Offworld Trading Company
A pitiless management sim about exploiting people, prices and planets.
This is a strategy and management sim on Mars. You take control of one of four factions, founding a business dedicated to supplying new human colonies. It’s your job to play the market, manipulate the price of resources and put your rivals out of business. That might sound like something only an awful investment wank with four phones attached to his face would love, but it’s one of the most immediate, intelligent strategy games I’ve played.
You have to watch what other factions overproduce, then exploit them. If your opponent has a surplus of water, the price will drop and you can invest in farms, producing food you can sell at an inflated price. This is the foundation of Offworld Trading Company and the thing that initially took me a while to understand. There are no tanks or troops. Your weapons are price fixing and corporate espionage. Your ultimate goal isn’t to destroy your opponent, but to absorb them via hostile takeover. It’s different from more leisurely strategy games in that it’s short form – games can be over at any stage, resources allowing – and if you just feel like laying back and colonising Mars, you’ll simply get devoured. This isn’t an RTS with the combat removed – it’s Wall Street on a new frontier. It’s a tricky thing to describe, let alone play, but thankfully there are some rugged tutorials to ease you in. They expertly explain the basics, such as price fluctuation, patents and buying shares in your opponent, and also more nefarious practices such as price gouging and market manipulation.
The campaign is an extension of the tutorial, and offers a different way to compete. There are nine CEOs from different companies, each with their own identity and limitations. You’ll have to invest money in engineers to build certain advanced structures, and every challenge is different. Many of the games I played came down to desperate, last-minute purchases of shares, racing to sell enough stock before the final buzzer.
Then there’s ‘skirmish’. It’s built on a system that’s endlessly evolving, reactive and intimidatingly smart. No two games play the same, and it’s only predictable in an abstract sense. You know that certain advanced goods generally sell at higher prices, but the circumstances leading to that point change in every game. It demands a level of agility I’m unused to in strategy games, and that’s exactly what makes it exhilarating. The sterile roshambo of simpler titles is almost completely absent here. No single tactic will effortlessly sweep you to victory.
It’s a difficult game to review because I’m probably not good enough to enjoy it the way I should. It says plenty about OTC, then, that I still completely love it. Matt Elliott