Early Access Review – Car Park Capital

Who doesn’t love a car? The freedom. The smell of both the leather seats and the exhaust. The horn. The click-click of the turn signal. There’s nothing more American than a gas-guzzling internal combustion engine, that’s why the country celebrates its birth with thousands of small explosions.

Car Park Capital is about penetrating society with hard, thick asphalt and freeing its people from a liberal hellscape full of public transportation and sensible walking distances. If the Gods didn’t want us driving, we would have been born with shoes.

BUY THIS CAR TO DRIVE TO WORK

I have a tendency to exaggerate or twist the central concept of a game for “humourous” effect (see Pikmin 4), but I’m being absolutely serious here: Car Park Capital is not only about building parking lots, it’s also about making car ownership an unavoidable necessity. Kind of exactly like it is in reality.

With each map, you’re given a perfectly functional city centre, and you need to buy up prime parking real estate, lay your field of asphalt, and plop down stalls that suggest where people should leave their cars. Then, you need to put up car dealerships (vending machines) to get more people on the road. If you’re feeling sassy, you can even build the cars yourself, which I recommend because otherwise you have to manually refill the machines whenever they get bought out.

After meeting certain objectives for car ownership and parking demand, you’ll level up, which often adds a new requirement to maintain the blossoming car culture. At first, it’s a fast food drive-thru (because why get out of your car), and later on it’s gas, entertainment, or fluids. Gosh, Americans love their fluids. But, eventually, they need to expel those fluids, which is why you later have to build drive-thru toilets, because why get out of your car just to pee? I’d typically use diapers, but they make my butt harder to appreciate, even in a pair of jeggings.

DRIVE TO WORK TO PAY FOR THIS CAR

You’ll also want to ensure people don’t make the mistake of walking to their destination. So, once you have enough money, you’ll want to buy up the bus stops and subway platforms and bulldoze them. Also, purchase real estate in the city, evict the tenants, and bulldoze the apartment buildings to force them into the suburbs (that you build) so they have a nice, long, bus-free commute to work.

Sure, this might piss some misguide people off, but that’s why you can employ your own private army of peacekeepers to bash degenerate protestors into submission.

It’s great. You can actually get a discount if you pollute areas of the map. Everything around your oil refinery will be free, and if you work to ensure your fuel trucks take a route through a neighbourhood you want to get your hands on, you’ll eventually find yourself getting a discount. No one will mind (I actually think pollution doesn’t have an effect on parking demand or public perception), and you’ll shorten your expense sheet. It’s just good business.

BUY THIS CAR TO DRIVE TO WORK

Creating demand is also important. While every map starts with areas of high demand, who would be satisfied with just one parking lot? No one I respect, that’s who. Unfortunately, this is one place where Car Park Capital is a bit weak, since you increase parking demand using certain items. There’s no restrictions on where you place them, so you can just plop benches around your lot and, bam, instant demand.

It seems that the intention is for you to build workplaces, since office desks are the typical draw for traffic. There’s a system for creating buildings that works pretty well, but it’s also tedious and slows everything down. There’s a blueprint system like in Roller Coaster Tycoon 2 but, currently, you can’t save to it, so you’d have to recreate your buildings from scratch. This is clearly a place that needs some love. I know the blueprint system is being worked on, but I think parking demand needs reworking. It needs something beyond simple, cheap items that make a spot desirable.

Later on, you’re able to build big box storefronts, which makes more sense for drawing traffic. After all, they always come complete with big parking lots. There just needs to be a better way to signify workplaces and beaches than desks and deckchairs.

DRIVE TO WORK TO PAY FOR THIS CAR

But that’s (presumably) why it’s in Early Access. The core experience is here, but there’s a lot that needs to be tightened and expanded, and it’s all within the realm of possibility. Regardless of possible exploits, there’s very little that isn’t enjoyable.

Long before release, I tracked the development on social media for a long while and watched videos of its progress. I wondered how it would actually all come together as a functional game. It wouldn’t be fun if it was just building parking lots all the time; there needs to be a purpose.

And the developer found it, and, as it turns out, it fits well in the old-fashioned “tycoon” format. It’s gives all the good feels of Roller Coaster Tycoon but with the added good feels of being evil.

What is already implemented in Car Park Capital is really satisfying to play. At times, I had trouble pulling myself away from one of my construction/destruction plans. Plus, you get to be an unambiguously evil capitalist. It’s satire to the max, and executed beautifully. Personally, I didn’t really think about the problems with private car ownership (and suburbanization) until recently, and Car Park Capital helps reinforce my opinions on it by bringing those problems directly under a spotlight. I see now why General Motors worked so hard to kill the street car, because enforcing automobile dependency is a tonne of fun.

This Early Access Review was conducted using a digital Steam version of the game. It was paid for by the author.