utter ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ♥♥♥♥♥

Just fkn gay

kind of ugly, boring and wank

This game asks quite a lot of its players (in terms of learning curve, consistency, attention), and if you're in a position to fulfill these, it's great.

You don't have to spend ALL your time on this game, especially if you plan in advance and think about what you're doing, instead of just responding.
You don't have to engage in drama, same as any online game. It exists, but is usually the vocal minority.

For better or worse, this game fully succeeds at being a society sim type thing and its hard to deny it is a great litmus test for peoples personalities. I've made many a friend in this game, joined lots of servers, introduced players to one another, and am quite fortunate that I've been able to build up a solid community of likeminded friends to play and enjoy this game with... something that as an almost 40 year old gamer is second only to my World of Warcraft years..!

So while a lot of people will have valid complaints about this game (too demanding, too complex, too social), those issues are kinda navigable... It DOES offer something new, unique, and fairly damn wholesome, and it certainly deserves praise for that.

Very promising

chill if you want, challenging if you want.
Chillenging

It is impossible to lose at this game, because even if your city doesn't work, everyone is starving, and you can't figure out how to get your industry working, congratulations, you have built a Soviet Republic.

This launch was so stable and bug-free* I can't believe it's the same studio that brought us Age of Conan.

*Worms aren't bugs.

Took 13 years to get around to doing something about griefers and cheaters; online experience is finally as it was promised on launch.

It's difficult to review this game without comparing it to DDS, and I don't want to be too critical of a game that's in early access, so I was a little reluctant to review.... but then the lawsuit got filed.

I played DDS for years; it was a fun little brain-dead game to play with one eye whilst also watching marathons of IASIP, audiobooks and podcasts. I played it from the early days up until the release of DDS2 (a huge pile of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ that isnt a sim at all, just some weird indulgent linear RPG-lite story game....but I digress). The reason I stuck with DDS for so long is because it had so much potential to punch above its weight... but, 5 years later I kind of accepted it was a meme game made by lazy, incompetent devs who honestly never grew out of the mindset of "SmoKinG W33d iS coOL". The amount of basic bugs and spelling mistakes that exist in DDS TO THIS DAY are testament to these claims.

Schedule 1 has the same potential. It has the same opportunities. While the S1 devs have made some design/mechanical choices that I'm not 100% sold on, I can see why those decisions were made... and for the most part they work. The art style, for instance, struck me as juvenile at first, but dang if it doesnt make the world far more navigable than drab realism ever could, and the personalities of the npc's really pop too.

Currently, the game is too easy, in the sense that there isnt much punishment for error. Cops are dumb, slow, predictable, and not very good at catching you. When they do, the fines are tiny. Consider making cops faster, with stronger stuns, and with larger fines.

The game takes a little while to get going... aaaaand its got that stupid linear access to products format that gets dull quick. Would be nice to play in a world where every product is available to you from the outset, or at least different starting scenarios... perhaps you are the weed kid, or maybe a biker pushing meth, heck, even a tramp living under a bridge in a Nirvana shirt selling smack would be a great origin story... I didn't give a ♥♥♥♥ about Eddie in DDS, I sure as hell don't care about Uncle Hank in S1... keep the start ambiguous and let the player fill in the gaps with the most powerful hardware known to man; their imagination!

The lack of competition is a double edged sword; on one hand I like how chill it is just managing my own empire, but I can't help but think a rival or three would be a nice touch.

As fun as the map is, I really hope that the devs make a few cities, or suss out some sort of procedural generation for them, as this would significantly increase replayability. Same goes for NPC's. I want my random encounters with Peter File to feel special, dammit.

So yeah; all in all its a game that shows promise and I really hope it gets there. In it's current state, yeah theres a few UI problems here and there, the math needs a bit of balancing... but Early Access is a work in progress, and whats on offer at the moment inspires more confidence than some *other* developers ever did. I'd like to think that the S1 team will deliver the goods, but at the end of the day, I felt the same about DDS about 5 years ago.