I started Tech Corp. with no clear expectations. I had tried my hand at simulation management games, like Zoo and Roller Coaster Tycoon, as a kid – they’d been fun, but essentially repetitive. I hadn’t touched something in their likes for years till Tech Corp. landed in my lap. Developed by Mardonpol Inc., and published by 2tainment, this startup simulator takes you from an office space that looks like something out the first season of Silicon Valley to one of the largest tech corporations in the world – if you don’t bankrupt yourself along the way.
After choosing a startup location from a list of countries/continental regions, each of which has a different demographic range and levels of consumer demand, it comes time to actually build your company. Tech Corp. is, at heart, a management SIM – the game journal provides you with tasks, which you set workers that you hire to handle. Programmer’s can write code, salespeople find contracts for you to set your workers on, managers manage – automating what the workers assigned to them do, so they don’t just sit in the corner building redundant copies of network code till they pass out from exhaustion. You can decorate and furnish the office with pleasant and utility-providing knick-knacks and decorations like the obligatory Foosball table, a water cooler, fridge, etc, while growing out your team with other key members like researchers, who, true to their name, research projects, and engineers, who start building the physical components to make hardware.
Once you have an engineer and the ability to research blueprints, the game shifts gears and accelerates. This is, after all, a game about scaling up – you can’t stay in that cozy office space forever. Moving you to a larger office, with a factory attached, you get the responsibility of building and customizing physical products. These can range from CPU’s, to monitors, to media players and headphones – there really is a wide breadth of choice when it comes to determining what your business creates. Customization options allow you to install an array of subfeatures and microcomponents, from blue-tooth, to liquid cooling, that put a personal touch or flair on the products you create. This is where things got a little overwhelming for me – managing 2 programmers, their manager, a software developer, salesperson, and engineer, was a lot. Adding a factory on top of that with additional side quest deadlines was a little more tedious than fun, but I was able to stay invested – after all, I’d chosen a sick name for my gaming headphone company, and I wasn’t going to let it fall apart, not after I’d hired a larger team.
If micromanagement and company simulation sounds like fun, then Tech Corp. is absolutely the game for you; it affords a degree of flexibility and customization around products and aesthetics which the Sims and Tycoons of the world don’t have, and a surprising amount of depth when it comes to replicating market factors like demographics and demand. It’s not the kind of game I normally seek out to play, but once I had hired enough managers to oversee my workers, it became, well, not just manageable, but fun.
Check Out the Tech Corp. Trailer:
Tech Corp. is available for PC for $19.99 via Steam Early Access.
I'm a huge nerd and PC gamer. I have my own rig and recording set up, and while I'm mostly a fan of RPG's like Fallout: New Vegas and the Witcher 3, I also play RTS's, shooters, narrative games, etc.
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