroid colonies. That one's become a personal favourite. Among the dirtier options is the ability to hack the market exchange and create artificial shortages of a given commodity - preferably the one you have a massive stockpile of.

Offworld Trading Company is highly focused on replayability. Each game is a sprint, not a marathon, and you can usually finish a game in less than an hour's time. There's a short, seven mission campaign available, and oddly enough it's sorta packed away in the back. You'll need to finish a skirmish game - the "proper" way to play Offworld Trading Company - before the campaign becomes available, because it tweaks some of the mechanics a bit. For instance, you no longer win a mission by buying out your opponents, but rather by building the most expansion modules for the neutral colony that inhabits the center of every map.

Offworld Trading Company

In the campaign, your building options are limited by the staff and engineers you hire between missions, meaning your favourite strategy might not be viable, forcing you to change things up. Overall it's a neat addition, though it feels both short and slightly superficial. You can finish the whole thing in an afternoon. Clearly, the focus is on the Skirmish mode, which is also how the game is played in multiplayer.

Before diving into anything else, there's a rather splendid tutorial that does an admirable job of introducing the game's many aspects bit by bit, and it's well worth playing. It doesn't just cover the basics, but explains more or less everything, from the intricacies of the economy to the difference between the different factions.

There's also a daily challenge, updated with news maps and conditions daily (well, d'uh) where you compete asynchronously with other players about who can win the fastest.

We get the feeling that the game is especially aimed at those who enjoy online multiplayer, but Offworld Trading Company is still great for a quick fix of real-time strategy. The short game length is one of the main reasons for that, while the difficulty is another. You'll easily cruise your way to wins on the lowest difficulties, but take it up a notch or two and you'll begin to feel the heat as opponents come dangerously close to being able to buy you out. There's a slight sense of panic that sets in when someone buys half your stock and comes close to piling up enough money to do a hostile take-over.

Though Offworld Trading Company doesn't have the literally thousands of decisions that a game like Civilization does, playing it is pure joy. It might take a little while to wrap your head around the core mechanics, but as soon as the transport ships start rolling in and the price of your favourite commodity goes up, it's immensely satisfying. You'll curse your opponents as they hire pirates to take potshots at your ships, and tap your fingers with Burnsian glee as you crush your enemies and see them driven before you - not with guns or swords, but with humongous piles of cold, hard cash.

HQ
Offworld Trading CompanyOffworld Trading Company
08 Gamereactor UK
8 / 10
+
An excellent twist on the genre, short game length encourages experimentation, plenty of depth despite short sessions.
-
Campaign feels short and superficial.
overall score
is our network score. What's yours? The network score is the average of every country's score

Related texts

0
Offworld Trading CompanyScore

Offworld Trading Company

REVIEW. Written by Rasmus Lund-Hansen

"Though it doesn't have the literally thousands of decisions that a game like Civilization does, playing it is pure joy."



Loading next content