Steam Deck Playable!Welcome to my latest review which is Drill Deal – Oil Tycoon. This is a PC game brought to us via Steam by developers A2 Softworks (Climber Sky is the Limit, Lovecraft Tales) and publishers Manager Games S.A. (Car Mechanic Manager 2023) and Red Dev Studio (Potato, Down to Hell). Drill Deal – Oil Tycoon is an oil business simulator where you run your own oil rig.
This Is Fracking Great!
So how did I get on running my own oil rig out in the middle of nowhere? Continue reading to find out. You can also check out my previous review where I played the fun open-world game FixFox.
The Game
First off, this is similar to your typical strategy/management/city builder game. You start off with next to nothing, build your way up, and end up with so much money you don’t know what to do next.
That’s not a bad thing really because it does take a fair while to get to that point in Sandbox mode. That’s once you have unlocked it after completing the tutorial mission and the two following missions. These are named North Sea and Jack Torpedo. The idea here is to build up your oil rig whilst defending it from invaders and other dangerous incoming objects such as floating mines.
I like how each mission in the game has different objectives for you to tackle, for example, in the North Sea mission our primary objective is to destroy all mines. The secondary objective is to build a platform and hire 15 employees. You may think “That sounds simple”. It kind of is. But they get tougher as you get further through the missions.
Not only must you complete the objectives of each mission, but you can increase the size of your rig. You can end up with an absolute behemoth of an oil rig if you push hard enough. You can increase the rig by building more platforms. Once you have more space you can also build many different types of buildings to aid in the growth of your rig. These range from productive buildings to earn you money, to housing for your employees, entertainment for them, and much more.
This leads me to the fact that this isn’t just a tycoon game where you build up your company and thrive. You also have to defend against things such as the aforementioned mines, pirates, and more. I won’t go into too much detail on what you have to defend against as I want to leave some of that as a surprise for you. Trust me, it’s worth the wait.
During our time building up the rig, we also have access to two “trees”. Think of these as ways of unlocking more buildings and more. The first is called the technology tree, and this is where you can unlock more buildings for your rig using your hard-earned cash. The next tree is named the contracts tree, and this gives you some little side missions to the action whilst playing the game. This is the game that keeps giving!
Of course, as mentioned, we have sandbox mode. This just starts you off with a small little rig and allows you to build to your heart’s content. Build, earn,
Look & Sound
A2 Softworks have gone with the voxel graphic approach for Drill Deal – Oil Tycoon. In my opinion, this was a very wise choice as I feel this style really suits management games to a degree. For example, I also reviewed Kubifaktorium a few months ago which uses similar graphics.
I must add that during my time playing I did not experience any graphical, audio, or gameplay bugs or glitches. The game also ran very well on my 3080 Laptop GPU. For the below image I took it from the press kit to show the graphics off better.
The audio in the game is pretty decent, I have no quibbles here. The sounds effects give off that feeling of working on your own rig whilst fending off mines, pirates, and more.
Length & Replayability
Because of the nature of the genre of this game, the replay value is basically endless. The only limiting factor would be the player getting bored, which I can’t see happening too soon.
The game also contains 45 Steam achievements for you to unlock. Not too shabby.
Conclusions
This is quite a fun game and as mentioned I love the choice of graphics that the developers went with. It feels quite unique with the fact that you’re running your own oil rig, expanding on it, and having this huge business running. It reminds me somewhat of Mother Base in some of the Metal Gear franchise.
If you’re a fan of management or city builders I recommend you pick this up. It is available now via the Drill Deal – Oil Tycoon Steam page. I score Drill Deal – Oil Tycoon a 7/10.
A code was kindly provided for us to review this.
