Detroit

1994 retro games Amiga games PC games

German economy game, in which you are put in charge of one of the companies in brand new raising brand of industry - the car manufacturing. And yes, it takes place in early years of 20th century.

While using a very typical model for German economy / strategy games (four companies competition) Detroit offered some new ideas and actually was quite original and interesting. You are put in charge of a car manufacturing company and you select one of the areas of the world where your main factory will be established. While this decision have very little impact on things most of your further steps does matter. There are four major fields you have to take care of - factories that manufacture the cars, car salons network to sell them, design and research departments to work out the models you will be offering and the work force.

It sounds complicated, but in fact the interface was very user friendly, it was easy to find your way around the available options, so all you had to do is to tune your company to maximize your profits. The world is divided into different areas (some of them make sense, some of them actually doesn’t), in every one of them you can set up factory and car sales network, analyze sales and demand, plan supply lines, etc. To design your cars you can research new parts and be step ahead of the competition or just sell simple and cheap cars with high profit margin. You can also design the cars yourself (each car body is split into 3 parts and you can set them up together), you can test them, prepare promotional campaigns and even come up with new types of cars (f.e. family saloon, van, sport car).

While all of it is a lot of fun Detroit unfortunately had its flaws, f.e. some areas of the world are simply not buying cars whatever you offer them (Japan, Russia), even if you offer very cheap cars to Africa the sales are always poor, some parts of the interface were a bit annoying (assigning supply lines) and even though the marketing section had a lot of options it was hard to actually spot any use of those activities.

Detroit was first and most probably the best game, in which you could try to build a car manufacturing empire from the dawn of the industry to the modern times. It had its flaws, but overall was a very well devised game that had a lot to offer.

Our rating
★★★★★

Video
★★★☆☆

Audio
★★☆☆☆

Playability
★★★★☆

User rating: 4 based on 1 votes

☆☆☆☆☆

★★★★★